Old Faithful

We--two adults and one seven-year-old boy--carried the following through three airports: Graco Pack 'n' Play playpen, which is not quite four feet long when packed up in its carrying case for travel. Weighs a bunch. Umbrella stroller with Winnie the Pooh theme, not quite four feet long, not too complicated. Weighs, not so much. Tough Traveler child carrier, not anywhere near four feet long, and my personal favorite. Weighs, still, a sum worth considering. Evenflo car seat the size of a small refrigerator. Doesn't fit through the airport security machines no matter which way you turn it. Weighs quite a lot.

In addition, the regular luggage: our seven-year-old's carry-on, filled with extra clothes and Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and who knows what else. There was some food in there, yes, a fair amount of it, not fresh and mostly atomized. My wife's carry-on, a backpack that, made of a hundred pockets that accordion out to alarming size, holds the baby stuff. My carry-on, a briefcase, nearly full before I put the laptop in it, entirely full after, more than full when I remembered that the laptop would only work a few hours without the power supply. My wife's suitcase, a standard large suitcase, full but not overdone. Finally, my suitcase. I stood alone on the bathroom scale, then stood with the suitcase, to make sure that it was under fifty pounds. It was forty-nine. The Tough Traveler child carrier fit into my suitcase, just barely, making the suitcase look from the side a little like a case for a French horn. My carry-on looked similarly lopsided when I wedged in the coffee and coffee cup. I wedged those items in at about ten the night before we left, deciding that, even though I had cut back on coffee almost to the vanishing point, I might need it the next day the way an accident victim needs plasma. I had cut back on coffee because it makes me too irritated.

In addition to the two adults and the seven-year-old boy, Dustin, we were carrying a ten-month-old baby, Lewis. This would be his first visit to Yellowstone National Park.

We got up at 4:30 in the morning at our home in California and, about twelve hours later, we drove into the park. This was last summer, on a day when the airports were all busy. When we arrived, I was in such bad shape that little stars and birds may have been spinning around my head, tweeting and making cuckoo sounds. The best thing we could think to do was to get into our hotel. Maybe some light activity would present itself later, but right now, I wanted badly to lie down.

That attitude violated my old Yellowstone ethic. I had lived and worked here for five years, and had thought it a moral imperative to live every minute of the summer to the fullest. But everything about me now violates my old Yellowstone ethic, in its earliest, purest form. I had been the freest of free spirits, and now was the opposite of unencumbered. Would Yellowstone fit into this new arrangement? Was it big enough to keep me in its orbit, now that I had so many satellites?

And will our hero survive? It seemed unlikely for a while, that evening. Taking advantage of the late sunset in this northern latitude, Dustin and I walked through the Upper Geyser Basin while mom and baby rested. We climbed up to Observation Point, looked out over the steaming valley, then descended and walked through the woods and out into the geyser field beyond. The hour was late enough that we had the place mostly to ourselves.

To the south was the historic core of the "development," the human part of Old Faithful: the majestic Old Faithful Inn, the rustic and rather handsome general store, and the elongated shack that served, and had for decades, as a gas station. On a chess board, the inn would be king, the store a knight, and the gas station a pawn. The pawn sat closest to the entrance road, its face turned with suicidal braveness toward the general public. In this gas station, I had spent some of the best days of my life. I had worked there for all or part of three seasons. Perched over there, on the far side of the Firehole River, it seemed kind of distant behind the steam, and no longer a part of me. When I worked there, we mostly ignored the geysers. Strange but true, and commonplace: this seething spectacle was just a backdrop to daily life, like the sound of freeways and aircraft in a city.

"What is this place called?" Dustin asked. Good at math, good at English, good at baseball, he is kind of a Renaissance kid. He was, I noticed, not bored yet.

"They call it Old Faithful. Also the Upper Geyser Basin."

"The Upper Geyser Base."

"Basin."

"Baste-in?"

"Basin."

We came upon Grand Geyser. This, I explained, was one of the big ones. Did I ever see it erupt in the old days, before I met his mom? Certainly. "That's an advantage to living here. This one only goes off once or twice while the sun is up, and people wait for hours. But a couple of times, I was just wandering around out here, and it went off right when I arrived."

For days to come, he would be expecting Grand to go off the instant we passed it. We walked on, crossing the Firehole River and pausing, as I did in the old days, to look for trout. We found two, one the size of a loaf of bread, a big animated loaf of French bread down there in the lee of the bridge pile. We came to Grotto Geyser. How did it get that strange shape? I explained to the best of my limited ability: when the geyser first appeared, it came up among some lodgepole pines, and it killed them and coated them with sinter and turned the area of the vent into a sculpture.

We looked at Giant and Riverside geysers, and finished with Morning Glory Pool. We returned to see Tardy Geyser erupt, just in time (hyor hyor: people have no doubt been making that joke for well over a century. Ulysses S. Grant was president the first time that joke was told. Someone told Ulysses S. Grant that joke, and he had some more to drink). We watched Sawmill Geyser erupt, too, and I noticed--a little late--what I had failed to notice throughout this little journey around the geysers: Dustin found them absolutely fascinating. We spent much of the rest of the trip on them, and he never did get enough.

On the way back, we passed my gas station. Except for the pumps, it has not changed since I worked there. I once saw an aerial photograph of inn, store, and station taken in the 1920s, and all three seem pretty much the same today. I had been a free spirit when I worked here, yes; I thought nothing of dropping everything and driving across the country. I once drove from Old Faithful to Florida to Los Angeles almost on a whim. I drove in part because I couldn't afford to fly. Free though I may have been, I was also in a state of almost constant anxiety about the future. I was worried about what would happen after the end of the present season. I was worried about what would happen forevermore. I worried about it every single day. In part, I was afraid that if I got too encumbered, in one way or another, I would never see the park again.

It was nice to actually be in that future and discover that it was better than I could have hoped. We had started coming to Yellowstone--which I hadn't seen since the old days--three years ago; we came because it made a good family vacation. If I weren't encumbered, I wouldn't be here.