“The patience of the river wears away the stubbornness of the stone.”
I wrote that a little more than 10 years ago, while sitting on the banks of a churgling little river in Yellowstone National Park.
Hallmark was sending artists out there for a week to paint wildlife and landscapes. OK, they weren’t actually painting the wildlife. That would have been rude. Yellow stones are one thing, yellow bison quite another.
I did, however, get to watch the great Mike Willard sit on the banks of a river, patient as time, until a chipmunk walked up and posed for him. If you’re lucky, you’ve received one of Mike’s wildlife calendars as a gift.
That was an aside. I’m going back to the main story now.
The Yellowstone trip was for artists, and no writers were supposed to go. The artists decided to open a spot for one. I made a quick brass ring grab for it.
My son was an infant then, and the nine days I was away was my longest separation from him up to that time. I thought about him a lot while I was away, and decided I would come back to Yellowstone one day and bring him with me. That’s why his mom and I are with him now, in mid-air somewhere between Kansas City and Denver.
But here’s the good part: The trip was my son’s idea.
The plan for this summer’s too-expensive-but-worth-it vacation had been for Aaron and his mom to return to Roatan in Honduras. We went there for a week last summer. Aaron and Carolyn scuba-dived. We have a picture of Aaron underwater, peeking under a coral shelf. When I asked him later what he was doing when the picture was taken, he said, “Looking for a shark.” He wasn’t kidding.
I’m not quite that fearless. Since I’m still trying to stare down a lifelong fear of deep water, I settled for snorkeling above schools of synchronized blue tan, all the while wearing the wimp-out inflatable vest. It was all wet and good, but when Aaron’s junior scuba club chose to go back again this year, I decided I’d already snorted enough saltwater, thank you very much. Him mom would take him, and I would stay home and write my goofy little stories and funny little songs instead.
That was the plan, until Aaron suggested the family go to Yellowstone, and I tried not to grin like a gassy baby.
After a few hours alternating between threatening and cajoling the computer, I eventually booked three flights on Frontier Airlines.
Immediately, one-liners about why they would name an airline “Frontier” began tumbling through my head like Weebles. It’s one of the bi-products of what I do for a living.
“The first-class seats are the ones closest to the campfire.”
“Then they brought complimentary sarsaparillas and little bags of salt pork and beans.”
“The flight attendant turned out to be a toothless, bearded guy named Gabby.”
Leave me now, oh spirit of Jack Carter.
Actually, the planes are quite nice. No peanuts, but the boy is quite enjoying the little TVs in the back of the head rests. And the attendants have all their teeth. And some other interesting things. Pillows, for instance.
**
I’m changing tense now. Try to remain calm.
My plan was to write 1,000 words or so every day during our five-day visit to Yellowstone. Sometimes I’m so cute with my little plans. It has now been – well, a little while, let’s say – since I wrote what you just read. I’m back at home writing this from memory while sitting down in the Beatle Room watching a Red Skeleton movie on TV.
About my memory…
We flew into Salt Lake City, rented a car and drove north to Jackson Hole, a town I’ve always thought would make a good name for a TV secret agent.
“Call Jackson Hole! He’ll get to the bottom of things!”
Course, I’ve also always thought they should make a movie called “Journey to the Center of Uranus.” So don’t go by me.
My memories of my visit 10 years ago are scattered and sketchy, but every now and then one is clear as a Yellowstone lake. The artists and I went to Cody, Wyoming one night. At the park in the town square, there are huge arches on each corner made completely of elk horns twisted together like extension cords in a bag. I could see clearly in my mind’s eye the row of rough wood tourist shops leading away from the square. It was so vivid.
So imagine my surprise when I found the square in Jackson Hole.
I could have sworn on a stack of original Capital Beatle Albums that it was in Cody.
So, anyway, that might be a good thing to keep in mind while you’re reading these essays. Some of my Cody stories actually take place in Jackson Hole.
**
We ate at a restaurant that serves Buffalo. The meat, not the town.
For many years now I’ve been street-fighting with the cholesterol gang. I try to keep up on the latest dirt, or healthy food that tastes like dirt. I was delighted recently, for example, when I could have olive oil again.
