It should be a movie title… no?
So this year’s summer vacation was to the
oft-visited vacation haven of Yellowstone National Park via the drive from hell
across Nebraska and southern Wyoming.
(Really… if you’re going to Yellowstone from the East… take 90 and go
through South Dakota. When you’re
disappointed that a cyclone didn’t whisk you off to Oz… well… you’re not in
Kansas anymore… you’re in Nebraska. It’s
the armpit of the Midwest.)
Anyway… how can anyone explain the natural wonder that is
Yellowstone? You really can’t. For 99% of the people who visit… it’s a hell
of a lot of driving and walking around to see the “natural attractions” while
dodging Chinese tourists who insist that umbrellas are better than sunscreen
and completely ignore the “The Placid-Looking Bison want to kill you…” warning
signs, while listening to an endless litany of whining small children who have
been dragged to see yet another stinky rock belch sulphurous steam… just like Daddy after the Superbowl.
I would have loved to do some day hiking. I went prepared for copious day hiking… but a
combination of a severe allergy to lodgepole pine pollen that clogged my
sinuses rock solid and started the fastest sinus infection I’ve ever had in my
life… and not quite realizing an elevation of 8000+ ft. above sea level was in
fact… quite high for a native Illinoisan… hiking the backcountry became completely
impossible.
But the tales are true… it IS the Serengeti of the American
West. As a veteran of many years of
watching Marty Stouffer’s Wild America… I knew that there was still actual non-zoo
wildlife in the US. And last year’s
visit to Glacier National Park confirmed it.
We saw Mountain Goats… and Bighorn Sheep on the side of the mountain. But
Yellowstone was what we literary folks call fecund.
Life was everywhere… from primordial
soup living off of the excrement of the volcanic hot springs… to bison causing
traffic jams to rival downtown Chicago at rush hour. Squirrels of every size and color… ravens
trying to steal your lunch… and yes… I did see both black and grizzly bears…
AND wolves… what our guide called the “fanged trifecta” of viewable wildlife.
There were meadows there that should replace the definition
of the word in the dictionary. Long
rivers with looping meanders… and thick coverings of geese and water fowl. Vast thermal spring fed wetlands. Swans. Heurons.
Elk browsing willows along the shoreline. While rafting down the snake river… we
watched an adult osprey stoop in its flight and splash into the water… bringing
out a large, red, wiggling cutthroat trout… and then fly it in wide loops
around our head until it suffocated from the air pressure in its gills. We
watched a lucky coyote running off with something suspiciously weasel looking
in its mouth… and dozens of other examples of the food chain in action. It was
pure wilderness… and through all of my hacking and congestion… I looked on the
beauty of God’s creation and was filled with the appropriate combination of
fear and awe. There is a place on earth
where I am NOT the top of the food chain… the master of my landscape… and here
I am… standing inside the body of a living volcano… watching a predator through
a spotting scope that could scoop out my insides like they were made of
double-fudge mocha chip ice cream. That
would slurp my bowels like noodles…
And then I would turn around and watch someone in a tube top…
hanging out of the sun roof of their Lexus SUV… trying to take photos without
flashing the pronghorn… and the spell would break.
And that’s Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons. The beauty and majesty of nature… and while floating down the Snake River
watching the Grand Tetons emerge from beyond the canyon ridge… you can see
Sandra Bullock and Michael Eisner’s house… and part of Harrison Ford’s 800 acre
wildlife and aging Hollywood icon preserve… before going into Jackson for the
2pm shootout in front of the “Ripley’s Believe it Or Not” museum. It’s in danger of becoming the American-side
of the Niagara Falls in everything but scale.
The Wisconsin Dells of the great West…
So besides the souvenir sinus infection… the trip left me
rather sad. It’s not just the ecology of
the place that is fragile… not the balance of nature and man… mountain and
molten rock… but it makes me wonder what the actual purpose of vacationing in
the wilderness is? Why do we climb the
mountain in our crew-cab 4X4? For the 1% who strap on their daypack… wear
appropriate shoes… and hike into the backcountry… yes… they’re experiencing the
wilderness. They’re doing something that
several people die trying to do every year.
(Though usually from mishap and stupidity… and not actual dangers.) But for the rest of us… we’re viewing
wilderness from the safety of our cars… like Yellowstone is a giant nature
drive-thru… but we’re shouting into the clown’s mouth but will never get our
order. We will never see the Wild
America that Lewis and Clark saw when they viewed the vast herds of Bison on
the American Plains… eventually… even the Artic will be available on Google
Maps… and that’s what makes me sad… that we’re running out of wild places that
have never heard the footfall of man. Every
time some shaggy biologist in the Amazon announces the discovery of a new
species… I shudder. And not with
excitement… but at the continual narrowing of our world.
There are a contingent of Yellowstone freaks who are waiting
for the time when the Yellowstone volcano erupts… spewing ash and smoke into
the atmosphere on a catastrophic scale. There’s
a force under there said to be ten times of what we saw when Mount. St. Helen’s
erupted. The explosion would usher in a
new ice age… a volcanic winter… that will make all of those crazy Montana “preppers”
smile and count their cans of beans and boxes of shotgun shells against the
impending breakdown of society. Sometimes… Sometimes… I hope they’re right.
