GLACIER NATIONAL PARK, MONT. — IT'S TOO early for civilians. As dawn's first light falls on the jagged peaks, creeps down the dwindling glaciers and glides across glass-faced Swiftcurrent Lake, most of the tourists in the Many Glacier Hotel are still snoozing.
But down at water's edge, three early risers huddle around a camera. One of the guys, leaning on a tripod and waiting for the clouds to arrange themselves over the jagged peaks, has a Beatles haircut, the build of a shortstop and a face you've seen before somewhere.
Perhaps during pledge week.
"I want more of the color," he says, peering through a viewfinder. "OK, I'm doing it," he says. And the film rolls.
Yes, it's Ken Burns, solemn PBS documentarian of the Civil War, jazz, baseball, Frank Lloyd Wright, Mark Twain, Congress, the Brooklyn Bridge and more than a few other American characters and institutions. Beside him stand cinematographer Buddy Squires and writer Dayton Duncan. Upstairs in the hotel, Burns' wife and 3-year-old are still sleeping.
So what exactly is Ken Burns doing on his summer vacation?
A six-part, 12-hour series, of course.
"The National Parks: America's Best Idea" is to air in fall 2009 on PBS. This choice of topic may surprise some, given the body counts and civil-rights gravity of other subjects Burns has chosen. His last series, nominated for several Emmy awards, covered World War II. Other projects in the pipeline cover Prohibition, the Dust Bowl and the Vietnam War -- doom, destruction and gangsters on every side.
So why drag his cameras out here to the Canadian border, amid the peace, quiet, scampering children and slowly retreating glaciers?
When you boil it down, Burns says, almost all of his work is about the way American geography connects with the American character. And one of the country's most startling innovations, he says, was the creation of a national park system in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
"For the first time in human history, land was set aside not for the pleasure of kings and noblemen and the very, very rich, but for everybody, for all time," says Burns, lounging in a chair downstairs at the Many Glacier Hotel.
If that phrasing sounds suspiciously like a Burns script, that's not so surprising. Burns, the son of an anthropologist, has been exploring American institutions on film for more than 30 years, ever since his graduation from Hampshire College in Massachusetts in 1975.
