Bee Travel
Natural disasters spark curiosity
CHRISTINE HICKS- USTA
We've all had a maudlin fascination from time to time. Whether it's a car wreck we pass randomly on the Thruway, a surrounding band of police "Do Not Cross" tape or events we monitor on television, there is a fascination with the bloody, creepy, explosive and those things that are larger than we can imagine, much less control.

I got to thinking on this as wildfires raged in the Lake Tahoe area. In the meantime, tourists on Maui were curtailed from activities owing to a brush fire that overtook a main highway. Speaking of Hawaii, there's Kilauea, that volcano that has been erupting for about 35 years. Rather than run, however, people have made it into a tourist attraction. They come to see the powerful force of nature that virtually nothing can top. Not even sulfur dioxide gas can keep the curious away.

Wildfires aren't a spectator sport; don't get me wrong. They are unpredictable avengers of our presupposed occupancy on land, as are floods. Their immediate aftermath isn't for touristing, either. Like landslides, avalanches and tsunamis, the event surprises us, takes enormous toll, and is perhaps most remarkable for the changes wrought in the months and years afterward. Scientists at times characterize these events as "environmental colonics" that bring about benefits for years to come.

There were wildfires in Yellowstone Park in 1988. (Incidentally, there are wildfires in Yellowstone all the time; they just aren't as large as those in 1988, caused by the dry conditions, dry fuels and high winds that combined to make the fires rage almost uncontrollably.) Throughout July and August of that year, fires pushed through more than 1.2 million acres, over 800,000 of them within the park. In 1988, the National Park reported a dip of approximately 400,000 in the number of visitors compared with the previous year. The following year, any decline had been swept aside with a new record level of visitors. The devastation laid on the park will take hundreds of years to erase. Still, there is a beauty - and a fascination - in the raw blackness that scorched Yellowstone, now a part of the attraction. Consider Herculaneum. It and its more famous neighbor, Pompeii, have welcomed throngs of sightseers to a place where death itself was frozen in time, under what must have been hell on Earth in 79 A.D. Like no other place in the world, this speaks to our fascination with the aftermath of disaster. Stories such as the 2004 Sumatra-Andaman earthquake/ tsunami and Hurricane Katrina are still perhaps too raw and unsettled to have an attractive effect. The time will come, though, when the infrastructure will be rebuilt sufficiently for us to be able to reflect on what happened there. There will be monuments, memorials and museums to document the "before" versus the "after" and testaments to the many that got the survivors from "then" to "now." In the rising from the ashes of disasters, big or small, there is a victory for all of us - as well as lessons to be learned. (Christine Hicks-Usta has enjoyed more than 30 years of globe-trotting as a member of the travel industry. Direct questions to her at Bee Group Newspapers, P.O. Box 150, Buffalo, NY 14231-0150.)