Tasting the Music
posted by Scott Herring @ 12:19 AM
During my first season in Yellowstone National Park, we had the kind of spring that has become a distant memory now that the region has been in drought for years. During that spring, it rained hard every day in the afternoon, and even snowed off and on through the end of May and into June. We worked outside, so by mid-June, we were ready for it to stop. It did: on the day of the summer solstice, June 21, the afternoon sky was free of clouds, and we had almost no rain for the next two months. In early July, when I was beginning to get used to this new, sunnier Yellowstone, I made a trip that stirs me still.
One weekend day, I got up early (on a day off, "early" was, like, noon) and drove my rattletrap car from my home at Old Faithful north toward Mammoth Hot Springs. My route took me up the less-visited west side of the park, where the traffic was still light. Just past the midway point of my trip, I approached a matched-set pair of lakes called, of course, Twin Lakes. Shallow and not especially large, the lakes are ignored by the summertime masses (usually: our company maintenance man once drove into my station to report that he had watched a big family merrily fishing one of the lakes, "and they were having such a good time I didn't have the heart to tell them that there aren't any fish in Twin Lakes"). On this day, I caught a glimpse of the lakes through the trees before I reached them. I saw sunlight on blue water. I saw green trees in front of the water, and green trees on the ridgeline above. In the sky, I saw nothing but the most intense blue. And it all hit me at once.
Why that particular scene affected me so strongly, I will never know; it was just a generic Yellowstone scene, containing the same sorts of things I would be seeing all day, and all summer and part of the fall. Maybe it happened because the scene was so typical: it was a slice of pure Yellowstone. I had a moment of revelation, one of great intensity.
My problem in writing about it is that I cannot say for certain what was revealed. The state I entered--it lasted not quite a full minute--is itself not easy to describe, a cognitive state in which, at the same instant, I felt that all things were perfect, and yet somehow would get even better soon, or could get even better if I made the right moves. It was a desire to freeze the moment and at the same time progress to greater moments. As I have explained before on this blog, I came to Yellowstone get away from an unhappy life in Los Angeles, so this cognitive state was unfamiliar. It felt, in fact, like an abnormal condition--like a flash of déjà vu, which has been shown to be associated with temporal-lobe epilepsy--and was so intense as to affect senses like taste and smell. Specifically, and most strikingly, I felt hungry. I was not actually, physically hungry; I had eaten before the drive. It was as if my stomach had gotten its wires crossed with the language centers in my brain, and was creating a metaphor. The perfection of this place had made me hungry to experience ever more of it.
The feeling passed quickly, and I drove on. It was never intense enough that it felt scary-weird, as, say, a hallucination would have been (hard to say, however, what I would have hallucinated at that moment: maybe Tony the Tiger pouring trees and lakes into a cereal bowl and saying "They're grrrreat!"). That strong hunger I had experienced was pretty odd, though, and I wondered about it until quite recently, when I started teaching a class on writing for medical students at UC Davis. One of my students wrote a paper about synesthesia, the term psychologists use for a condition in which a person experiences one sense through another. Familiar to those who experimented with psychedelic drugs in the 1960s, who often had the experience of putting on a Hendrix record and "seeing" or "tasting" the music, synesthesia can also happen after a stroke, or it can arise among people who are otherwise perfectly normal. It can also appear in any of the senses: one can hear colors, see odors, etc. I can only assume that my hunger was an unusual instance of synesthesia, although I cannot find any examples of it in reference works I've looked at (if any research psychologists want to ship me to Yellowstone to do a study, I'm available). I am treating the phenomenon scientifically; another person would likely use religious terms.
The feeling came to me again at peak moments throughout that first season, but faded over time; after a few seasons in the park, it never happened at all. I could get it back in memory; to this day, I can close my eyes, picture Twin Lakes as I saw them that day, and call up the feeling, or at least a less forceful version. I thought that the more intense version was gone for good. After living in Yellowstone, I went off to graduate school and endured a long exile away from the park; then, starting about four years ago, we started coming to Yellowstone for increasingly lengthy visits. To my surprise and delight, it started happening again. To take one example, here is what happened one morning at the start of a recent visit:
I wake up in a place that seems familiar even though I've never been here, a little rustic box that smells of dry wood and dust. A cabin? I have been traveling, so I am actually uncertain as I first open my eyes. I look around: a cabin, yes, cold now in the morning air. Sunlight glances through cracks. Motes of dust, plenty of them, spin in the shafts of light.
