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Legacy 11
To experience Fire Island National
Seashore requires that a visitor
make repeated
excursions. e
Seashore does
not reveal itself
quickly thanks
to the diculty
of traversing
its entirety and
understanding
the interplay of
its natural and
cultural resources.
Alternatively, it might reveal its
essence if a visitor were to overy it. A
20-minute ight in a helicopter would
be too noisy and disruptive, but on the
wings of a gull one would sense Fire
Island in proper perspective.
—Opening paragraph of “e Overight”
Is it too much to ask that interpretive
plans actually interpret places they
plan? So oen, they gure as technical
documents enriched with planning
tools such as interpretive themes,
signicance statements, attraction
descriptions, and experience goals
that surge from rationally minded
interpretive planners, yet lack that
which these plans so enthusiastically
advocate. Does interpretive, creative
writing somehow detract from the
credibility of objective, technical
interpretive planning documents? Is
it u in the serious game of strategic
heritage management planning?
Or can its use not only improve the
quality of analysis but serve as a
model for professional practice at the
heritage site?
I argue, based on a recent
experiment at Fire Island National
Seashore, a US national park, that a
place for interpretive writing amongst
the more conventional interpretive
plans, tools may exist, even be
desirable. e park and its consultant
facilitators had decided early in the
planning process that we wanted in
the Visitor Experience Plan (a more
holistic version of the NPS’s venerable
“Long-Range Interpretive Plan”), real
examples of interpretation, a visitor-
reader experience opportunity, and
personal expressions of community
members and sta that produced the
plan. Further realizing that amidst
only themes and goals, still, the plan
would oer no resources to provoke
reader emotions toward the place.
For those reasons, we launched “e
Overight.”
j o n k o h l
e Overight
Seen from its lighthouse on the
western end, Fire Island stretches
some 26 miles along the southern
coast of Long Island
A New Interpretive Tool for Interpretive
Planning and Audience Engagement
january/february 2018
12
Based on a strategic planning
tool I learned years ago called the
“photographic vision” by which a
writer describes a place as if she
were guiding a blind person by the
hand, explaining to him not only
the place’s tangible characteristics
but its intangible ones as well. is
approach intended to replace short,
factual sentences oen utilized as
vision statements. So we applied this
technique to Fire Island. Given the
island’s terrain, only a fool would dare
to traverse it with eyes closed, so it
occurred to us that a perfect medium
to take in the entirety and complexity
of the barrier island would be from
the wings of an overying bird.
Taking advantage of a light easterly
breeze, our greater black-backed
gull jumps alo from the beach
oceanside at Robert Moses State
Park. As the gull rises, she sees
the thicket of phragmites through
which the boardwalk slithers
like a black racer snake. e gull
circles the black-and-white striped
lighthouse which guided ships,
immigrants, and cargo for 150
years into New York harbor. A
quick glimpse backward, the steel-
and-cement cityscape of one of
the greatest cities on Earth peaks
above Robert Moses Causeway.
Tourists atop the lighthouse wave
as the gull heads eastward along 26
miles of national seashore on the
barrier island, an Olympic distance
that takes far longer for a hiker to
cross than it did for Pheidippides
to run aer the Battle of Marathon
2,500 years ago.
e Overight attempts to integrate
into a single owing narrative all the
key elements of an interpretive plan
including its themes, signicance,
main attractions, outstanding
landscape features, principal
management issues, processes that
transform the island, and ultimately
its essence.
e number of cars drops o
rapidly passing the lighthouse
and then the Burma Road vehicle
gate. Once inside the national
park reaching the community
of Kismet, only a smattering of
vehicles can be observed, whether
driving on the beach or along the
interior route of a relatively motor
vehicle-free community.
e Overight synthesizes multiple
participatory planning processes,
background readings, site visits,
and innumerable conversations. It
required expert fact-checking and
stakeholder review. ough written
by a single hand, many people
contributed to its contents. Aer all,
an outside consultant alone unlikely
could capture the essence of a
complex site he has barely known for
more than a few months.
Using The Overight
Perhaps its greatest function is to
integrate, synthesize, and transcend
all the disparate place pieces both
in plans and constituent minds.
