Category: North America

by John Stinson, Jr.
My summers tend to be heavy with work, but this one was truly the beast of the decade for me. With two jobs to cover at once, and an overly keen sense of responsibility, a short drive to West Virginia or a refundable flight to Providence on Southwest Airlines would have been justified out of existence in the first week of August. But a trip to Newfoundland was just far enough away, requiring exactly the right mix of nonrefundable airfare, planning, and difficulty involved in reaching the place, that canceling in favor of work was out of the question.

Newfoundland excited my fiancée and me because of its remoteness. We couldn’t find any contemporary guidebooks on the island — a true rarity for a place so beautiful and so completely stable. The general books on Canada offered very little on Newfoundland as a whole, and focused just small attention on St. Johns, the oldest European city in North America, and Gros Morne, the national park where we planned to spend our week. On the latter, the books mostly just professed to its beauty and warned that the big hike there was a “lungbuster.”

From the Deer Lake airport, Jennifer and I drove along an empty, dark road at night to Rocky Harbour, a town in the middle of Gros Morne. Along the way, we saw the occasional sign hawking tourist wampum and cabins, and spotted almost as many moose as advertisements. The burg we woke up in the next morning was impressive only for its lovely inlet and dramatic surroundings. Mostly, it showed its true nature: a fishing village depressed by a cod moratorium very slowly making its way to a tourist economy. The houses were squat, square, and ugly. Signage — even on the tourist traps — dated stylistically from the 1950s. No glitz, no glamour. Not even much in the way of nostalgia for the 500-year-old ocean-going culture that had nearly fished itself out of existence.

But that inlet and those surroundings! It may be that Newfoundland avoids notice because it reminds its few visitors of other places: coastal Maine in the foreground, the fjords of Norway in the middle ground, and New Mexico mesas and plateaus in the far distance. The streams, tea-brown with natural tannin, are banked by goldenrod and purple aster like the waterways of upstate New York. The flat mountaintops are almost alpine, strewn with fields of giant rock shards with delicate flowers and lichens poking through where their forebears have created soil pockets.

The beaten little towns reminded me of other places as well. Teens ran along the edges of the road in the evening wearing Tupac shirts and Fred Durst red ball caps. The adults were either overweight and shy, or thin, pinched, and pointy. Most everyone was white, and the coffee tasted the same in every shop and restaurant: harsh and a bit stale. The cars were old, but the drivers seemed to truly love them. Gros Morne, Woody Point, and Portland Flats mirrored places like Mount Vernon, Ohio, and Jamestown, New York, that have seen far better days and cling to them as the paint further fades and the economy worsens. But Gros Morne’s towns will, I suspect, fare better over the long haul than the American counterparts I named. We found a chic little café in Rocky Harbour, a sign that someone sees clearly what is to come.

The “lungbuster” hike up the James Callaghan Trail was the highlight of our visit. A Parks Canada staffer who was polling hikers returning from the peak confessed that visitation has been on a steady rise for some years. The trail is the sine qua non of the park, taking hikers straight up to the top of Gros Morne, the second highest peak in Newfoundland. It’s a 90-minute trek just to reach the base of the mountain, and from there it is a climb straight up a rock-filled gully to the plateau near the peak. The park does a good job of warning visitors of the degree of difficulty, but the hype to stay away likely has the opposite effect in many cases.

We approached with trepidation, feeling out of shape after a summer riding the desk. The walk to the base was nice, and the staging area there is very inspiring with its small, dark lakes and promising view. The gully-up is exhilarating at first, then a bit demoralizing as it goes on and on. The advantage to this ascent is that, to quit in the middle would be a painful and very public defeat: the gully faces all approaching hikers and the park strongly urges users not to descend its steep face for fear of raining stones down on those climbing up. Unless you are in a total panic, once you start the way up, you are stuck finishing it. Jennifer and I did just fine on this hour-plus section, but discovered that what seems to be the most dramatic component of an undertaking can turn out to be the most tedious.

