This one will have to be more brief and ill-thought-out than I would prefer. I'm writing this in a cabin on top of a rocky hill a few miles outside of Cooke City, Montana, near the northeast entrance to Yellowstone National Park. Today, I visited the cabin I lived in when I worked at Tower/Roosevelt, down in the park, and I must say, the one I'm sitting in right now is better appointed. That's not saying too much. The one at Tower had a single bare electric light bulb; that was the sole difference between it and a cabin from, say, the 19th century. Some of the cabins were about that old. Tower was always like that. A rumor we often heard stated that the employee housing was so old as to be "historical." Because it had to be kept wretchedly pristine, it couldn't be modified.
No doubt that explained part of the reason employee housing at Tower was always such a problem, but not all. I might be able to sleuth out the rest of the explanation, but I am too tired. Better-appointed though it may be, it is hard to sleep in this cabin. As I write, our toddler, Lewis, is having a problem. He wants to empty the contents of the refrigerator out onto the floor, but has been stopped from so doing. He is--let us say unhappy, and draw a curtain over the matter. He was just now expressing his thoughts by throwing something across the room. He slipped and bumped his head on the floor. This event made him less happy still.
I am pretty well accustomed to travel with the family at this point. Dustin, our eight year old, has reached an age at which he is a good deal more a help than a hindrance. He just opened the fireplace door, built a cone of kindling over a grocery bag, and--with me watching carefully, it is true--lit the whole on fire. The kindling was so dry that it went off like a bomb. We added some split logs, turned down the lights, and sat around the fire, Lewis having at last screamed himself into a state of bliss. The only other light was the glow of this screen, and lightning flashes through the south-facing windows.
Bugs bounce along the screen. Outside, the night is purest black, except for the stars and Milky Way--and the lightning, which grows in intensity until we hear, on the roof, a growl that says the rain has arrived. We can smell it, too, through the open windows.
In the daylight, our surroundings are banal enough, for Yellowstone. We are in the middle of a forest that burned in 1988. The new forest is as much as twelve feet tall now, lodgepole pine mixed with quite a few spruce. It sort of looks like a Christmas tree lot, except for the big dead trees, and the deer and moose wandering around, and the general scarcity of humans. A hummingbird buzzed us yesterday, something I have never seen around these parts.
In sounds great. In truth, however, this trip is going pretty badly. Lewis just got up again. He didn't want to go to sleep, and he let us know about it. In between the screams and the bloodcurdling shrieks, I can hear "No. No. No!" The last "no" is a drawn-out wail, an expression of deepest despair. This has been going on for an hour now, and it just turned midnight. His normal bedtime is about 8:30, but being on vacation has thrown him off. My wife, Jen, is doing her best to cope with it; when he sees me, unfortunately, he screams even harder. His brother is patient with these outbursts, but enough is enough. He, too, is not asleep yet, and his normal bedtime is about nine. He's curled up on the couch, watching his fire go down, just riding out the storm.
During the daylight hours, the weather is hot enough that it's hard to walk very far. The whole region is having a bad year for horseflies. Insurance people talk about a "hundred-year flood." These would seem to be the hundred-year horseflies. They bite you between the toes. They bite you through clothing. When you park a car, they attack it. For people who have never seen this phenomenon, no, I am not being artistic or untruthful. They really do attack the car; when one rolls to a stop, a dozen pound the hood, the roof, and the trunk. They slam into the steel as if they want to break and enter. The deerflies are having a fine year too. I've had some success fighting them all off with DEET, which I hadn't expected to work, but hiking in the northeast part of the park is nearly impossible. So is fishing. Or walking. We have to drive to distant parts of Yellowstone, which of course means a hours-long struggle with the tourists.
I used to laugh at the tourist dads and their endless ridiculous travails. They would drive into the gas station where I worked here in the park and open a map. It was, let us say, a map of California, and the dad's finger would wander all over the Sierra Nevada while I tried to discover a subtle way of telling him that he needed a map of Wyoming. His wife would always be filled with advice or complaints or something--it was always hard to hear--and filled also with Little Debbie snack cakes; everyone in the family always seemed to be dangerously overweight. And in the back, the kids, in their clothing that always tested the outer limits of tastelessness, and that was further stained by junk food, all quarreling and complaining and whining, whining, whining. Who could stand it? Why would anyone voluntarily take on such a load?
Now Lewis is finally asleep.
And now it's morning. Dustin and Jen dropped off shortly after Lewis did, and I slept for a little while, somewhere in there.
It's nice outside. I can smell the pines through the open window. I can also smell the soil, the volcanic soil of this part of the Rockies, dry already even after last night's rain. Through one window, I can see the mountains that line the south side of this valley, dull green and brown and massive, giving way at the top of the window to a deep blue sky.
Lewis woke up at a normal hour, as did Dustin. Lewis' mood has improved greatly; he's toddling around and playing drums on the pots and pans. Dustin is eager to get into the park. He is never as proud of me as when we are in the Yellowstone area. Because I worked here for so long, he regards me as an expert on a par with the park superintendent. He wants to see a thermal area today, and then go fishing. I taught him how to fish here in Yellowstone, and he is already skilled enough that he is beginning to outfish me.
I think it's going to be a wonderful day. Even though something can, and will, go wrong any minute, I cannot think otherwise.
scott tagged map by user - Tagzania
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