I rise and walk to the door, feeling bits of volcanic gravel under my bare feet. Though dressed so informally that I wear no pants, I open the door. We never worried about that sort of thing too much when I worked here.
Outside, the sun is shining, although it rained last night, pretty hard. In the cratered obsidian gravel before me is a little lake, a puddle of rainwater that is just now beginning to subside. Lodgepole pollen makes a bright yellow bathtub ring, showing that the water has dropped one half inch. The parent trees are all around, classic lodgepoles, beanpole-straight and thirty feet tall. These are unburned trees from before the 1988 fires. The ground beyond the gravel is covered by brown needle-litter and this year's crop of wildflowers. Harebell and fireweed predominate, as often here at Old Faithful. I can make out the hills along the northern side of the valley only as a gray shadow behind the lodgepoles.
No clouds yet. The clouds will come later in the afternoon. I can hear only the faintest of breezes, and a seemingly outraged squirrel, behind me somewhere. Otherwise, no motion, and nothing dramatic to look at, just a forested half-acre, one of forty million half-acres in Greater Yellowstone.
Peace, yes, but also possibility, wide-open possibility. Anything can happen on this high-summer day. The satisfaction I feel arises from the certainty that something will happen, something extraordinary. I literally hunger for it, feel actual hunger pangs, even though it is far too early in the morning for me to want food. The depthless blue of the sky makes the hunger all the stronger....
So the feeling is back, intensely pleasant, and more available today than it was when I lived in the park (Yellowstone, by the way, is the only place in the world where it happens). I used to think that it was connected to exotic adventure, of the sort Sam the Hobbit gets because he is brave enough to leave home; in the early years, that exotic adventure was one of the more valued qualities the Yellowstone experience had for me. Yet here the feeling was again, even though I don't do much swashbuckling any more.
And when I am in the park, it always comes eventually, these days. That is the only reliable thing about it, because it is otherwise confusing and contradictory; when the mood is on me, I feel at once both perfect contentment and a promise of some spectacularly greater experience, and those two states do not match. It's a bewildering puzzle, and I'm fine with it.
One weekend day, I got up early (on a day off, "early" was, like, noon) and drove my rattletrap car from my home at Old Faithful north toward Mammoth Hot Springs. My route took me up the less-visited west side of the park, where the traffic was still light. Just past the midway point of my trip, I approached a matched-set pair of lakes called, of course, Twin Lakes. Shallow and not especially large, the lakes are ignored by the summertime masses (usually: our company maintenance man once drove into my station to report that he had watched a big family merrily fishing one of the lakes, "and they were having such a good time I didn't have the heart to tell them that there aren't any fish in Twin Lakes"). On this day, I caught a glimpse of the lakes through the trees before I reached them. I saw sunlight on blue water. I saw green trees in front of the water, and green trees on the ridgeline above. In the sky, I saw nothing but the most intense blue. And it all hit me at once.
Why that particular scene affected me so strongly, I will never know; it was just a generic Yellowstone scene, containing the same sorts of things I would be seeing all day, and all summer and part of the fall. Maybe it happened because the scene was so typical: it was a slice of pure Yellowstone. I had a moment of revelation, one of great intensity.
My problem in writing about it is that I cannot say for certain what was revealed. The state I entered--it lasted not quite a full minute--is itself not easy to describe, a cognitive state in which, at the same instant, I felt that all things were perfect, and yet somehow would get even better soon, or could get even better if I made the right moves. It was a desire to freeze the moment and at the same time progress to greater moments. As I have explained before on this blog, I came to Yellowstone get away from an unhappy life in Los Angeles, so this cognitive state was unfamiliar. It felt, in fact, like an abnormal condition--like a flash of déjà vu, which has been shown to be associated with temporal-lobe epilepsy--and was so intense as to affect senses like taste and smell. Specifically, and most strikingly, I felt hungry. I was not actually, physically hungry; I had eaten before the drive. It was as if my stomach had gotten its wires crossed with the language centers in my brain, and was creating a metaphor. The perfection of this place had made me hungry to experience ever more of it.
