Valley Pulse

Maybe it was the bright lights—deal for TV.

Or the stark interview space—two facing chairs.

But most likely it was the audaciously carefree aura of Ken Burns’s pepper-specked beard that caused me to fumble my audio recorder as we began our interview Friday evening.

I had just 10 minutes to pick the brain of a filmmaker who just devoted six years to a documentary that runs 12 hours on the history of America’s national parks. He seemed to know that too, so he poured forth with facts and famous figures, personal anecdotes and a historical literacy that left me nodding and scribbling along—all the while the audio recorder capturing nothing of the quotable but tough-to-quote precision of Burns on a roll.

Without a “but,“ a stutter or an “um,“ Burns roamed from President Theodore Roosevelt to naturalist John Muir, and tackled bison populations, economic stimulus and the Everglades. He described Virginia as “my hood,“ and described how his grandfather taught at the Virginia School for the Deaf and the Blind in Staunton.

Burns, in talking about The National Parks: America’s Best Idea, left my notebook out of order and surprisingly empty for all that I learned. Some pages are outright blank where I accidentally flipped ahead. Others look indented and scattershot like the poetry of E.E. Cummings.

I got my recorder on eventually, and later caught up on what it (we) missed thanks to a WVPT videographer who was rolling for much of the interview.

But for all that I missed that Burns was saying, his stare and firm handshake filled in the gaps: he is serious about the parks, he wanted a provocative documentary and he knew, like Muir, what it would take to learn about them. When it comes to the parks, “in order to go in, we have to go out.“