One Day, Ten Millennia

It is time, at last, to finish my story about our Yellowstone trip, which I started here and continued here. We spent our last night at Old Faithful, and once Dustin was settled, I slipped out for a while, walking around outside in the pitch black, looking at the stars. I had a hard time enjoying them, because I spent much of the evening worried about the next day. Would we be able to find anything? I had made my first trip to the place we were going back when I worked here, and I had only gone once. Our only guide would be my imperfect memories. There were no official trails, where we were headed.

We broke camp and drove for two hours, until we had almost left the park. We ditched the car (almost literally) and set out across a sagebrush flat, then up and over a hill that led into the creek drainage that I remembered--and, I was happy to see, to the creek itself. We were on what looked like a strong trail, and I decided to follow it for a few hundred yards even though it led in the wrong direction. We hiked up the slope on the far side of the drainage and found another first, times four: here was the first wholly intact elk antler I had ever found, and another, and another, and another. How had they gotten here? At first, I theorized that the park service had dumped them, that the trail was made by NPS maintenance people dumping roadkill elk parts here to keep them from going to the quack-medicine trade--an improbable theory, but not as improbable as the idea of tripping over four full-grown elk antlers right next to a trail. But we were on multiple trails that day, and I realized later that all were made by animals, by elk and deer following the leader. The antlers had been dropped here by their former owners, and had sat here untouched because we were the first humans to come this way in a long while.

We kept going upstream, passing a steep rockfall from the shoulder of the mountain to our north. We found another trail at this point, one so clear that I thought it might lead directly to our goal (it was actually another game trail). So we started upward. We went almost straight up through the forest. The landscape opened, as if we had climbed a mountain--which is just what we were doing, in fact. We found nothing. We climbed back down, searching all the way, but we could find no trace. And by this point, Dustin and I were both exhausted, our eyes stinging with salt, our breath gone, our legs at the end of their tether. Dustin at last yelled, "Whoa, Dad!" I had by now learned to dread that yell, which meant danger and savage beasts and worse. He was pointing down at the creek, where there stood a wickiup.

It seems an anticlimax to describe, but it wasn't much to look at, just a conical arrangement of wood from the forest, not quite six feet tall. But it was the remains of someone's home. It had been built by one of the last generations of native people to inhabit the park, over a century ago. I've been vague about its location because the park service wants to keep that quiet, but if you work in the park, you always learn about it eventually.

There was enough wood on the ground, in a wickiup-shaped heap, to make at least one more, and the wickiup still standing had lost much of its structure. So they were not pristine, but what else would you expect of structures that were about 130 years old? I admired what remained of the workmanship, as did Dustin. "Look at that," he said, pointing toward the one intact wickiup. "Look at how they fit together at the top." He had been expecting classic Hollywood teepees, and happily, I had explained that these had been rotting at their bases for over a century. This wickiup was short because it had been sinking since Ulysses S. Grant was president. The wood was fragile, combustible, deeply grooved, and silver with age. But it was also uniform: the wood was all the same length and width, and that exact size is not in fact easily available. The builder had put some work into these.

And that, of course, is the charm of such a place. I recall visiting the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena for the first time, looking hard at the brushstrokes on the Van Goghs they own, and thinking, "Vincent Van Gogh did that himself, one afternoon a hundred years ago." Hairs from his brush were embedded in the oil, the paint itself sculpted deeply on the canvas in his characteristic later style. Here in this canyon, too, we could observe the remnant of labor that had been obscure in its time, and admired today in part merely because it has survived. It really did not matter that one had fallen. It was still possible to feel a connection with these people.

And who were they? Sources are often vague on this subject, saying they might be the Shoshone, or the Bannock, or somebody else, but in this case, I think I have an answer. I did some research when we got home, and found a catalog of images that the NPS has put online, digitized versions of film photographs that people have taken over the decades. In the collection, I was able to find photographs of our wickiups, two taken in 1964, and one in 1973. Given a detailed look at the construction, I was able to go to expert sources I knew of, and finally decided that these were Sheepeater wickiups. The Sheepeaters were a branch of the Shoshone and the only permanent residents of the park in the nineteenth century; they got their name because they hunted bighorn in these mountains, although that was not the only animal they hunted.