It gives voice to a place in a way
normally reserved for natural history
books and documentaries, too long
for most interpretive or planning
purposes. At rst, we debated
whether e Overight was actually
a planning tool or just a nice heritage
description. Later we concluded that
it could be paired with standard
information normally included in
interpretive plans, together providing
a more holistic planning tool used to
guide decision-making.
e Overight can be used as an
introduction to the park in a brochure,
on a webpage, or perhaps even read
aloud by interpreters. In this way, it
becomes part of the visitor experience
opportunity itself. Alternatively, it
serves as reference for dening
future park scenarios (this Overight
describes the current baseline for
change). It can be used for training
new sta as an orientation to the park
and also as a model demonstrating
interpretive writing. I have recently
discovered that e Overight is
the right-brain counterpart to the
le-brain interpretive framework
I have described in other writings
that captures various interpretive
elements necessary to truly appreciate
a place (heritage elements, themes,
universal processes, and essence).
For the interpretive framework
methodology, we use guided imagery
to situate workshop participants in
the perspective of an overying eagle
peering down upon the park. We
ask them to spot major landscape
elements, energy and water ows, or
traits that interact to yield a place’s
essential character. While the eagle
can share but a single sentence for
the interpretive framework, for e
Overight, the bird on the wing has
time to glide, observe, and expand
its perspective outward across many
more dimensions than just 3D space.
When on the ground, a stretch
of beach or a forest stand slows a
walker’s advance. From up above,
these multiple and changing
landscape features—dunes,
houses, boardwalks—pass in
continuous change like blips on
a sonar screen landscape. Fire
Island enjoys no extensive forests,
mountain chains, or enduring
wild rivers. is is not like many
other national parks. Perhaps
its single indomitable feature,
dicult to perceive from the
ground, is its long thin barrier
island land bridge, holding at
bay the Great South Bay to the
north and the Atlantic Ocean to
the south. Along this sand bar,
Legacy 13
Delaware History Museum | Wilmington, DE
EXHIBIT DEVELOPMENT & DESIGN
CONTENT DEVELOPMENT
LABEL WRITING
HANDS-ON INTERACTIVES
MULTIMEDIA INTERACTIVE DESIGN
INTERPRETIVE GRAPHICS
geckogroup.com | 610.430.0305
Engage visitors.
Stimulate conversations.
Change perceptions.
the gull sees a bright, reective
beach undulating all the way
to the horizon to her right and
darker colored saltmarsh, green
vegetation, and wooden docks
along the le.
Indeed, much of modern planning
today rests on the scientic paradigm
and utilizes approaches that
guarantee objectivity, rationality, and
methodical approach. As such, our
strategic plans leave little room for
local voices, other forms of knowing,
or products of subjective thinking.
Most interpretive plans today would
not yield the space for an Overight.
But interpretive plans, among the
many management plans that provide
overarching guidance to heritage
areas, have the strongest argument
to include actual interpretive writing
in their pages. As society becomes
more holistic in perspective so too
goes interpretation. “Interpretation
should aim to present a whole rather
than a part, and must address itself to
the whole man rather than any phase.”
e Overight then makes a standard
interpretive plan more holistic,
integrating objective and subjective,
ultimately more interpretive.
Now the gull drops down into the
Otis Pike Fire Island High Dune
Wilderness Area, 1,400 acres of
one of the smaller wildernesses
in the United States and the only
one in New York, not to mention
so enticingly close to a grand
metropolis. As the gull touches
down on the beach, out of sight
of the Burma Road, it peers out
over the ocean. Here a wilderness
camper or beachcomber cannot
get lost physically, with the four
cardinal directions so clearly
identiable on this small island.
He or she does not feel insecure
or disoriented as one might in
a major wilderness such as the
Gates of the Arctic Wilderness
Area. Rather shielded by dunes
from the view and sounds of
civilization, the respite provides an
illusion of distance and isolation,
conditions that provoke a sense
of solitude and tranquility, even if
for only a eeting moment until a
plane or boat passes by. At night,
a constellated dark sky gapes
above the wilderness-goer erasing
conscious remembrance that the
never-sleeping Big Apple hums
some 60 miles to the west.
a b o u t t h e a u t h o r
Jon Kohl, director of the PUP Global
Heritage Consortium, worked with
its founding member the Consensus
Building Institute to facilitate a
participatory planning process with
park sta and partners to develop the
Visitor Experience Plan 1.0 which as
of this writing has become version 2.0.
To experience the entire Overight,
you can nd it on page 82 of the plan
at www.nps.gov/is/getinvolved/
upload/VEP_FINAL_6_26_17_
interactive-v2.pdf.