Yellowstoned
by Jennifer Trudeau
Posted: March 1, 2007
Images © R. Kolakovich 2006
. . . the creator creates. Does he stoop, does
he speak, does he save, succor, prevail? Maybe. But he creates;
he creates everything and anything.
-Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
It is 4:00 a.m. For the past hour,
only the hallucinations have kept me on my toes. A horse bridled
with Christmas lights appears and canters alongside the car. I have
slowed to the speed of his gait; I consider his footing as we take
corners. I'm lulled by the steady jing jing jing of his
harness bells when he disappears from the side of the mountain.
Down, window. The air is cool and thin. I breathe deeply.
We come to a switchback curve; there's a clown in
it, a mean-looking clown with a nasty smile. He peeks through the
brush. When the road straightens I'm afraid to check the side- or
rearview mirrors in case I should see his white hands and bright
hair, in case he's there, tangled with Christmas lights, running
at the window.
In a hairpin turn I narrowly miss hitting the clown. Chicken wakes
as we sweep through a pass and leans out her window, marveling,
oblivious, admiring scent, season, Alpha Centauri. The sound of
her voice brings Sinead to her headrest. She snatches Sinead up
like a towel to wring and nibbles her underside, snorting. The mountain
looms, its shape told in great missing hunks of starred sky. The
sum effect of night and rock and Milky Way is severe, disruptive.
I cower behind the windshield.
The clown darts around.
In this way the four of us arrive at an abandoned gate: Welcome
to Yellowstone National Park. 15 MPH. Please Do Not Feed the Wildlife.
The road is about wide enough for a motorcycle and runs along the
World's Edge. We twist through the woods, come to a tight corner,
and splash promptly into a dense, bright fog, cool and swirling
and settling impenetrably until I can’t see the end of the
hood.
We roll to a stop. I turn off the headlights and, in a minute,
the motor. Sinead stands alertly on Chicken’s knee. I can
feel the fog move over us in the darkness, loamy and damp; far into
the trees something is dripping. It feels like we’ve breached
not a pocket of fog in a windless valley, but . . . some other kind
of pocket.
I doze. All the lights come on in my head: I find I have an aerial
view of the car; there, the clown stealthily approaches. Where’d
he come from anyway, like some haunted carousel version of Puck?
He wields a twisted black claw, a flaying tool, a shining machete.
His red shoes make no sound. He comes and comes, never quite reaching
my window, always just arriving at the rear bumper, the front bumper,
over and over, claw and machete and flensing sword aloft in an attitude
of menace, toothless red mouth open wide, with a fistful of strobing
lights. He is soundless but appears to laugh, silent and horrific,
eyes lucid and blue. He is malevolent, insane. He is alternately
left- and right-handed; his hair has begun to grow.
Hey, he says in Chicken's voice, right next to me, as his hair
spools out.
I start. The real Chicken prods my knee.
I felt a breeze, she says. Turn on the lights.
The dash clock says 4:48. I hit the lamps. The whiteness rolls;
I start the car and we inch forward, foot by foot. The fog ends
abruptly, and we are out on the clear side, back in the dark.
The forest here is hung with vines and grows right to the road.
From all sides comes a sensation of height, the soundless vault
of a cathedral. Soon the road widens, by inches, then a foot. I'm
accelerating to thirty miles an hour, energized, when a dark shape
bursts free of the ground and crashes through the trees into the
road. I yell, standing on the brake. In the redness of the taillights
I catch a glimpse of a bounding, long-legged shape. In a moment
the pound of hoof beats recedes. The quiet resettles. We gather
the blown strings of our hearts.
Yellowstone is clearly not to be trusted.
Chicken turns the dome light on to read from the map. After a few
minutes she says, We're about twenty-five miles from the hotel.
Twenty-five?
intersection right here pretty soon, no more than four miles, and
there we turn north, and from there it’s ten or twelve miles
to the next crossroad, then west there and follow the little curvy
road right to the hotel, like, another ten miles. See.
Twenty-five miles of driving inside the park? From the
gate?
I guess it's a big park.
How far have we come?
She hovers over the map then looks sheepishly, wanly, up at me.
About five.
