For many months now I've been giving interviews to what has become, little more than phone conversations with friendly strangers ...

There has been much repetition, and at times I find myself wondering ... the questions are as much the same as the answers ... each is forgotten within minutes, and I lose all sense of who it was and just what publication was that?  I rarely ever see copies of the pieces upon completion.  I get lost in "the work," and in the people who come to my talks ... .

But then there comes that rare moment of realization.  This time it was an email from an editor from the In-Flight magazine for British Airways, and I remembered that only yesterday there was a woman in my audience who'd read about me only last week in the Guardian which is delivered to her home in London.

The editor was requesting a date for a photographer to come to the Visitor Center, "a (possible) cover shot,: says she.  The email contained a sentence that mentioned that their readership is over three million.  That caused a shudder to run up my spine and the catching of my breath -- and the instant and full realization of how widespread is our park and my role in it, and how wondrous that is ... .

... and how little impact those friendly conversations with interesting young people has had on this aging ranger -- at least in those moments of encounter.  It all seems virtual, a word and a concept that has only come to me in my last decade.

It causes me to wonder just when did all this become self-generating, begin to feed on itself,  and will it suddenly come to an end just as it began?

,,, but then there is the filmmaking team who shared some of their footage at the Rosie Trust's banquet last weekend, and -- though it was difficult to view myself in a room holding 250 other people -- I found a way to do it in the third person.  She turned out to be someone I might wish to know, actually.  Not sure I'd want to repeat the experience, though.  It's rather eerie ... .