At the top, we were treated to twenty minutes of solitude and a visitation with two caribou. The male with his impressive rack of arabesque antlers, stood stock still for so long that I conjectured he was a decoy set to palpitate the hearts of chump tourists like me. His female companion grazed, lay down, and generally revealed her flesh-and-blood life so clearly that he eventually did some of the same. They stood on a section of the plateau due west of us with the curve of the gully we hiked between us and the Gulf of Saint Lawrence behind them. Jen and I sat for a while and passed the binoculars back and forth, eating sandwiches and candied ginger. It was difficult not to anthropomorphize the two wild creatures, to project ourselves onto them as we sat in coupled solitude on top of the world looking over the fjords and long stretch of sea. The appearance of two other groups burst my fantasy and set me aright. We are herd animals, certainly, but of a completely different stamp than the caribou.

The return to the base from the peak of Gros Morne proved to be the truly difficult section of the hike. The backside of the mountain provides some of the most impressive views, including one of a placid lake atop a different plateau across a huge, glacier-hewn canyon, but they accompany a long and knee-beating descent. At two different points, I was convinced we were near the end, only to find later that we were perhaps halfway and then three-quarters of the way down. Parks Canada maintains trails of laudable quality. My fatigue was my own fault, borne of a summer’s worth of typing and driving to the store when I could have walked. The gentle return from the base of Gros Morne across the peat bogs and through the stretches of scrub spruce was even more lovely than before, however, and gave Jennifer and me the chance to celebrate our accomplishment. We patted one another on the back and went out for dinner.

A note on the food: it’s every bit as lackluster as you might imagine. Newfoundland managed to combine the worst mainstream habits of both U.S. and British Commonwealth cuisine. Vegetarians will have one hell of a time and will weep for the fate of the boiled carrots and broccoli that show up on every dinner plate. Java Jack’s in Rocky Harbour was a welcome respite as it attempted a mainland bistro-ish kind of menu. We found Jackie’s place very late in the game and were incredibly grateful for her attempts.

We spent a good deal of our time lazing about or taking relaxed, half-day excursions. We went to Newfoundland to escape more than to accrue a list of outdoor heroics, and the atmosphere lent itself to this kind of languor, allowing us the comfort of taking in many of the local attractions, without feeling pressed to “do Newfoundland.” We took the Western Brook Pond boat ride, but didn’t quite make it up to St. Barbe for the ferry across Iceberg Alley to Labrador. We stopped and read about the peridotite Tablelands — an upwelling of acidic bedrock colored like an Arizona desert, a place where few plants grow — but we never attempted its ascent. I read three books (including Mark Kurlansky’s excellent Cod) and found that many quiet hours in a row spent with my fiancée had lost no luster for me in a summer’s worth of frenetic business.

Gros Morne is a place for looking as much as doing. The region is rife with placid sea-lakes, craggy coastline, untended fields displaying bursts of thistle among the gnarled larch. Jennifer and I stood on one pebble-strewn coastline for hours, skipping stones.. We swam in the shallow inlet where the water was warm from a full day of sunlight.

When we lifted off from Deer Lake airport, it looked as though all of Newfoundland was shrouded in clouds, and we quickly lost sight of the place we had spent the previous week. My hunch is, though, that this place won’t be lost for long. Marketing materials distributed by the province speak of greater plans. Tourism is the present and future for Newfoundland. When I project out to the days of my grandchildren going on vacations, I imagine global temperature change transforming Nova Scotia into a latter-day Long Island and Newfoundland taking on the veneer of a northern Nantucket Island. When that happens, Canadians will be glad their country set aside the best pieces of land as public park way back when. And I’ll be glad that Jennifer and I visited back in the day. If that comes to pass, my hope is that Gros Morne retains some of its lazy and unremarkable personality. To me, that brings out more distinctly what makes this area so impressive.

by Daren Stinson

An oasis in the Chihuahuan Desert, Carlsbad, New Mexico is approximately 120 miles north of El Paso, Texas. A nice town with plenty of hotels, restaurants, and a Wal-Mart, Carlsbad makes a good base camp from which to stock up and explore the area’s most significant attraction, the Carlsbad Cavern National Park.

Just south of town, a small brown sign lets you know to turn right and begin the five mile ascent on a twisting paved road through the area designated as Carlsbad National Park. The drive ends at the visitors center, the gateway to the caverns, but before you go in, take a look out over the valley stretched out below and imagine it during the Permian Age 286 million years ago, as a vast open sea.