The sixth is a preciously uneventful mile, and then the problem
is a rickety, white-slat bridge. More fog rolls around it, both
beneath and astride. We can't see across. The forest has been pulling
away from the road for a while; I'm suspicious of the feeling of
space left behind. This bridge really doesn't look safe, so we consider
our options: risk passage or turn back and take our chances with
the beasts, the mist, the lunatic Puck-thing and the World's Edge?
The bridge holds. It's a bit wider than it looked at first. Near
the middle when the ends are dark and buried in that curious switch-tail
fog, the faraway sound of a waterfall drifts in. We cross without
incident. Soon we find our first turn and take it with much shrill
fanfare; I holler through my window in especial effort to frighten
the wildlife.
Now, leg two. Twelve miles.
We make almost two.
What's that smell?
Unlike the brick-wall fog, the odor has crept up discreetly. I
realize I’ve been ignoring it for a while.
Smells like sulfur.
It's awful. In another mile even windows uprolled do no good; the
smell wafts through the vents. With the vents closed, the stench
penetrates glass, metal, skin and sense and bone, so putrid that
I bristle—offended not only that such a stink should be,
but that I should possess the biology to suffer it. This place is
a spectre like a daisy-haired hippie, tripping and oblivious, revealing
her painted breasts. The blood-mouthed clown materializes on the
hood of the car and spits at the windshield. I see he's now sporting
a few bad teeth. My brain curdles. I'm no match for him. The sky
whirls. I wonder if it’s possible to turn around on this skinny
little road, if I could survive the mountains again. Puck disappears
and reappears clinging to a tree, dry heaving, hair blowing in a
foul wind like something out of Maurice Sendak, or Dante.
* * *
We make it to the hotel, no memory of how. At 10:30 the next morning
we wake, insane but rested. We take turns rat-sitting and showering;
I take Sinead's picture, tickle her, kiss her, bite her feet and
her tail. Rat girl, rat girl! We shmoo into her pointed
face. She grabs a lip gently.
We pack the car and hit Yellowstone whooping. Up the road at a
rustic-looking general store I find Yellowstone: A Complete
Guide to Planning Your Stay. It has a better map with cartoon
waterfalls and geysers and prong-headed animals. I take our map
to the parking lot and give it a happy kick. Chicken shreds it.
While we hunch over the booklet comparing destinations, Sinead stands
on Chicken's shoulder chewing a potato chip.
Mammoth Hot Springs! That sounds good.
What about Paint Pots . . . oooh or Fire Basin
. . . or wow Circe's Boudoir . . .
Just drive, says Chicken.
The sky is alpine blue; everything shines. We roll down the windows
to let in green forest shadows. We drive a little but when we reach
a turnout so full of cars I'd just as soon pass it up, Chicken wants
a look.
The viewing platform—a railed, wooden deck—empties
as we approach. Everywhere are signs commanding Do Not Leave
the Trail. There’s a distant rumble. Once we’re
on the deck its opposite side comes into view, the wilderness falls
back, and I see.
Our platform juts hundreds of feet over a frothing river, over
a plunging stone canyon bristling with trees and violent angles
of rock. To the east an immense waterfall spills, thundering, in
slow motion, shrouded with mist and rainbows and thrown sun. The
platform vibrates. This is the Lower Falls of the Yellowstone River,
308 feet high; from a quarter of a mile away it is captivating,
it is stunning, and it is terrifying.
* * *
We investigate a patch of smoking ground. The mud
is strangely soft, slippery in the mud way, but different, too;
it's the mineral content of the soil and the water. The signs telling
us not to do what we’re doing are everywhere. We ignore them.
The floating steam is surreal, the day has grown chilly, and the
water is lovely and unusual and warm.
The thermal features at Yellowstone and the surrounding
area exist because molten rock lies so close to the surface—three
miles down. The park is on the site of a dormant hot spot volcano
with some 10,000 geothermal features—geysers and boiling paint
pots, hot springs and fumaroles, in a massive plumbing network over
the magma. This is Earth breathing, heating and expanding and blowing
and refilling from a fantastic system of chambers. It is the main
attraction at Yellowstone. The Colorado, Columbia, and Missouri
river systems originate here, and the hydrothermics span well outside
the boundaries of the park.
I'm standing in steaming water halfway to my knees. Danger!
signs surround me. The water seems hotter the further in I wade,
perhaps because it’s a bit deeper and the air is so chilly.
