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Sport 39: 2011
Old Faithful
Old Faithful
Ten minutes into grizzly territory, adrenaline clears my sinuses. The tang of lodgepole resin tears into my brain. I see and hear my pulse. An undergrowth of wildflowers erupts: shooting stars, larkspurs, glacier lilies, phlox, flax. Light cuts in under the massed thunderheads and intensifies every hue. Thomas lollops ahead and warns the forest of our progress. I will his silence though I’m aware his noise keeps us safe.
‘Thomas,’ I call. ‘Wait. We’re going to get hailed on, I think.’
He waits for me wearing his pre-negotiation face, his eyebrows raised and the corners of his mouth pulled down. When I reach him I throw my arm around his waist. He moves away.
‘Too hot,’ he says. With his hands on his hips he bends an ache out of his back. ‘Should we turn around? Is that what you think?’
‘Yeah, I don’t know. That thunderstorm looks pretty huge.’
‘Wicked,’ he says, looking at the sky. Then he turns and walks deeper into the forest. His bear repellent, a made-up song, covers my failure to follow. He starts out half the height of the burnt trunks around me and is shorter than their green offspring when I start to fantasise about his disappearance (cliff, mountain man, earthquake). I hear distant thunder and start to walk backwards down the trail, watching Thomas grow smaller until finally he does disappear, but only because he has walked up a rise and down the other side.
Rain blurs the forest. The colours of the wildflowers run. Lightning whitewashes split seconds and thunder brings the scene-scored black of my closed eyes. I hate to run but sudden hailstones turn me into a giddy athlete and I race off down the trail. I make an involuntary sound—an excited, moosey bellow—and believe I hear an impossible echo. But it’s a sound with its own source. Muffled by hail and covered by thunder, the sound heads my way. It’s Thomas. He barrels down the trail, his mouth widened by whoops and yahoos. His four limbspage 209 churn. I stop and watch him come towards me and watch him whip past me. I step off the trail to wait out the storm beneath a tree with the keys to the wagoneer in my pack.
Last week we ground through the post-death processes in Bozeman: visits to the lawyer, cremation, the exchange of a father for a house, an old wagoneer and a little money. Thomas was stoked. He loved the car. He said it would be excellent for road trips and that a road trip was just what I needed to deal with my grief. The morning I announced I was ready to sort through closets and drawers, he asked me where I wanted to scatter Dad’s ashes and then ignored me for hours except to call out things like Is there a tent we can use? (Yes) and Why won’t this fucking printer work? (Beats me).
Today I drove us east first thing. The Bridgers stood purple in their boa of cloud, their backs to the morning. After the darkness of the Bozeman Pass we hit the sunrise, the pinked sagebrush and, on the county line, alpenglow on the high and distant Crazies.
Three miles out of Livingston and too late in the summer to catch it green, we entered the Paradise Valley. Between the Yellowstone’s clear grey flow and the Absarokas, still feeding that flow with their snowmelt, we rode River Road to the bridge over Mill Creek.
Dad never spoke of his childhood except the parts set on the four hundred acres of the Bar NV, the ranch where his mother’s parents ran sheep and cattle and he saw nine summers of rattlesnake bounties, river swimming, bedrolls on Emigrant Peak, and his mother’s joyful drinking. He might have seen a tenth summer there, but it was spring when his widowed grandmother decided neither her hips nor her only child were any good for carrying on the operation. She sold up in May and moved to Bozeman where she died that August.
Dad was shy and never asked if we could come onto the place, but every summer after I joined him in Montana we drove River Road half a dozen times as far as the Mill Creek bridge, where we’d look upstream at a slice of the Bar NV. We could see the garage where my great-grandfather shot himself in the head: the bronze logs of its body, its windows blinkered by white shutters with carved-out hearts that to me suggested the suit of cards more than love.
This morning I stood alone on the bridge with the boxed bag ofpage 210 Dad’s ashes between my hands. I wanted to note things for him: fescue and oatgrass sibilant in the wind, corridors of cottonwoods flashing their leaves, pieces of sky darting around on the backs and wings of mountain bluebirds, the steep, stony bank of Mill Creek, and the rush of melted snow I poured him into.
Wary of rattlesnakes, Thomas had said he would wait for me in the wagoneer. When I returned from this funeral I caught him listening to the D4 with his feet up on the dash, looking over his notes and itinerary. He sat up when I opened the door.
‘Right,’ he said. ‘You okay?’
I stared my hands, which I’d placed on the steering wheel. ‘Can you turn that off?’
He killed the stereo as he slid across the green vinyl of the bench seat. He moved in and draped an arm around me. He cupped and jostled my shoulder. ‘He was a great guy.’
‘He thought the same of you,’ I said to Thomas, and sat forward to escape his arm, to start the engine and his goddamned holiday in Yellowstone.
The hail diminishes to rain. The rain stops. I stand up and duck out from under pine boughs, careful not to disturb the water they hold even though I’m soaked. Half the sky is blue again when I reach the parking lot where I discover that Thomas has had a set of my keys cut. Our shared towel is sodden though this morning it was stiff as freeze-dried meat.