At that time, the sea stretched across an area of land covering virtually all of what’s now the western United States, retreating as the Paleozoic Era came to an end. Because of the natural mountain boundary, a massive (250 miles wide, 300 miles long) salt sea basin remained in its place, covering an area made up of present day southeastern New Mexico and West Texas. Over the next 38 million years, the remaining sea slowly evaporated depositing sediment rich in potash across the valley floor. Potash is a valuable ingredient in fertilizer, but nineteenth-century settlers found more use in the vast stores of bat guano, selling it first for fertilizer and later for the saltpeter that was an active ingredient in gunpowder. Mid-twentieth-century exploration found oil buried under the region, and to date almost 15 billion barrels of oil and 2.3 trillion cubic feet of natural gas have been extracted from the area.
For scientists, however, the caverns themselves are the most valuable natural resource. To the scientific community, the limestone caverns and surrounding mountains provide an opportunity to study an ocean reef from the inside. Though the reef was made of mostly sponges and algae, which have long since disappeared, live bacteria still grows in the underground water pools, and well-preserved fossils have been found in the rock. Unfortunately, everyday tourists do not get to dig for fossils or collect bacteria samples. Instead, they come to see the effects water can have on solid rock.

Inside the visitors center, a ticket buys access to the main cavern which can be reached quickly by an elevator ride, or alternatively, an hour-long walk through the “natural” entrance. The mouth of the cave was discovered long ago by Native Americans; settlers pushing West also explored the caves, but men were not the first visitors. The Mexican Free-Tailed Bat has been making Carlsbad Caverns its summer home for over 5,000 years. More than 200,000 bats currently reside in the cavern, and their evening flights en masse to hunt for food provide a magnificent experience for tourists.

The bats live and bear young inside the cave due to the consistent climate. Temperatures can be extreme above ground, but inside the caverns, temperatures hold steady around 56 degrees–be prepared to adjust to the change in conditions. In addition to the strong sulfur smell, the path is steep, slippery, and poorly lit in many areas. On the way down, but especially when you reach the cavern floor, stalagmites and stalactites are a feature attraction.

Like an elaborate cathedral created by nature, the main area of the cavern is called The Great Room. It is the largest natural underground chamber in the United States, with appropriately named formations, such as Doll’s Theater and Whale’s Mouth.

In 1923, the U.S. Department of the Interior sent inspectors to judge the aesthetic worth of the caverns. One inspector named Robert Holley had to say of Carlsbad,”…I am wholly conscious of the feebleness of my efforts to convey in the deep conflicting emotions, the feeling of fear and awe, and the desire for an inspired understanding of the Devine Creator’s work which presents to the human eye such a complex aggregate of natural wonders…” The area was designated a national monument on May 13, 1930. In all, thirty miles of passageways can be explored, although, most of the areas beyond the Great Room require a separate admission and guide.

A total of 100 caves have been discovered in the area, encompassing 46,766 acres, including Lechugilia Cave. At 1,567 feet, it’s the deepest in the United States. In addition, thirty-five miles south of Carlsbad National Park, across the border in Texas, are the Guadalupe Mountains, which functioned as part of the natural boundary of the Permian Basin. Today, they provide hiking, camping, and four-wheel drive opportunities through desert, canyon, and highland environments. For more information on all the attractions in the Carlsbad/El Paso corridor please visit http://www.nps.gov.

Photographs by Jamie Schapiro

As spring of 2003 begins, I find myself looking back to a year ago, when the Salt Lake Olympic Games were coming to a jubilant close. It was a period of great pride for me to witness representatives from around the world coming together in the spirit of competition, friendship, and humanity.

I remember the moment I learned that Salt Lake City would be hosting the 2002 Olympic Winter Games. It was the summer of 1995 and just thinking about a new millennium was daunting, much less a millennium that would begin with the celebrations and excitement of these games in a place so familiar to me. At that point I did not realize that, when the games began almost seven years later, they would provide an opportunity for my entire family to come together and, more poignantly, a chance for our country to begin recovering from one of the greatest tragedies it has ever suffered. I am fortunate to be a part-time resident of Park City, Utah–not far from Salt Lake City–and there was never any doubt that my family would be present for the Olympics; however, I could never have guessed that my brother, photographer Jamie Schapiro, would have earned the perfect vantage.