As always, I was a little short on deep thoughts. I felt a connection with these people, but it was awfully vague. I know so much more about Vincent Van Gogh, and can imagine a day in his life with little effort. With the Sheepeaters, I immediately slip into generalities or Hollywood baloney or misappropriated amateur anthropology. As I stood there, I tried imagining a day in their lives, and immediately thought of a woman who looked like the Land O Lakes trademark, pounding cornmeal. Corn. In Yellowstone.

But we know what these people did for a living. They hunted and fished, and they did a great deal of what we would call hiking (the Sheepeaters had no horses when the earliest explorers arrived, according to all sources I've seen. They did have dogs, to which they hitched their travois poles). At this moment, I had just spent most of a week proving to myself that I could still negotiate the backcountry--better, indeed, than I could in the old days, when I hiked with a cigarette in my mouth, literally. The Sheepeater life now looked pretty good. At the same time, it is always easy for me to imagine the harshness of that life, one spent in total isolation, splendid or otherwise; individual bands wrung a living from this unforgiving country with hardly any help from a larger society. No metallurgy, no communications, no footgear worth mentioning, no medicine; imagine trying to treat brain cancer or a broken spine with leaves and roots. One moment the wickiups looked cozy, watertight and warm. The next they looked like hovels so wretched that even a medieval European peasant would turn up his nose at them. Here is a house that is smaller than the interior of a Mini Cooper, and about as easy to stand up in. Its owner would not have any choice but to embrace the outdoor life.

And then we switched millennia. We returned to the trailhead and rested, sore, but much pleased with our success. A string of horses ridden by bearded, dusty cowboys appeared. "Real Montanans," I said--and then most of them got into expensive cars and drove off. They were upscale fly fishing clients, wealthy orthodontists and tax attorneys and the like, from distant cities that had nothing to do with Montana. We got back on the highway, headed for Bozeman. While we had been looking for the wickiups, we had begun to smell smoke, faintly at first, and then stronger as the day advanced; it came from forest fires that were burning everywhere. The distant Gallatin Range ahead of us grew blurrier and ever more brown. We drove into traffic bad enough for me to get that not-enough-time-to-make-it-to-the-airport feeling in the pit of my stomach. The sky grew more dense all the while.

We left the mountains and passed, slowly, through Gallatin Gateway and Belgrade, the sky now brown as a stool sample. It was actually getting hard to breathe. The afternoon was desert-hot, and the two towns were a tour-de-force of commercial debasement, eyesore after eyesore assaulting my already grated senses: Liquor! Discount Cigarettes! Girls Girls Girls! Flies Flies Flies! (The kind you fish with). I had been told that the housing bubble missed Montana, but given what I saw here, I have to disagree. I saw the kind of lunatic housing developments that are the special province of the bubble. It all came to a head as we raced through Belgrade, not much time left to spare, and ground to a halt amid one last traffic jam, this one caused by a pair of cars that had caromed off one another on the highway. As we slowly coasted past the wrecks (the drivers were up and walking around), I peered through the murky brown air and saw, on the south side of the road, an open gravel pit. Trucks were chugging in and out of it. And on the rim of the gravel pit, with a marvelous view of its open expanse--barely visible to me through the murk and the glare--sat a row of little plastic housing-bubble houses. Under my breath, I muttered, "It's like a vision of hell."

But then--moving forward in that millennium--we went from the auto age to the jet age. The airport was small and sane and air conditioned. The airport security people were friendly; we took Dustin's water bottle through the checkpoint by accident, and they were honestly apologetic when they had to dump the last of our Neolithic Yellowstone water lest it turn out to be nitroglycerine. Everyone was friendly. We hopped to Idaho Falls, where we stopped only long enough to exchange passengers and luggage, then hopped again to Boise. We spent a happy two hours in the airport here, our only layover, and perfect for dinner, which we ate while looking at Idaho Air National Guard planes with our spotting scope. Then we got on the plane for a leisurely flight to Sacramento. Our three flights home were perhaps the mellowest, sanest part of the whole week.

The moral of the story: you can make generalized statements about entire societies or historical periods. You can do that. But you will always be wrong.