A Natural Bridge

"But identifiably, it was, 'Here's a dolphin and here's a gull?' "

"Yeah," Ruth says, "I just thought people might not appreciate a gull chewing on a -- "

"On a charismatic mega-fauna?" Grabowska's voice rises theatrically and he breaks into another grin.

The two consult further on whether to keep shooting the dolphin or whether to wait for the weather to brighten. "We spend so much time waiting for something," Grabowska explains later. "I was watching some of the DVD extras on 'The Lord of the Rings' and Peter Jackson is sitting there surrounded by all these lights and dozens of people, saying, 'Well, we'll just wait for this cloud.' And I said, 'That's what we do! We wait for clouds!' "

Captured by the Lens

John Grabowska never intended to make a living waiting for clouds.

The son of college professors at Northern State University in Aberdeen, S.D., Grabowska spent a year in Spain after graduating from the same school his parents taught in, toyed with the family business of teaching, spent some time in TV news, got married and, along with his wife, Monica, spent two years with the Peace Corps in Honduras.

It was when he was covering the South Dakota statehouse that he discovered a latent passion for looking through a viewfinder.

"I enjoyed covering all of the issues, but it wasn't particularly visual shooting committee meetings," he recalls in his Harpers Ferry office, located in a ramshackle building overlooking the Shenandoah River. "So whenever politics was too much with me, I would run off to the Rosebud Reservation or Cheyenne River or Pine Ridge. . . . Because I loved shooting, and would just go out and happily spend the day framing the shot and trying to get something visually aesthetic on the air instead of the typical local news stuff."

Over his 14-year career with the Park Service, Grabowska has become known -- and sought after -- as a filmmaker who possesses an unusual affinity for Big Nature, who is more inclined to let images and music do the talking in his films and who isn't afraid to take chances.

When he made "Crown of the Continent" for Wrangell-St. Elias, Grabowska realized that the place was eerily familiar. He asked his mother to send him some old 8mm home movies and, sure enough, his family had visited the park when he was a child. What's more, the Wrangell trip was one of the last times Grabowska remembered his father, who later succumbed to multiple sclerosis, being at the height of his physical powers. After wrestling with whether to add such highly charged personal memories to the film, Grabowska finally did; the result is both a spectacular testament to "the architectonics of the planet itself" and a surprisingly intimate and moving tribute to his own father's dreams.

In "Remembered Earth," which he made for the El Malpais and El Morro national monuments in northwest New Mexico, Grabowska asked the author N. Scott Momaday to narrate from his own writings, and mined film archives for footage of classic westerns shot in the area. What could have been a plain-vanilla infomercial about geology and weather is instead by turns a poetic and irreverent look at a place that Americans have

mythologized, romanticized and, in the name of rugged individualism and progress, nearly destroyed.