After a seven-year bout with the professional world in San Francisco, Jamie decided to quit his job at a dot-com in the beginning of 2001 and spend eight weeks traveling in New Zealand. He bought a car, slept in a tent, and rediscovered his true passion for photography amid the sweeping glaciers, snowy peaks, herds of sheep, and fresh Kiwi air. Upon his return that April, Jamie decided to establish himself as a professional photographer, unaware that the opportunity of a lifetime would come to him less than a year later, when he was offered the position as one of three photographers hired by the Salt Lake Organizing Committee to capture the “human element” of the 2002 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games.

As it turned out the games were much more multidimensional than I anticipated. The footage on television hardly addressed the myriad of cultures that meshed together in Salt Lake that winter. At every event, fans frantically waved flags from dozens of nations, cheering for skiers from traditionally underrepresented countries like Sri Lanka and Bermuda. Every emotion imaginable could be seen in the faces of the athletes and the spectators. Volunteers in their yellow uniforms, and their National Guard counterparts greeted everyone with a smile and a wave of their metal-detecting wands. Kids from around the globe jumped together over an Olympic fountain in Salt Lake, while others swapped pins at the Coca-Cola trading posts. The games were truly a joining of people: different backgrounds and cultures were not ignored but celebrated, and as this small section of the United States quickly transformed into a global community, everything seemed to be underscored by ideas of liberty and acceptance–ideas that, to me, represent cornerstones of American culture.

Somehow Jamie managed to catch every nuance that made the 2002 Olympic Winter Games so extraordinary. One of the benefits of attending the games was being able to share them with my family. Jamie, however, was often hard to find. He would stay out late, setting up his equipment on building tops to get shots of Salt Lake City in its limelight, then wake up early the next morning to capture a glowing sunrise over the Rockies. We would hardly go anywhere without stopping to wait for him as he photographed the lines of buses or hundreds of practitioners of Falun Gong meditating on the side of the road in peaceful protest to the Chinese government’s censure of their beliefs. Nevertheless, what often seemed a too-hasty shot nearly always turned out a fitting example of the human element at that moment, and one you would barely have noticed had it not caught the corner of your eye.

If a picture speaks a thousand words, Jamie’s photographs tell a story all by themselves. They speak neither of controversy nor of victory, but simply of humanity.

This month, Travel Outward is exhibiting a selection of Jamie’s photographs from the 2002 Salt Lake Winter Games. Those interested in learning more about his work, or purchasing prints can do so at http://www.jamieschapiro.com.

The Village of Bath offers the triple crown of New England photo opportunities. Within just feet of each other Bath has the oldest general store in the country, a white-steeple, a country church, and a covered bridge that spans the Ammonoosuc River. This is the New England of postcards.

The village is nestled in a valley of rolling farmland in northern New Hampshire and, much like some of the state’s other rural communities, Bath offers a nostalgic look back at simple, clean, country living. For those tourists who flock to this part of the country during the foliage season, Bath is a town blessed with these and other highly identifiable New England portraits. And while just a drop in New Hampshire’s population bucket–932 at last count–Bath is a huge blip on any foliage lover’s radar screen. Bus loads of “leaf peepers” descend on the village each autumn to get a glimpse of what they want New Hampshire to be: a safe haven from the perils of the 21st century.

New HampshireThe Brick Store is steeped in the aromas of homemade smoked cheddar and assorted meats. The covered bridge is a sturdy reminder of reliability and the Bath Congregational Church evokes a sense of strong neighborly bonds between community members. Still, although the village itself produces such warm sentiments in its visitors, another landmark of New Hampshire’s traditions is just down the road–off the beaten path. That symbol is the colonial family barn. Big, red and almost defiant in its straight-forward design, this particular barn belongs to the Minot family–operators of a struggling seven-generations-old dairy farm–though theirs is but one of many around the state.

Tourists rarely step down from their buses or park their SUVs to go sifting through cow stables and haylofts, but still the New Hampshire barn is ever-present in the background of New Hampshire memories, rarely sparking a strong reaction, but always lurking somewhere in the camera’s view-finder.

Not many people load up the car for a “good barn touring weekend,” nor are there many catchy T-Shirts targeting the barn loving community: “Is That a Silo in Your Pocket, Or Are You Just Happy to See Me?” But these old barns are as much a part of New Hampshire’s scenic reminders as the general stores, covered bridges and white-steepled country churches. The thought of losing these historic buildings has started to disturb a number of people throughout the region, as the Division of Travel and Tourism Development takes stock of what tourists expect to see when driving through the Granite State.

