Chiura Obata

Ken Burns' The National Parks was anything but the snooze fest I was anticipating. I found it to be an exhilarating tearjerker. Truly filled with passionate individuals changing the course of mighty streams for the good of all.

Through 12 hours I found myself growing a waist-length shaggy beard and having an uncontrollable desire to go hug a tree. And I shivered, still remembering my one visit to the spectacular Grand Canyon in the summer of 72 when it was in the 40's as I peered down over the edge of the rail.

And whatever happened to Glenn and Bessie Hyde during that tragic 1928 honeymoon adventure in the unforgiving Grand Canyon? More intriguing than, say, the disappearance of Amelia Earhart.

But I was mostly touched by the story of the Japanese-born artist Obata. Born in Sendai, Japan, in 1885, he came to San Francisco in 1903, taught at University of California, suffered during the internment during WW II, became a U.S. citizen in 1954, and made sketches as an eyewitness to the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, to those extraordinary watercolors of gorgeous Yosemite.