The Sage of Yellowstone

Having worked in Yellowstone, I fell in love with the place--a common, if not universal, outcome. I am not surprised that it happened. I am, however, never sure why I am so avid to pass on my feelings for Yellowstone to our children. My usual rule is that I do not want them to follow in my footsteps. Viewed from above, my footsteps make a trail that is long and tangled and frequently veers off the path to investigate something glittery that turns out to be a broken bottle or an old hubcap. My footsteps are just about the stupidest thing you ever saw, really. But where Yellowstone is concerned, I want the kids to be just like I am. And I have had some success.

It can be challenging. Recently, ten-year-old Dustin and I spent some time in the park. We were there by ourselves--Jen had business that kept her at home with Lewis--so I was accountable for Dustin's welfare on top of the need I felt to solidify his relationship with the park. And I should explain that I am his stepfather; I came into his life a long time ago, when he had just turned five, but we are in a sense still getting to know each other. It was all a heavy responsibility. I responded, as I have before, by turning into Professor E. Cology.

"Come forth, my son, and learn from Nature's University!" I didn't actually say that, but that was my tone, as we set out on our first morning to hike to Osprey Falls, on the Gardner River near the north entrance to the park. We hiked along an old road that followed a broad sagebrush flat, mountains all around. The high country autumn had begun, with blue skies and moderate temperatures, and a cold wind in our faces. The meadows, long since brown, roiled in the wind like a rapid. I lectured all the while. "That's Bunsen Peak. The Bunsen burner is named for...what's his name, the guy the mountain's named for. He was an expert on volcanoes, and...other stuff, like, um, Bunsen burners...and it's a volcano, so it makes sense, see?"

"What are those things, dad?" Dustin asked, pointing at the sky.

"I...don't know." Those things later turned out to be fireweed seeds. Fireweed is a handsome pink flower that blooms voluminously where wildfire has been. Looking like cotton, the seeds ballooned over the landscape in a miles-long wave. Dustin knew perfectly well what fireweed was, once we found the source. He had to stop me from explaining.

A few minutes later: "What's that, dad?"

"I...don't know." It was scat--animal droppings, for you city folk. I knew that much. I did not know what it came out of, whether dog or bear or chimera, but I took a photograph with our car key for scale, and it was huge--not the key. I noted Dustin looking over his shoulder. "That's good," I said. "You should always be cautious and think about what animals might be out there."

Moments later, I was hiking with my head down, hat blocking my eyes so that I could see only about ten feet of the trail. "Whoa, Dad!" Dustin yelled. I stopped, confused, wondering what was going on. Dustin pointed.

There was a bear on the trail ahead. We were too close for comfort; it was maybe a hundred feet away, looking oddly alert. Bears always look to me as if they can't be bothered, but this one seemed tense. It appeared to be a black bear--not the more dangerous grizzly, that is--but it was also huge; it stood there, sniffing the air, looking away from us and apparently unaware of our existence. I looked to my side and noticed Dustin backing away with his eyes averted, which is just the thing that all the nature guides say you should do. Like a tourist at Disneyland's Country Bear Jamboree, I was reaching for my camera. I saw what Dustin was doing and thought something like, Oh, yeah--that's a real bear. We should leave.

So we backtracked. All this time, I had been nurturing a vague plan that we would fish in the Gardner River. We reached a point where my fishing book said that we could descend to the river, and we were sorrowful at what we found. The river raged hundreds of feet below, at the bottom of a V-shaped canyon. The terrain between us and the water was a hodgepodge of volcanic rock and dead timber, all meshed together like chain mail. It was not quite sheer, in those places where the slope got more ambitious. The climb back up would be exhausting. We hiked along the canyon rim, back and forth, and found that there was no easy way to get to the river below. "So, should we try this?" I asked Dustin.

"No."

"Why not?" I asked again, genuinely perplexed.

"It's stupid. It's practically a cliff."

The bear was gone now, so we finished the trip to Osprey Falls. We found it at the bottom of a long trail, deep in the river canyon; the river made a 150-foot leap here, and Dustin was deeply impressed. I was nursing my sore bones, and actually did not pay the falls much attention. After a rest, I fished for the remainder of our visit. The fish I caught were the size of the fish that come on a pizza. Dustin was eating, which was what I should have been doing. "Do you want to fish?" I asked him.

"No, I think we should hike out so that we don't get caught by the dark."

It was not that long before dark as we approached the trailhead. By mile 10, I was just barely able to walk. I would have been in better shape if I had eaten. It was good to know that I could do this kind of thing, along with the 800 foot drop down into the river canyon to the base of the falls--and 800 foot climb back out--but I was quite literally dragging my feet by now. Dustin zipped along without complaint. We figured out the next day that we had gone about 14 miles.

That evening, we were supposed to go to the community center in Gardiner, to a meeting of local environmentalists, where I hoped to meet some of my old Yellowstone Park Service Stations friends. (Among the organizers was Mike Tercek, a YPSS guy from my days in the park, now a Tulane University Ph.D. and a kind of freelance biologist--which, however, sounds odd, as if were a character in a film noir gangster movie or a piece of hard-boiled detective fiction: "He was the most dangerous kind of scientist: a free-lancer. And he had the drop on me. Standing there looking down the barrel of his .38, I had to figure it was only the harmful effect of lead on the environment that kept him from pumping me full of it." That sort of thing). When we got back to town, I was so wrecked--by dehydration, fatigue, and the migraine headache I had developed--that I could hardly sit upright. I probably also had a touch of altitude sickness, of which Dustin was quite free. The subjects under discussion at the meeting were complex. I sat there like a cartoon character who has been hit in the skull with an anvil or a grand piano: stars and little birds were spinning around my head. I was no longer Professor E. Cology. I was more like Professor E. Coli. I was deathly ill, that is.

Dustin sat up and took it all in. After the meeting was over, I had to ask him what it was about.

I had begun to feel better about the time the meeting ended. Still, if I could have let Dustin drive home, I would have. "So, did you have a good time today?" I asked.

"I had a great time," he said. "It helps that you used to work here. It makes you such an expert."

I'll take that.