It just keeps getting better and better, or at least weirder and weirder.

Word this morning was that Park Service personnel had placed cones on a state-maintained highway in South Dakota to prevent motorists from pulling off the road to look, at a distance, at the busts of the greatest Presidents carved into the side of a mountain.

We aren’t even allowed to look at a national monument. The Park Service is busily blackening their previously not-bad reputation as the people in the white hats, protecting our natural resources and conserving our national monuments for future generations.

From one bone-headed policy implementation, the Park Service has been used as the shock troops for the partial government shut down. On the off-chance that people would not notice that Rangers had been furloughed, the NPS added on overtime for essential Rangers, who did all sorts of non-essential stuff that they normally don’t do.

As far as I know, they are still blockading the parking lot to the privately-owned Pisgah Inn in North Carolina, evicting retirees from their homes in the park land in Lake Meade, and attempting to cone-off the waters of the Gulf of Florida. I understand it was not successful, but the verdict is out. Some of the cones might float.

I was wondering who had converted the Park Service to the vanguard of pain for the otherwise blameless taxpayers. Jon Jarvis is the head of the Service these days, and has been so since 2009.

(Jon Jarvis. Photo NPS)

By training and experience, he is a career protection ranger, resource management specialist, park biologist, and has served at parks such as Prince William Forest in Virginia, Guadalupe Mountains, Crater Lake in Oregon, North Cascades in Washington State, and positions of increasing authority in Idaho and Alaska before assuming duty as the Regional Director of the Pacific West Region.

Along the way, he has gained expertise in developing government-to-government relations with native tribes and wilderness management. We missed each other by a year at the Harvard JFK School of Government for that executive course.

I wish I could have met him then. He doesn’t strike me as a doctrinaire sort of fellow, and an unlikely one to be the poster child for Federal Over Reach.

(Secretary Sarah Jewell. Photo courtesy of the Interior Department).

Sally Jewell? She is the Secretary of the Interior, and has been since February of this year, replacing Ken Salazar. She is, among other things, one of the first naturalized citizens to serve as a Cabinet Secretary and is not in line for succession to the Presidency. She is also a successful engineer and capitalist, having served as CEO of the outdoors supply house REI. Her last tweets in September were about the Duck Stamp, and has no comment on activities of the Park Service.

She is a complex woman. A petroleum engineer by training, she worked on technology that became the juggernaut of fracking. She was also an ardent conservationist who sat on the board of an organization that used litigation to shut down exploration for hydrocarbons on public lands.

I don’t have a problem with that, since I am an environmentalist as well, although not as hysterical as some. I concentrate my efforts on trying to preserve Civil War battlefields in Northern Virginia, on the premise that we really ought to remember that national emotion sometimes runs even higher than it does today.

I think. Anyway, I had the chance to spend some time as the intelligence briefer to Secretary Gale Norton, which was a curious thing. Still reeling from the shock of the attack, President Bush implemented the succession plan that meant at least one of the officials in line to succeed to the Presidency had to be physically out of the capital at all times.

The Secretaries hated that, let me tell you. We spent time trying to entertain the Secretaries of the VA, Education, Energy and Health and Human Services, and to a person, they would have preferred to be back in town and safe in their own beds for their one-week deployments to the windowless underground facility right after 9/11, when we thought there was a war on. Spending some time with the Secretary of the Interior was a treat.

Her views on all sorts of things were interesting, coming from the senior-most official in charge of all public lands. Not exactly a DoD perspective, you know?

She didn’t mention coning things off against the terrorists, but she was not a woman to be trifled with. I am confident that she would have in a heartbeat if she thought it was the right thing to do, though I am not sure al Qaida would have paid any attention.

A pal out West said that the level of hysteria about Mt. Rushmore had been blanketed by a couple feet of snow, and the cones were gone until the plows have completed their work. Early snow this season, and a lot of it.

If the Park Service had just waited, Mother Nature would have taken care of things all by herself. There is apparently an alternative, though it would require Federalizing the South Dakota National Guard.

Relax. It is photo-shopped, and courtesy of Mr. Pinko. But actually, even if it were true, it wouldn’t be any weirder than everything else in this surreal sort-of shut down season.

Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303