In the center of this shallow pool the clay begins to give strangely,
suddenly, without warning. I find I'm locked into it, five inches
and sinking; water rises around my knees. It's surprisingly hot.
So is the mud.
I pull at a leg. As I tug I drive the other in deeper. I plant
the right foot back in, pull at the hot left. Squish, the right's
stuck.
Here comes Chicken, looking irritated.
Get out of there.
I can't.
Slurp. There's a Danger! sign right in front
of me. I sure see it clearly now.
Get out. Give me your hand.
Don't come in here! But she's in and then she's got me, she jerks
like a bastard and I lurch, nearly falling over but freeing myself.
We splash out, squishing and sucking. On the grass I step carefully.
Some sourpuss lady gives us a disapproving glare. Chicken sticks
her tongue out.
Are you okay, jackass? She pokes my red calves.
Yeah.
I'm covered with mud. A guy with a big beard is watching us. Everything
all right? he calls.
We're okay, thanks.
Hot in there. He pets his beard.
Yeah. “Danger.” He laughs and waves. We climb
into the car. The disapproving lady is toeing the water. I hope
she goes wading. Sinead tastes the clay while I change. There's
even clay in my hair.
Troublemaker, says Chicken.
It's raining a little at Mammoth Hot Springs, a flowing limestone
place, weird and billowing and globular. We're attracted to the
ethereal formations, but stick to the path. It feels ghostly: acres
of brown ground, snap-dead trees, and fragile white bubbles, eerie,
a bit mournful. We take pictures. At the Artist's Paint Pots (supervised),
the sun comes out again. Mazes of wooden walkways weave among pits
of bright goo, pastel blues and pinks and every shade of white and
grey mud, glubbing. Their edges dry like eggshells.
By the end of the day we've seen the majestic Hayden valley, where
the Yellowstone River flows, the Biscuit Basin Loop Trail, Grand
Prismatic Spring, the rainbow-rimmed waters of Morning Glory Pool,
and all manner of flora and fauna. I've been charmed by pronghorn
antelope, lodgepole pine, Wyoming paintbrush, phlox, sedge, quaking
aspen, sub-alpine fir and my favorite, yellow monkey flower, which
thrives on hydrothermic channel runoff. We've been warned against
feeding the black bears (which may be brown or blonde), and against
surprising a grizzly (females with cubs and bears with carrion are
to be feared); we’ve been instructed on how to identify bear
scat. Year-round dangers at Yellowstone include hypothermia, giardiasis,
falling trees, blisters, lightning strike, scalding water, toxic
mushrooms, and the nefarious water hemlock plant, an extract of
which is thought to have killed Socrates. Water hemlock attacks
the nervous system and causes convulsions and a bright green frothing
from the mouth, nostrils, and sometimes eyes and ears, which may
continue long after death.
My God, what a place.
Here is Creation authentic, effortless with majesty, swallowing
the efforts of men whole: rainbow-rimmed springs and pools and lank
coyotes and bald eagles and 308-foot waterfall and a ghost town
made of stone and paint pots and unearthly mists and even the immeasurable
stink, to which we’ve contributed guardrails and boardwalks
and outhouses. Fine example I am, anyway, stomping around in a hot
spring like I owned the joint. This is holy ground. Its dignity
ought not be subdued like a predator in a circus outfit.
* * *
Twilight. We're spent and hungry. Last stop: Old Faithful. Old
Faithful has blown her lid about every 94 minutes. We wait for the
next blast with a crowd of about two hundred. When the geyser spouts,
its water and wind smell dark and clean and deep, like the earth
they've been running through.
The burst lasts five minutes. The mist that flies during Old Faithful's
eruption is cool. I inhale deeply, trying to catch particles of
the blast from the air, lodge a few in my lungs to metastasize microscopic
spouts that will splash the insides of my cells.
The tower of water weakens, drops, finally ceases. Immediately
the crowd turns and moves toward the parking lot. A silence follows;
Old Faithful has a voice.
Behind us Creation speaks for Itself, says anything goes,
seeps heat and blue mud and yellow monkey flowers. Yellowstone marks
a site of rivering magma, the viscous, glugging pulse of rock. Here’s
a patch of land upon a lake of fire, cooling and sprouting, with
heat creatures and weird fever, inveigling by stink and fog and
motley hocus.
Chicken and I sit, watching where the eruption was. In a few minutes
we’re the only ones left.
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