(Must…not…tell…Popeye…joke…)
Anyway, I read somewhere one time that buffalo was better for folks like me than beef. I’ve pretty much given up steaks in favor of chicken and fish, but I thought it might be nice to find something somewhere in between. Buffalo is supposed to be lower in fat than cows with their four sets of love handles.
So I was going to order a buffalo steak. But then I started remembering how the bison looked during my visit 10 years before. They are huge, shaggy animals, majestic in their innocent dullness. They seem gentle and harmless, except when they gore tourists who consider them props for gag photos. My point is, I’m not sure they deserve to be eaten by the likes of me.
And no, I’m not one of those.
I’m not a vegetarian, although I have no bone to pick with them.
When I was a kid, we raised pigs. I’ve watched the pink, hairless little squint-eyed porkers nuzzling for a spot at Mama Sow’s milk bar. I’ve cradles piglets and named them and chased them around the barn. Then I’ve watched them grow into fine, fat hogs, seen them butchered and enjoyed their chops for dinner.
There should be a fast food drive-thru dedicated to me, for all the burgers I downed before I put them down for good. I live in the city of barbecue, and I’ve sampled more than my share.
I understand that, for the most part, people eat animals and not vice versa.
So I thought I’d try the buffalo steak.
“Are we ready to order?”
The moment of truth arrived, and I heard myself say, “I’ll have the pork, please.”
Now I know it doesn’t make a bit of difference. Bison will still be farm-raised and served up to tourists. The bison steak I didn’t eat went to someone else that same evening.
I’ll keep eating chickens and pigs and fish, and I won’t regret a bite.
But I’ve decided not to be part of adding yet another animal to the food chain. Enough already.
**
The next day we spotted our first big game, and no, I’m not going to do Groucho’s joke from “Animal Crackers.” Rent the video.
On the road from Jackson Hole to Yellowstone, we spotted a moose, knee-deep in a pond by the side of the narrow, blacktop road. The moose was somehow balancing his body on spindly legs, his huge moose mouth munching contentedly on wet grass, his antlers threatening to throw his narrow head off balance at any moment.
He looked like an animal designed by committee.
I stole a glance at my son, and saw that he was staring with the same big-eyed wonder I felt when I saw my first moose in the wild.
On my trip to Jackson Hole a decade ago, I took an afternoon to hike the seven miles from the top of Rendezvous Mountain back down to the hotel. As I descended, the temperature rose, and it was turning into a beautiful afternoon. I would walk until I got tired, then sit on a rock for awhile. After a few hearty pulls on my water bottle, I’d take out my harmonica and send a few poorly played tunes down the valley. Eventually, the water took its toll, and I walked off the trail into the woods to return it to nature from whence it had come.
When it came time that I could look up, I thought I saw a big blob of something brown moving around off in the woods. I looked closer, and saw the moose. In pictures and on TV, I always thought moose looked a little goofy. I found myself really hoping this guy didn’t know that. There was nothing goofy about him. His massive chest expanded as he took in air, and when he let it out, he thundered a snort. I figured he could carve his initials in my chest with his hooves, then beat me to death with his antlers.
My plan was to back away slowly before the moose spotted me. As I put the plan into action, he glanced casually at me, stared for a thousand years or so, then returned just as casually to his munching.
I back-crept to the path, then edged down the hill on shaky legs.
It was a stunning experience.
And now, 10 years after, my son was seeing his first moose. If I know him, he was most likely trying to figure out how to coax it out of the water and into the rental car, so he could bring it back to Kansas as a pet. My wife meanwhile was taking several of the photos she takes so well, probably wondering how she could get the moose to turn slightly to the left, look directly into the camera and smile.
And me, I was keeping my eyes open for flying squirrels and spies with uncertain European accents.
And remembering my first moose.
A little flap. A little Jack. A big smile.
There is a special place in my stomach’s heart reserved only for pancakes. Modest, unassuming, the Mr. Peepers of the breakfast table, they are completely content to let other foods be the show-offs. Pancakes have simpler goals. They are old friends you can eat.
Pancake joints, then, are among my favorite restaurants. Let other diners sashay into eateries with too much oak and not enough light. Let them sit in uncomfortable chairs and pay too much for wine.
I want a place where the fading paper on the walls and the fading dye in the waitress’s hair are equally steeped in the smoke of a grill, and there is forever a hint of maple in the air.
