Remember Niagara: Mad Men, Bad Choices & The National Parks
Whatever I might’ve been planning to write about Mad Men last week, Ken Burns messed it all up.
Had I not spent the two previous hours watching the first episode of The National Parks: America’s Best Idea on PBS (dork alert: if simply reading that made your eyes roll back in your head just now, go ahead and move along, ’cause it’s only gonna get worse), I might have written something referencing the text message my mom had sent me about a half hour into Mad Men: “Don and Peggy are making bad choices.” The “making bad choices” thing is kind of a family in-joke that I can’t remember the origin of but it especially applied to last week’s episode—which, in a series founded on a bedrock of bad decisions, is really saying a lot.
In short: Don stumbles into the Hilton Hotels account but flips when Sterling Cooper tries to snag him with a contract, goes off on a bit of a bender, loads up on whiskey and loads himself into his Cadillac (PS, at what point does guiltless drunk driving get to stop being an amusing cultural anachronism and start being something these folks should get smacked upside the head for?), picking up some hitchikers and popping a few Phenobarbitals along the way to—well, I don’t even think he knew where.
Meanwhile, Peggy’s new life as an empowered career woman is moving along right on schedule, as she’s skipped right from demanding a raise (though failing) and snagging an apartment in The Big City to confusing sexual advances and professional advancements—which, in this case, means doin’ it with Duck. Which, can I just say, is totally gross. What was wrong with burger boy from the bar a few weeks back? Sure, he lived with his mom, but he was so cute! Or at least kinda cute. And so not slimy. And so not named Duck. Talk about getting some tools in your toolbox, Pegs. Jeez.
Anyway, I was going to write something about all that, and then also probably about how my mom sends me funny text messages, but then Don picked up that young couple on their way to get married at Niagara Falls, and I got cold chills. Hours earlier, in his dulcet tones, Peter Coyote had told me all about that same place, and the parallels between its story and Don’s own, and Peggy’s own, struck me hard. (Elsewhere in TV Land, The Office‘s Jim and Pam are set to get married there this week, but that’s rather beside the point that I’m going to eventually try to make.)
By the 60s, I’m sure, Niagara had become just another benignly romantic American icon, but in the late 1800s it was a bit of a sore spot—a natural wonder laid to waste by developers all looking to make a buck off of what had basically been rendered a schmaltzy, over-commercialized tourist trap. Burns’ series argues that its thwarted beauty was, in part, what fueled the efforts to protect and preserve what became America’s first two national parks, Yosemite and Yellowstone—kind of a “remember the Alamo” approach to conservation.