There are many good things about Yellowstone National Park, and here’s one now: They could give a rip about people.
If you’re going to have a place set aside for people to see nature in its natural state, you are immediately faced with a choice. Do you make it easy for people to see stuff, or do you make it possible for nature to run wild without human intervention?
Yellowstone has chosen nature.
There is a viewing area at Hayden Valley, where herds of domesticated humans stand at an overlook, overlooking through department store binoculars, an old uncle’s old hunting scope, or magnifying instruments that may well have cost more than my car.
You can stand there well into the chilly evening, and be rewarded with the sights of bison and elk and the very occasional coyote. Usually the animals will be some distance away, and they will be doing exactly what animals do. Maybe that will be interesting. Maybe not.
The animal-seekers arrive as strangers, but rapidly become comrades. They begin to share possibly true stories about the Grizzly they saw that morning when, darn the luck, that didn’t have a camera. Often there will be long debates among the strangers about whether the spot moving a couple of miles across the valley is a bear or a wolf, the twin holy grails of sightings in Yellowstone. Usually agreement is reached that they are just spots.
I met a nice young couple from France there. They had come all the way to Yellowstone to stand among the hopeful hill-scanners.
Go to just about any zoo in the country, and you will be able to walk within yards of bear and wolves. Go to Yellowstone, one of the most famous nature preserves in the world, and the odds are that you won’t see either.
They are there, back in the woods, living as close to wild as they can. But you won’t see them.
Our group waited a long time one afternoon, near a bog by the road where a freshly killed antelope lay rotting in the water. We were waiting in the hope that a wolf would come to dine before birds picked the bones clean.
Eventually we drove wolflessly on.
You might stumble on a bear deep on a backcountry trail in Yellowstone. A folk-art looking rough wood sign would have warned you of the possibility at the trailhead. But if you are one of the unfortunate ones who riles a bear in the woods, it won’t be chained to anything, or tame, or drugged, or behind bars or triple-thick glass. You’re the visitor here, pal, and if you resemble a bear hors d’ourve, too bad for you.
We were in the park almost five days, and I never saw a wire fence. If you come to Yellowstone, you’re expected to bring common sense with you.
You should know better than to walk into one of the steaming springs, hot enough to boil the flesh off your bones.
If you feel like it, you can walk right up to the edge of Yellowstone Canyon and choose between spitting and leaping in. It’s your call.
If you’re a big enough idiot, you can sidle up to a bison and perhaps have your picture taken before it takes a notion to head butt you into intensive care.
Nature is beautiful, but it ain’t pretty.
Huge sections of the park were burned out a few years ago, and the beautiful forested vistas you expect to see are sometimes stubby hills, as though Mother Nature hadn’t gotten around to shave her legs after a long weekend.
We had an exceptional guide during our week there, and one day she patiently explained to us why Yellowstone usually lets forest fires burn, and why it’s good for the land, and why, in its own way, it’s just as beautiful as the lush, old growth forest.
But I think she just told us that because so many tourists before us had seemed disappointed by the scarred hills and valleys.
We were stuck in a long line of cars one day, waiting while a herd of bison cogitated over whether to cross the road, or just stand in it blocking traffic a while longer, and she told us about the reintroduction of wolves into Yellowstone. She spoke lovingly of each wolf, identifying each by number. And she told us how one wolf got old, got sick, and was found one day, dead. She and my wife Carolyn both cried when she told the story. Through it all, she made it clear that even if authorities at the park could have done something to stop that wolf from dying, they wouldn’t have. That would have been against nature, and it would have been wrong.
Nature, when left alone, knows exactly what she’s doing.
In the cold, beautiful Yellowstone Lake, there used to be more Cutthroat Trout than you could imagine. You could watch them swim through the ethereal waters. When they would spawn in the fall, bears would lumber down off the hills and grow fat on them.
Then somebody with a fishing pole and a dream decided to stock the lake with another, bigger breed of trout.
The bigger lake trout are doing just fine, thank you very much. They’re also killing the Cutthroat Trout, which are now endangered in the park. The bigger trout spawn in deeper water, and at the wrong time of year to be of any use to the hungry bears. The situation has deteriorated to the point where, if you catch a Cutthroat Trout, it’s illegal to keep it, and if you catch one of the big Lake Trout, it’s illegal to throw it back.
Nature, when left alone, knows exactly what she’s doing.
My family loves Disney World. I consider the park designers there to be absolute wizards at recreating nature and history and fantasy. I love vacationing there.
So it was an odd thought I had one evening in the shadowing dusk, looking across a wooded valley in Yellowstone.
“Disney couldn’t do this,” I thought.
They’d make it too perfect.
“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.
I don’t remember how old I was when this happened, but it’s probably my earliest memory.
It was a family picnic. My aunts and uncles were all there, with the herds of kids and formerly stray dogs they were raising. We were all stuffing ourselves with hot dogs, deviled eggs, Wise potato chips and Kool-Aid. I was too little to join the bigger cousins splashing in the creek (pronounced “crick”) behind my grandparents’ house, so I was sitting on the dock my grandfather had built.
Somehow I lost my balance and rolled into the water.
I was under water forever by my estimation. I didn’t know about things like drowning at the time, but Mom and Dad had warned me there was something bad about water.
Eternity passed in that otherworld beneath the surface of the creek, and I burst through, gasping and crying.
Two things surprised me.
First, no one had even noticed that I had been underwater. Second, I was standing in the spot where I had fallen in, and the water was only waist deep.
Scrambling up the slick bank I began, with my limited vocabulary, to try to convince someone – anyone – of my near brush with death.
They were all amused, and I felt like a shivering fool.
