A Voyage of Discovery: Betsy and Bubba on the Road

Our season has been beautiful but dry and warm, even at this elevation. At lower elevations, in and outside of the park, there have been fires: to our north, west, and south. Many days on my weekends, as I was driving north to see Ms. Maybelline in Gardiner, the air was thick with a smoky haze, and I would find myself with a constant dry tickle in my throat. One of the fires, known as the Derby Fire, erupted near Absorkee, MT , several weeks ago. It has now burned more than three hundred square miles, and has destroyed homes, rangeland, livestock, and forests. It even caused a closure of the Interstate from Livingston to Columbus a few weeks ago because of the thick smoke. Two fires are burning in the Paradise Valley, not seeming so much like Paradise these days. My friends, the Doolittles, are wending their way west from Portsmouth RI to their new home in Pray, MT, and will turn into their lovely valley now full of smoke and haze on their arrival. Fire is so much a fact of life here that people seem relatively unfazed by their occurrence, except when evacuations are called for and homes are lost (something we’ve seen much of in recent weeks). At least with a hurricane, I have some sense of what to expect. I find the fires a frightening unknown.

Even with these warm dry days, we’ve had frosts nearly every night for a month or more, beginning during Maggie’s visit. And, as the days shorten and the air is colder, a young man’s fancy, in the bison and elk world, turns to lust. It all began in early August with the rut of the bison bulls. As Maggie and I emerged from the woods on our hike out to Storm Point, she was wondering about what sounded for all the world like motorcycles revving (and, a few weeks after the gathering at Sturgis, we did indeed have a lot of them in the park!) Instead, we emerged from the woods onto the verge of a meadow chockablock full of bison. The bulls have a unique snort, takes on a timbre and resonance unlike anything I’ve ever heard!They spend their days separating the cows from the calves, or trying to, intent upon bending them to their own desires and needs. Not all of the cows are prepared to be quite so malleable, so there’s a whole lotta snortin’ going on. For the past five weeks, a lot of that activity has taken place in the middle of the road, any road, utterly without regard for the line of cars approaching in each direction. We’ve all heard the stories of cars being charged and gored, and some of the photos have been great; I’ve been trying to picture the face of the insurance adjuster reviewing these pictures in preparing his documentation for a customer’s claim!

As the weeks have gone by, some of the bison bulls have returned to their torpid cranky selves, and are currently drifting back across the central plateau to the west side of the park; a drive through will usually mean an encounter with a lonely bull strolling up the street alone. The cow and calf herds are still hanging in our area, but some of the big boys are still engaged with them. This morning, Bubba and I were walking back from throwing a load of wash in the machine. Bubba was in one of his rare off-leash moments, as I’d left the leash in Andra’s car in Bozeman and was trusting to his voice recall–not a reliable tool. We came into my campsite through the trees and there was a small herd in residence around the car, including a bull busily trying to separate out his main squeeze for the day. We had a few minutes of watching them mill around the camper and the car; the young’uns watched us with dull-eyed puzzlement while the bull continued with his business at hand.

Our nights are punctuated by the sound of the bull elk in their rut. It’s an eerie call, and frequently triggers the calling of the coyotes. As I drove out of the park last week, I saw a bull elk standing alone in a sunlit sage brush meadow, bugling his dominance and lustfullness to the neighborhood. I couldn’t stop there to get a photo, and thought the picture I would have taken would never have done justice to my picture of that powerful animal, with a gravity-defying spread of antlers, calling through that sunlit afternoon.

The harlequin ducks are back on LeHardy Rapids; I watched 9 the other afternoon preening themselves on the rocks in the middle of the Yellowstone River.

And last night was our first real snowfall. Just a dusting here at Lake, enough to ice the roads and bring out a spirit of congeniality on the part of many of the guests gathered in the lobby. But the Beartooth Pass was closed yesterday, Dunraven Pass, last night, and heavy snows in the Tetons all day. Preceded by rain, the snows have done a great job knocking back the fires, although they still require monitoring. The concern of the local folks is now erosion: with all of their ground cover and forest burned, there is little to hold the soil this winter.

There’s been a long hiatus in my writing. I had a stinking cold for about a month, couldn’t shake it off, and it was compounded by the smoke in the air; it taxed my ability to stay awake, before work on my late days and after work on my early ones. So here I am back.

