National Park visitors

It turns out that Americans have been treating national parks and trampolines as interchangeable recreational outlets since 2015, which is either a remarkable coincidence or evidence that the universe operates according to a logic we have yet to fully grasp, possibly involving springs. One would think that visiting Yellowstone and launching oneself into the air with insufficient medical supervision would appeal to entirely different personality types, yet here we are, 96 percent correlated, moving in perfect lockstep like two dancers who have never met but somehow know all the same steps.

Both are symptoms of 2020's great outdoor migration, when Americans went looking for anywhere that wasn't indoors with strangers. National parks were the socially acceptable destination, backyard trampolines were the socially acceptable substitute — and both set records as families tried to burn off cabin fever somewhere, anywhere, that wasn't a living room. One trend sent people to Yellowstone; the other sent them to the emergency room.

What we're really witnessing is humanity's gift for finding correlation where causation would be infinitely more embarrassing to admit—that we simply have more people, more leisure time, and more ways to injure ourselves in pursuit of enjoyment. The national parks didn't cause the trampolines, and the trampolines certainly didn't cause the parks, yet the data insists they rose together like bread dough in a warm kitchen. Sometimes the universe is just doing its job, and we're simply here, occasionally bouncing, frequently bewildered.