The feeling passed quickly, and I drove on. It was never intense enough that it felt scary-weird, as, say, a hallucination would have been (hard to say, however, what I would have hallucinated at that moment: maybe Tony the Tiger pouring trees and lakes into a cereal bowl and saying "They're grrrreat!"). That strong hunger I had experienced was pretty odd, though, and I wondered about it until quite recently, when I started teaching a class on writing for medical students at UC Davis. One of my students wrote a paper about synesthesia, the term psychologists use for a condition in which a person experiences one sense through another. Familiar to those who experimented with psychedelic drugs in the 1960s, who often had the experience of putting on a Hendrix record and "seeing" or "tasting" the music, synesthesia can also happen after a stroke, or it can arise among people who are otherwise perfectly normal. It can also appear in any of the senses: one can hear colors, see odors, etc. I can only assume that my hunger was an unusual instance of synesthesia, although I cannot find any examples of it in reference works I've looked at (if any research psychologists want to ship me to Yellowstone to do a study, I'm available). I am treating the phenomenon scientifically; another person would likely use religious terms.
The feeling came to me again at peak moments throughout that first season, but faded over time; after a few seasons in the park, it never happened at all. I could get it back in memory; to this day, I can close my eyes, picture Twin Lakes as I saw them that day, and call up the feeling, or at least a less forceful version. I thought that the more intense version was gone for good. After living in Yellowstone, I went off to graduate school and endured a long exile away from the park; then, starting about four years ago, we started coming to Yellowstone for increasingly lengthy visits. To my surprise and delight, it started happening again. To take one example, here is what happened one morning at the start of a recent visit:
I wake up in a place that seems familiar even though I've never been here, a little rustic box that smells of dry wood and dust. A cabin? I have been traveling, so I am actually uncertain as I first open my eyes. I look around: a cabin, yes, cold now in the morning air. Sunlight glances through cracks. Motes of dust, plenty of them, spin in the shafts of light.
I rise and walk to the door, feeling bits of volcanic gravel under my bare feet. Though dressed so informally that I wear no pants, I open the door. We never worried about that sort of thing too much when I worked here.
Outside, the sun is shining, although it rained last night, pretty hard. In the cratered obsidian gravel before me is a little lake, a puddle of rainwater that is just now beginning to subside. Lodgepole pollen makes a bright yellow bathtub ring, showing that the water has dropped one half inch. The parent trees are all around, classic lodgepoles, beanpole-straight and thirty feet tall. These are unburned trees from before the 1988 fires. The ground beyond the gravel is covered by brown needle-litter and this year's crop of wildflowers. Harebell and fireweed predominate, as often here at Old Faithful. I can make out the hills along the northern side of the valley only as a gray shadow behind the lodgepoles.
No clouds yet. The clouds will come later in the afternoon. I can hear only the faintest of breezes, and a seemingly outraged squirrel, behind me somewhere. Otherwise, no motion, and nothing dramatic to look at, just a forested half-acre, one of forty million half-acres in Greater Yellowstone.
Peace, yes, but also possibility, wide-open possibility. Anything can happen on this high-summer day. The satisfaction I feel arises from the certainty that something will happen, something extraordinary. I literally hunger for it, feel actual hunger pangs, even though it is far too early in the morning for me to want food. The depthless blue of the sky makes the hunger all the stronger....
So the feeling is back, intensely pleasant, and more available today than it was when I lived in the park (Yellowstone, by the way, is the only place in the world where it happens). I used to think that it was connected to exotic adventure, of the sort Sam the Hobbit gets because he is brave enough to leave home; in the early years, that exotic adventure was one of the more valued qualities the Yellowstone experience had for me. Yet here the feeling was again, even though I don't do much swashbuckling any more.
And when I am in the park, it always comes eventually, these days. That is the only reliable thing about it, because it is otherwise confusing and contradictory; when the mood is on me, I feel at once both perfect contentment and a promise of some spectacularly greater experience, and those two states do not match. It's a bewildering puzzle, and I'm fine with it.
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