I had a lovely visit from Maggie during the first week of August. I found that I was trying to cram into plans for the week all of the things I love about this place-that is, the bigger place, not just Yellowstone, but the feel of these mountains, the look of the sky and the air, the sense of the water so different from the ocean that’s been a part of my life so long. I had her visit programmed to the minute, and had to tell her, on her arrival, to call off the dogs when I was getting carried away with the itinerary.

She arrived at the hotel while I was still at work. When my shift ended, we repaired to Storm Point, one of my favorite short hikes in the area. And we drove there in Ruby, her wonderful enchanted convertible that appeared at the end of Neil Coffey’s magic wand. Top down, cruising through Yellowstone–what could be better!

And what a pleasure to take my oldest (in length of friendship, not age) friend to one of my favorite places. She got it immediately, was, I think, pretty taken with the serenity, the beauty, and the scale of these landscapes that puts precisely into perspective how important we are in this universe. We took advantage of passersby on the trail to document a moment in the lives of two Rhode Islanders on the lam.

We drove to Cody, spending the night at a pretty desolate KOA Kampground in a Kabin, I just love the alliteration! And, much to my delight, Maggie got herself some cowboy boots, a harbinger of a return trip. Couldn’t get her on a horse…yet, but she’s ready with the boots. We spent the next day driving up the Chief Joseph Scenic Highway, one of the most beautiful drives I’ve discovered out here, with stunning vistas across valleys thousands of feet below, views of summer range cabins tucked into little valleys high in the mountains, little tarns surrounded by rocks and pines. We came into the northeast corner of Yellowstone, and I treated Maggie to the amusement of watching me try to fish at Trout Lake. Trout Lake was once a hatchery for the Park Service, and contains an interesting hybrid they call a cutbow informally_ a crossing of native cutthroat and rainbow trout. Of course, the only evidence of them I saw was a ring from one surfacing a distance from us. I’m sure if I ever hook a fish, I’ll be so overwhelmed that I’ll simply toss the rod away. But I love the process, and am trying to find the rhythm of the cast (so far I’m not even close!)

We spent a night in one of the little “Roughrider” cabins at Roosevelt Lodge. The Lodge is, to my taste, way more inviting than the somewhat grand but soulless Lake Yellowstone Hotel. The lodge is intimate, rustic and warm. The cabin was tiny, and heated with a little wood stove. We headed out for the Old West Cookout: a trip by wagon to Pleasant Valley, which housed a hotel back in the old days, as a stopover for folks who’d gotten of the train in Gardiner and were headed to the mines near Cooke City. The hotel burned nearly a century ago, and two pavilions, one for cooking, and one for eating were our home for the evening. It rained - that seems to be the weather each and every time I’ve been out there– but that scarcely dampened our ethusiasm for a good evening, with entertainment by Cowboy Bob, until it looked as if he could get electrocuted by his mic! Bubba had to hang out in the camper while we had a night out, poor boy! But he loved some new blood, and was well behaved during Maggie’s entire visit.

We spent a lazy Saturday afternoon on the Yellowstone, on a three hour float trip, joined by Andra Spurr and her friend, Mary. Just enough thrills in the rapids for a bunch of middle-aged ladies. Andra unfortunately became ill, but Maggie and I spent a night in her cottage, and I drove Maggie past my new winter home. We headed down the Gallatin Valley, and returned to Yellowstone, for the mandatory trip to Old Faithful. We hiked up to Observation Point and watched the geyser erupt with a handful of families, as opposed to sitting on the boardwalk around Old Faithful with 3000 of our new best friends. The power and majesty of these geysers is undermined when you’re sitting in the throng; our vantage point really emphasized the power of the scene.

Another night at my campsite, followed by a trip to Jackson, where I sent Maggie off to pick up her daughter, Kate, at the airport in Salt Lake for some more western touring and their trip back to Little Rhody. It was wonderful having my best friend here, and wonderful to enjoy that friendship, but it has made the following weeks a little hard. Much as I love this place, I really miss the being a part of a community, having those friendshis that touch our hearts and connect with us so powerfully. I’m not done with my western adventure by any means, and may never be, but need to feel connected to the place I live, not merely in that sense of a connection with place that touches my heart so profoundly here, but also, and even more so, with people who are, or will become, important to my life.