Tourism is the second largest revenue generator in New Hampshire’s economy; as such, it is important to keep New Hampshire quaint and its barns upright. According to the Division of Travel and Tourism Development, that industry employs over 68,000 people who, directly or not, tend to the 27 million visitors who spend upwards of $3.7 billion per year. And although some of those visitors are coming up to hit the ski slopes in winter, most come through the state during the summer and fall.

“People don’t come up to New Hampshire to look at McDonald’s,” said John Porter, from the University of New Hampshire’s Cooperative Extension and coauthor of Preserving Old Barns–Preventing the Loss of a Valuable Resource. “They come up here to look at the rural, rustic environment and barns typify this. When some of these old structures come down you really miss them, it doesn’t seem the same when you go driving around.” The barns of yesterday may not be around tomorrow as more and more of these once solid structures start to crumble into disrepair. They are expensive to restore if not maintained properly and the barns of the 1800s still used on today’s working farms are slowly becoming out-dated as newer technologies help farmers cut down on some of their labor-intensive work, bringing with them a new, more open type of barn.A recent campaign to save some of the state’s cultural legacies has resulted in the New Hampshire state legislature passing a law this summer, helping owners of historic structures with property tax relief. The theory behind this new law is to prevent barn owners from avoiding sometimes expensive renovations because of the fear of a higher property tax bill. [Editor’s note: New Hampshire is one of the few states in the nation without a state income tax. To make up for this, property taxes are notoriously high.] In the past, some of these people have let their barns deteriorate into a pile of rotting lumber simply because of financial concerns. One popular and creative way of getting rid of the barn in the back yard was to set it on fire in order to give the local fire department practice extinguishing structural blazes–allowing parts of New Hampshire’s history to literally go up in smoke.

The origins of these endangered buildings goes back to the earliest days of colonialism in these parts. As settlers migrated to central New England in the 1600s, the unspoiled forests provided plentiful timber for farmers to start their homesteads. With readily available lumber came the notion of constructing larger barns than many had before, using the space to store not just grain and feed, but also the family’s livestock. For over two centuries the typical New England barn was what they called an “English barn”–usually a thirty by forty, one-level structure made with a hand-hewn wooden frame and a simple gable roof.

As these simple structures became more inadequate for farmers looking to commercially produce their wares, the barns began to expand in size and shift in configurations. In the 1820s farmers started to construct their barns with open cellars that could handle removing manure easily from the stables on the main floor. By the mid 1800s, farmers were building three- to four-story barns for ever more grain, livestock, and hay storage.

Of course all of these barns were built without planning for a future defined by mechanized farming tools or bothersome state health inspectors. This means it’s difficult to adapt may of these buildings to modern farming needs.

The father and son team of Bill and Will Minot make up the sixth and seventh generation of that family, respectively, to work their 300-acre dairy farm in one of the many outlying meadows of Bath. The scenery on the Minot farm is one that could grace a New Hampshire postcard. A country road winds its way toward the farm as cows lazily mill around pastures dissected by low stone walls. At the heart of the Minot farm’s operations, both physically and economically, is the barn, built in 1802 by Samuel Minot, who “cleared the place,” according to Bill, the elder of the two. The barn is impressive in both its stature and its connection with the family history.

Bill is an easy-natured man with a long, bushy salt-and-pepper beard. He shows off the barn with great pride that produces an eagerness to understand his family’s domain and livelihood. His son Will is a more serious, stockier, and younger version of the father. Will seems always ready to work–the barn is not just part of Will’s heritage, but it’s also deeply connected with his future financial well being. In fact, the duo is now in the process of buying out Arthur Minot, the 76-year-old, fifth-generation farmer, who has recently retired from the dairy business.

Bill and Will constitute the entire full-time work force, caring for and milking their 54 Holstien cows and tending to their fields. It’s back-breaking work, skirting through the basement stables with heavy wheel-barrows full of grain, spreading out the hay with pitch forks, and pushing around the large, slow-moving animals.

The two get some help from modern technology, but the barn itself prevents them from taking advantage of luxuries like automatic feeders and the latest air ventilation systems. “Being somewhat lazy I don’t mind using things with hydraulics and gasoline,” 50-year-old Bill says with a mix of self-effacing humor and satisfaction, as he logs in 14-hour days–18 hours during harvest (the Minots farm their all the feed for their cows)–through biting cold winters and oppressive summer heat. The Minot day starts at 5 A.M. with first milking, and finishes at about 7 P.M., if all goes smoothly.