This experience did not convince me to learn how to swim.
When I was a teenager, my friends and I used to spend too many summer days at Mountain Lake, a picturesque little hole full of ice water in the Pennsylvania hills.
There were many reasons to go there. For one, it was within hitchhiking distance of our homes, in those earlier times when you could do such a thing. There was refreshing water to swim in, or you could slap the sides of a pinball machine until it tilted. The pinball machines were in a corner of the huge, covered dancehall/deck attached to what was once a hotel. Sometimes we sat on the railing, and Tiny would get out his guitar and we’d sing folk songs. When somebody had a quarter, we’d choose six songs off the jukebox. There was a refreshment stand that sold greasy sandwiches and pizzas, and cold bottles of Tab and Kickapoo Joy Juice.
But for my friends and me, one of the biggest draws was that girls were there, and they were often in swimsuits.
Except one day they weren’t.
Half a dozen of the girls we all went to high school with and stared at and wondered about had that hot afternoon made the kind of joint decision young boys daydream about during algebra class. They were swimming in their swimsuit bottoms, but instead of swimsuit tops they were wearing white t-shirts. With nothing underneath except the stuff of our dreams.
In spite of the occasional lucky back-seat grope in darkness, all of us boys were still fairly ignorant about what went on under girls’ clothing. If our classmates were trying to enlighten us by swimming in white t-shirts, they were making their points quite clear.
Or so I assumed.
The girls were swimming at a dock about halfway across the lake, and I was standing on the bank, squinting mightily in their direction. I longed for superhero vision, or at least my dad’s hunting binoculars.
Not so for my two friends, who had leapt like horned toads into the lake and swam out to the dock. I could just make them out as they watched giggling girls climbing out of the water and dripping onto the floating dock, their shirts hugging their mysteries every bit as tightly as each of us would have liked to.
I stood on the bank like a dog at a steakhouse window and cursed my fear of deep water. No, really. I spat profanities and combinations of profanities and when I had run out of combinations, I invented some new ones.
And that did not convince me to learn how to swim.
My son is part fish.
I don’t know how this happened, since only my wife and I were involved, and neither of us is part fish. But I find myself checking Aaron for fledgling gills.
He would live in the pool if we’d let him. I remember watching him up on the high dive when he was seven or so, standing at the end of the board, talking himself into stepping off. It took a couple of minutes that first time, but then he was airborne like a base jumper, hollering feet-first and disappearing into the 14-foot end of the pool. As far as I was concerned it took him way too long to resurface. When he finally did, grinning like the first man on the moon, I let myself breathe again.
I was watching him from the shallow end of the pool, where the water was about up to my chest. I’ve always been OK in water as long as I can stand on the bottom of the pool.
My son is a huge fan of sharks. We take him to see the great exhibit at the Omaha Zoo. When he was five he signed up for a backstage tour of the shark area led by one of the people who works at the zoo. Aaron kept correcting her.
He lives for the day when he can actually swim with a shark.
So his mom, who loves animals as much as he does, signed him up for scuba lessons. Way before he was old enough to be certified he was donning scuba gear and, without a moment’s hesitation, working the valve that lets him sink slowly to the bottom of the pool. I watched from poolside, trying not to let him see the horror in my eyes.
As a member of Scuba Rangers, a diving club for kids, Aaron was able to take great trips with other families who have kids who dive.
That’s how we all decided to take a trip to Roatan, off the coast of Honduras.
I had visions of myself waving from the beach as Aaron and his mom took off snorkeling and swimming. They were unpleasant visions.
I’ve always said I wouldn’t be one of those dads who sits on the back porch watching his kid have all the fun. I put on the in-line skates. I bought a bicycle. Although I know less than zero about baseball, I became the assistant to the assistant to the assistant coach of my son’s team when he was nine.
So I decided, at age 51, to learn how to swim.
I was pretty sure I could handle the physical part. I could swim pretty well underwater, after all.
But there were two other sea monsters waiting for me at the bottom of the pool.
One was the absolute panic that overcame me when I could no longer reach the floor of the pool with my toes. I float with all the grace and agility of a floundering brick, and my panic state is not a pleasant thing to witness.
The second fear may have been even worse. I would actually have to admit to another human being that I needed help. And if that weren’t bad enough, the thing I needed help with was something three-year olds manage without thinking.
Meanwhile, I was thinking way too much.
Indeed, the woman who taught me to swim turned out to be a child. Oh sure, she was old enough to be married with a child of her own, but she looked like a kid to me.
At the beginning of the first lesson, she asked me what I wanted to accomplish. I told her that I hoped to be able to stay afloat in deep water, and to be able to go off the low dive with my son and know I could get to the side of the pool alive.
As soon as I admitted I didn’t know what everybody else knew, she was able to patiently explain to me how to move and breathe in the water. Once I stopped being too embarrassed to ask how it was done, I discovered I was able to do it.
It helped that she looked great in the suit and kept saying things like, “Now watch my legs, OK?”
Oo-ooo-ooo-kay.
She was competent and patient and the lessons were enjoyable. Also hard work.
It paid off the night I took a deep breath, stepped into the deep end of the pool, kicked up to the surface, and was able to tread water for a few seconds before swimming to the blessed ladder.
A few months later, while I was snorkeling over an otherworldly coral reef in my leaky facemask and inflatable yellow vest, a single Blue Tan darted under me. Immediately, it was followed by a triangle of others, turning sharply left en masse and disappearing away together.
Thanks, Aaron.
There’s a thing I tell my son quite often.
“”It’s OK to be afraid. But it’s not OK to let fear stop you.”
That goes for embarrassment, too. At my age, it’s nice to be reminded of that once in awhile.
