I edged up to the museum store clerk at the Petrified Forest National Park in New Mexico.  “How long is this going to take?” I asked, bending over the free map.  “Is there a quicker way?  A shortcut? I want to show the kids America and everything, but I don’t want to add too much time to the trip.”

Then I looked up at the clerk. She looked like she heard that question a lot — maybe too much. Well, sorry. But an extra couple of hours adds up when the kids have mapped out on paper who chooses each meal and the precise number of minutes each occupied the shotgun seat.

“Ma’am, it’s a 28 mile loop,” the clerk said flatly.  “If you are going west it will hardly add anything to your trip.  Just time.”
 
Just time.  I toyed with the idea of merely touring the kids around the museum shop.  I could see a piece of petrified wood from where I was standing. A coyote skull. A bottle dropped by tourists in the 1950s. Shoot, if I played my cards right, I could swear that I had, in fact, taken my kids to the Petrified Forrest AND the Painted Desert.  They just didn’t remember it because they were plugged into their iPods at the time.  Revisionist history is on my side.

That clerk was still giving me the fish eye, though. She seemed to know exactly how many times I had substituted virtual experience for real experience.   She didn’t have any idea that I wasn’t raised to be such an “Ugly American.”  My parents didn’t think my military childhood was complete until I’d hiked up a glacier at Glacier National Park.  They watched me melt into a puddle while waiting for Old Faithful at Yellowstone. My dad dragged me out of the car at Mt. Rushmore even though I couldn’t find my shoes.

I remember all those natural wonders — how beautiful and remarkable they all were.  Really I do.  But mostly what I remember about those trips was how much longer my sister sat in the front seat and how much I liked the museum shops.  
 

Maybe that is why we seem to embrace more and more of a virtual life and less and less of the real thing.  The real thing is far away and uncomfortable.  The real thing is usually located in the hottest place on earth with no nearby Coke machine.  And, let’s face it, the real thing is often boring.  Compared to Dolby Surround Sound and iTunes and even the National Geographic Channel,  million year old tree stumps turned into rock are kinda boring.  Seen one treerock, seen ‘em all.
 

But I was here.   My kids were watching.  So I piled them back into the car with their postcards and their Gatorade and a jackknife stamped “Petrified Forrest.” We read the brochure to each other, stopped at all the lookout points 
 

And my children marveled.  God love ‘em.  They actually found their shoes and got out of the car to see dry gorges painted with iron oxide and pure sunlight.
 

When we left the park and drove through the surrounding desert, they stared out at gritty businesses laden with tons of petrified rock,  truck stops that offered free petrified rock, offers to polish your geodes.  “No wonder so few people can live in New Mexico,” a voice piped up from the back seat. 
 

It was at that moment exactly that I wanted to drive back and tell that clerk I knew what she was trying to sell. That I knew what my parents had been trying to teach me.  Because it wasn’t just a natural phenomenon they were seeing.  They could see that on TV. Here they could see context and scale and proportion and mood. Here they had some kind of better understanding.  The clerk probably would have been glad to hear someone else say it.  But that chick was 28 miles back on a long dusty road.