With more efficient technology, the Minots could maybe cut those hours down; however, one important obstacle stands in the way: the barn.

“The biggest challenge with this work is adapting modern technology with to a 200-year-old barn,” Minot said. “The push today is away from this style barn. To replace it would cost about $200,000.”

While the thought of a larger barn with more open space on the ground floor for the livestock would be ideal, the price tag for such an upgrade is too steep as many dairy farmers around the state deal with extremely low dairy prices and razor thin profit margins. Like other dairy farmers in New Hampshire, the Minots begrudgingly rely on government subsidies, however, that financial support still makes the choice between building a new barn or keeping up with the bills an easy one. And although President Bush’s latest farm bill has some money allocated to help farmers like the Minots, the gears of government turn slowly.

“Some of these guys are losing $4,000 a month and they can’t keep doing that,” said Robb Thomson, state executive director for the U.S. Department of Agriculture–New Hampshire Farm Service Agency. “The farmers are kind of hanging on for the farm bill money because there is milk price relief in it but we’re concerned that we’re going to lose some people.”

And with the farmers gone, there is also a great risk of losing the history and beauty of the barns to decay or scrap.

According to Minot, the biggest enemy for these old barns is that “the minute you stop using them, they fall apart.”

Ernie LaBombard grew up in Hanover and as a child, he remembers, his favorite playground was an abandoned colonial barn on the outskirts of town. It was a gold mine for any child to explore, filled with dirty nails, sharp edges, and other dangerous things mothers warn their kids about. One day, when heading to the antique “jungle gym,” Ernie came upon a terrible surprise–the local fire department had doused the structure and set it ablaze in order to sharpen their rescue and extinguishing skills.

This memory stuck with LaBombard as he would later join his brother Jesse in a business to restore and save old barns from a similar fate. In 1984 the team started the Great Northern Barns company, which is headquartered in Canaan, New Hampshire. Today, the LaBombard brothers buy the barns that nobody wants and dismantle them, with the intention of rebuilding them elsewhere.

“We take the barns that people look at and think, ‘My God what a piece of junk,’ where I can see what is possible and try and save it,” Ernie said. “The older the better.” Once meticulously dismantled–categorizing each piece of wood as though on an archeological dig–the company will either store the frame and wood siding or ship it off to some of their clients who are looking to reuse the structure for their house or office. Great Northern Barns can attend to about 20 barns a year and have them relocated all across the country. The company has moved barns to Texas and as far as Oregon. However, when asked where most of these old barns go, without hesitating, Ernie replies, “to people with money.” Because the work is highly technical and the material is unique, the barn restoration industry is big business. A standard English frame, that is 30 feet by 40 feet, can range from $24,000 up to $75,000, depending on the work it needs. Often times these pieces will be shipped to pockets of wealth like Greenwich, Connecticut, or the Hamptons, on Long Island. Ernie estimates that about one-third of his restructuring projects are for second homes, another third for first homes, and the rest for barns or workshops.

But even though he may ship these pieces out of state, their historical significance is not lost on him. Although some people do not agree with moving antique barns out of New Hampshire, Ernie argues that he is saving the structures so that they can continue to demonstrate the almost forgotten craftsmanship that went into creating them. “You look at the history books and you see what was going on then and it really blows your mind,” he says. “After a while you realize what they are. The really old ones are like a piece of furniture: someone made each piece.”

And while many barns around the state are slowly crumbling, preservationists are scrambling to help owners with their up-keep in an effort to ensure New Hampshire’s past will be part of New Hampshire’s future.

One group, the New Hampshire Preservation Alliance, is working to establish a statewide registry so that the owners start to realize what they have, and almost more importantly, what they could have if properly maintained. So far that effort is gradually moving along–the group has about 30 properties listed for historic preservation purposes.

Although the colonial barn is very much part of the New Hampshire wallpaper, it means many different things to people throughout the region. For the tourist, it is a small piece of the puzzle of how people used to live and work. For the farmer, it is crucial infrastructure and one of the continuing costs of doing business. For those who make their living off the people visiting the state, it is a precious commodity that must be preserved.