Throughout our history, Americans have overcome difficulty through unity and shared experience. Join Ranger Jeff on the trails of Rocky Mountain National Park and Grand Canyon as he tells a story about wilderness, family, the Great Depression, and coming together as nation during hard times.

[Music quietly fades up and footsteps on crunching gravel]

This is Jeff, I’m a ranger at Grand Canyon National Park, y you’re listening to Behind the Scenery, Canyon Cuts

Working as a Wilderness Ranger at Rocky Mountain National Park for the past several seasons, I’ve had time to think…more time than I wanted some days. Whole summers spent walking, staring at my feet, winning imaginary arguments, and pondering…all between cutting trees from the trail, talking to hikers, search and rescue, the actual work of my old job. What did all that thinking produce? Tangibly, not much, but with all those quiet miles, I had the chance to wander on trails, mentally, that I wouldn’t normally wander on. National parks and the United States were created with pens, paper, and ideas. Our founding parents thought, argued, wrote, and came up with a government. National parks weren’t born from anything like the Continental Congress, but they’ve become one of the greatest expressions of our civic culture. Credit for these big parks and big ideas usually go to Presidents like Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt and national park pioneers like John Muir, Stephen Mather, Marjorie Stoneman Douglas, Virginia McClurg, and countless others. Same with our founding parents. These people are long dead, but their ideas and actions still inspire us and affect us…we still walk in the national parks they helped protect and we live in the country they helped create. Neither of these creations are perfect, we’re still working on both.

I hiked a few hundred national park miles each summer and I got idealistic. So, let’s come back to the present where those founding ideals are struggling through a smoldering, battered civic landscape, near antebellum polarization, COVID-19, tens of millions unemployed, and the re-exposure of old, simmering racism. It’s not a great view, it’s exhausting and disheartening. Between my lofty thoughts and the trail under my feet is a story, it’s a story written in my head as I walked…a story about all of us…actually, it’s the trail that’s the story, and the boys who built the trail. Eighty-seven years ago, President Franklin Roosevelt established the Civilian Conservation Corps and sent millions of unemployed young men into the national forests, parks, farm fields, and cities to repair damaged national resources and create even more. But we shouldn’t look only at the natural resources and tangible products of the CCC. President Roosevelt had more in mind:

Audio recording of Franklin D. Roosevelt It involved not only a further loss of homes, farms, savings and wages but also a loss of spiritual values -- the loss of that sense of security for the present and the future that is so necessary to the peace and contentment of the individual and of his family. When you destroy those things you will find it difficult to establish confidence of any sort in the future.[…..]First, we are giving opportunity of employment to a quarter of a million of the unemployed, especially the young men who have dependents, to let them go into the forestry and flood prevention work . […] and in creating this civilian conservation corps, we are killing -two birds with one stone. We are clearly enhancing the value of our natural resources and, at the same time, we are relieving an appreciable amount of actual distress.

The CCC is simple history, pick up a high school textbook and you’ll see some paragraphs about the billions of trees they planted, the thousands of miles of roads and trails they blazed and built. But President Roosevelt created the CCC not only to address the economics of the Great Depression, but to heal a suffering nation and its citizens.

[Aspen leaves quietly fluttering in the breeze]

One of the young men in the CCC was born in 1918 on the plains of central Kansas. His father was a stonemason and his mother a homemaker. Roman grew up in a small town with three brothers and five sisters, went to St. Joseph’s Grade School during the week, and to church on Sundays. After finishing 8th grade he went to work at his uncle’s small-town service station. Roman’s young life sounds like a Norman Rockwell painting, but I doubt it was Saturday Evening Post perfect. Most of our lives aren’t. But life changed for Roman when the Depression came to Kansas.

Roman lost his job at the service station, his dad wasn’t working, and there were seven people at home. In October of 1937, Roman joined the Civilian Conservation Corp and left for a job that paid him $5 and sent $25 to his family each month, it fed him, and gave him a place to sleep. Superficially, Roman’s work in the CCC was far more profitable for his family and the government. Roman’s family got $25 each month of his pay, his parents didn’t have to feed him, and the government found a motivated and inexpensive employee until 1940. After a few years in the Army during World War II, Roman came home from Japan and married Cecilia in 1949. They had three kids and bought a house and Roman worked on cement trucks until he retired in the 1980s. An 84-year life reduced to its most basic milestones.

For a naïve, idealistic wilderness ranger wandering the high country, milestones are handy. They punctuate a day, but they don’t say much about the trail between them. Smashing our country and economy and our health into social media sized milestones neglects our humanity and our citizenship. Sharing Roman’s story with only the high points may simplify his life’s story. But, what did the CCC do for Roman and for our country?

The Civilian Conservation Corp and the New Deal fed and employed a generation of young men, created hope in the midst of the Great Depression and brought some much-needed certainty to uncertain times and they helped set Roman on a path towards a 54-year marriage, children, and eight grandchildren. I’m one of his youngest grandchildren and probably his favorite. It’s impossible to know what Grandpa’s life would have been like without the New Deal’s CCC and it’s impossible know if the United States would have survived the Great Depression, but because of President Roosevelt’s decisions and the CCC’s work, I’ve been able spend part of my working life on trails built and improved by my Grandpa and all the others who enrolled in the Civilian Conservation Corps. Today, we can all enjoy the civic and material benefits of the CCC and the trails created by the Civilian Conservation Corps still welcome everyone who wants to enjoy them.

Writing this short episode has been a struggle mostly because I’m a better ranger than I am a writer. But it’s also difficult, probably impossible, to articulate a story that speaks to the diversity of challenges we face right now and to write a story that can speak to our country’s diverse peoples. It’s no more possible for me to write a story that speaks to every problem or every person in the United States than to invest any single person with the responsibility to fix our national problems. Grandpa didn’t lift us out of the Great Depression and President Roosevelt didn’t wipe away the nation’s suffering with his signature during the first 100 days in office. It took the efforts of millions of Americans. And today, 90 years later, we still need a diverse population of millions working to help solve our nation’s problems.

[Footsteps on crunching gravel]

All those miles of staring at my feet and pondering, I was thinking about our National Parks and our country. Along with our nation’s capitols and monuments, our national parks are civic places. Our national parks belong to you and to me and to all of us and we all share the responsibility to care for them. They’re places where we can be citizen, visitor, spectator, volunteer, or tired hiker. We can all look up at the same mountains, lean against the same railings and together look into the Grand Canyon’s depths. If we yearn for equality and we can find some in the parks hiking up the same trail, being soaked by the same rain, sometimes waiting in the same long lines at entrance gates. Our national parks can’t cure all the problems we face, but they are spaces for us to gather, to share our stories, and wonder at the beauty of these United States.

[Music quietly fades up] Thank you to the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum for allowing me use recordings from their collection and thank you to Passenger for letting me include his music in the podcast and finally thank you to my family for your help and good humor…grandpa made us all feel like we were his favorite. [Music quietly fades down]