This night then, while the wife is in Atlanta at a scrapbook convention and the boy is at a birthday party, I’m at a pancake joint. Never mind which one. They’re as interchangeable as the half dozen pairs of white socks with gray heels at home in my sock drawer.
As interchangeable as any two well-flipped pancakes.
Occasionally I had pancakes for breakfast when I was a kid. Those were the mornings my dad would heat up the cast-iron griddle on the wood stove, so when he smeared butter on waxed paper and slid it across the top, it would hiss and smoke and sass like an elderly aunt.
We drowned the results in way too much cheap syrup, back in the days before there were labels to tell us it was just thickened sugar-water with no actual association to a Maple tree.
The sugar high would keep us bouncing off porch roofs and out of trees until lunchtime.
One of my favorite pancake house memories is of the one at Cornell University when I went to college there in the 1970s. It was run by students, I think. And if it wasn’t, I’m going to say it was anyway. A good story always trumps the truth.
It was run by students, and a gaggle of them worked there. The restaurant was located next to scenic Lake Bebe, which students jump into on graduation day in their caps and gowns.
It overlooked Cornell’s beautiful gorge, as we all did on most days.
I can’t remember what the restaurant was called.
A classmate told me they had great pancakes there, and I said, “I’ll have to go there for breakfast one day.”
“They serve them all day.”
Pancakes all day. Truly, college was to be a broadening experience.
The mimeographed menu was a map to new worlds for me. In addition to flapjacks, they offered all sorts of pancakes featuring fruits and nuts. (Make your Ivy League college joke here. I’ll wait. Dum-de-dum-dum…finished now?) I was taken aback. Fruit on pancakes, I thought, was like earrings on a pig: Pretty, but unnecessary.
From my bearded, pony tailed waiter I ordered the peach pancakes, which the menu assured me were “made with fresh, freestone peaches.”
I sipped coffee and thought about the name “freestone peaches.”
“Awfully proud of our pits there, aren’t we, Mr. Freestone?”
Then I thought about how Freestone would be a good name for a band.
Then the pancakes arrived.
How to describe a masterpiece?
See, they had taken a huge pile of fresh, oozing peach quarters and folded the pancakes around them like giant, bizarre burritos. Then they’d covered the top with more peaches. So many that the thick gel-juice threatened to run off the sides of the plate.
Anyone who knows me will tell you – well, they’ll tell you a lot of things because they’re jealous and maybe out to get me. But one thing they’ll tell you is that I love the peaches.
I lifted flapjack and freestone together on my fork, put it in my impatient mouth, and was instantly flown from Ithaca, New York to Pancake Heaven.
Which, come to think of it, may be a redundant term.
For the longest time, I was unable to make pancakes at home.
I bought a griddle like my dad used, buttered it up like my dad used to, and poured pancake-sized globs of batter on it like he always did.
My dad was always able to slide a spatula under a flapjack and flip it in the air over the griddle. It would land, perfectly, like an Olympic skater.
When I tried it, the pancake tore in half. This would reveal that the bottom was either burned black, or still raw. The spatula would come away with its edges lined with congealed batter, seemingly attached with some sort of super-cement I had inadvertently created out of flour and water. This made it unusable to turn the pancake next door, which was rapidly filling the kitchen with smoke.
I am not a cursing man, but after a couple of tries I would fling the spatula across the kitchen. As it went, spewing a trail of batter dots on the floor and walls, I would address the griddle, the batter, the spatula, the dog and the universe in terms best not repeated here.
So I learned to love a good pancake joint.
I know what you’re thinking.
“Bill,” – and yes, it’s OK if you call me Bill – “Bill,” you’re thinking, “how do pancakes fit into a low-cholesterol, low-fat, low-triglyceride diet?”
Here’s how: They don’t.
This fits perfectly with my personal diet motto: The best way to stick to a healthy diet and exercise regimen is to cheat.
My wife knows how much I love pancakes, so a couple of years ago she bought me an electric griddle as a gift. There’s a little book with it, and that little book tells you the exact temperature that works for pancakes. So now I can make my own at home without teaching my son any new words. I make pancakes at home using healthy ingredients, and I put applesauce or yogurt on top of them, and I convince myself that they are good for me.
Then I enjoy them anyway.
