"Perish the Thought" by Kenneth Chamlee
– Quiet, please. This is a sacred space.
What if authorities in Ecuador allowed Basilica-like crowds to swarm the Galapagos?
Kenneth Chamlee’s work has appeared in five previous Personal Story Publishing Project anthologies. His latest collections are If Not These Things (Kelsay Books, 2022) and The Best Material for the Artist in the World, a poetic biography of 19th-century American landscape painter Albert Bierstadt (Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2023). Ken lives in Mills River, North Carolina, and is an active member of the North Carolina Poetry Society and the North Carolina Writers’ Network. Learn more at www.kennethchamlee.com.
Author’s Talk
Ken Chamlee
Maintaining the beauty and integrity of wonders both natural and curated is a challenge in a world where visiting parks and museums is more popular than ever. While many reasons for regulating admissions should be considered, it is often a numbers game in the end.
The Galapagos Islands, consisting of 13 major and seven minor ones, encompass 3,040 square miles of land spread out over 17,000 square miles of ocean. They get 136,000 visitors per year, who, of course, are not all in the same place at the same time.
The Sistine Chapel hosts six million people every year. Checking the scheduled annual closings and daily hours, I found the Chapel is open 319 days a year at an average of 11.5 hours per day. This comes to 18,808 people per day, or 1,635 people per hour in a space which is 134 feet long by 44 wide, approximately the size of 1¼ basketball courts. Imagine being in the swarm of enthusiastic fans rushing a court after a last-second shot to win a championship game, and you get an idea of the elbow-to-elbow crush beneath Michaelangelo’s masterpiece, minus cutting down the nets.