As he drives and I dry out, Thomas talks about the Yellowstone area’s human history. He fails to condense twelve thousand years into the distance between Mammoth and a gravel parking lot south of Canyon Junction, and he’s only up to Theodore Roosevelt when he turns off the engine. He leans forward with both arms over the steering wheel and his fingers dangling over the defrost vents and talks on into the depression years. Without the engine to blend away his voice I roll down the window to access other sounds. Mag? Mag? Mag? and the downward spiral of the veery’s song reach me through the chatter of a family unloading coolers from their RV. I mistake the gritty movement of some cyclists’ shoes for the plunge of water at the Lower Falls.
page 211Thomas has rushed the Twentieth Century; he’s onto the fires of ′88. I drove from West Yellowstone to the south entrance that summer, I could tell him. There was a boy in Grand Teton I wanted to visit. The forest on either side of the road was on fire and I was the last car they let through before closing the road for three infernal days. I was seventeen and utterly susceptible to the romance of driving through walls of flame to access love. I trace back in my head, looking for the point in my life with Thomas when I would have had the energy to tell him this story. I go all the way back to our first night, when I sat fully clothed on the end of his bed playing his records while he lay on his side curved like a C, his pillow halfway down the bed and his head upon it, watching me as we each weighed the risk of sleeping with our best friend.
‘And as fascinating as this parking lot is,’ says Thomas, suddenly finished with humans and their time in the region, ‘we are here to walk the canyon rim.’ He slips the keys out of the ignition and gets out of the car. Holding the door, poised to slam it, he looks back in at me because I am still sitting on the green vinyl. ‘Ya keen?’
While the green Yellowstone works to deepen the canyon, we walk a narrow trail of yellow earth that skims the long precipice. A crew cut of forest grows along the edge of the far rim. A few rows of pines cling to folds in the walls and around us there are pines, enough to smooth away with their windy whispering some of what Thomas talks about the entire way to Inspiration Point. Here, where amateur artists have set up decades of easels, I decide to shoot a whole roll of film, convinced my pictures of the canyon will develop as though handtinted to show imaginary colours. Long before we reached the Point, Thomas explained that these colours are the products of regional metamorphism acting on rhyolite.
‘Let me take one with you in it,’ I say. ‘For perspective.’
He runs his hand through his hair as he always does before I take his picture. Even if the shot is candid, his hand detects the presence of the camera and sets about styling. He positions himself to replace the landscape and he’s a decent substitute for it, with his dark hair standing in for the forest and the colours of the metamorphosed rhyolite present in his face and arms. He looks out across the canyonpage 212 and I take one picture. ‘Okay, thanks,’ I say, and take another when he looks at me just before he moves out of the shot.
I know how much he hates spending time at the end of a trail (at a museum café, a theatre while the audience applauds). He talks on, past where we are to where we are going, and I have seven exposures left when I put my camera back in my pack, shrug on the shoulder straps and gesture, after you.
We retrace the trail. My hair feels hot as metal and my shins look dustier than my boots. I discover as we turn down the steep, paved descent to the Brink of the Falls that I have been following his calves. Like the rest of him, these are formed exceptionally well and make me want to touch him. I walk a little faster, reach a hand towards his waist, and trip where a root has buckled the asphalt. I touch him with my forehead and left shoulder.
‘Watch it,’ he says, without looking back at me. ‘You okay?’
Tourists swarm around the Brink barrier, augured by the overweight kids and tracksuited videographers who puffed up past us on our way down. I believe in democracy and feel there is enough wilderness in the park to allow lazy people access to views like this one, but Thomas does not. As we wait our turn to marvel he mutters a treatise on unworthy park visitors into my ear. I don’t consider, as he does, a one-hour walk along the canyon rim to fit the criteria for human-powered exploration and blame him as I elbow my way through the crowd towards the damp metal that divides safety from danger. On the danger side of this barrier, the Yellowstone roars up to the brink and leaps. The emerald green water sprays up a rainbow as it shoots for the canyon several hundred feet below.
Thomas taps my arm, shows me his watch. ‘Time to go,’ he says.
‘Huh?’
‘They’ll give away our site if we don’t get there by five.’
‘It’s not even one-thirty.’
‘And we have a lot to do along the way.’
‘What, like grocery shopping? Like picking up the dry cleaning? Jesus, Thomas.’ I might only have wanted another thirty seconds at the falls had he not tried to rush me, but now I grip the railing and lean forward towards the spray. ‘I like it here. Can’t we sacrifice something else?’
page 213‘Like the Lake Hotel?’
Like my one addition to his list of sights. ‘Sure, yes, like the Lake Hotel.’
Thomas lowers his voice, aware as I am of the tourists nearest us, who slide their eyes in our direction. We are interfering with their awe. ‘What’s wrong?’
I stare at him to tell him his question is ridiculous and also to provide part of its answer. ‘Nothing at all. Ready when you are.’
We stop at a picnic ground at the head of the Hayden Valley, eat, drink, scan for pelicans. We climb to a cleared plateau two hundred feet shy of the top of Elephant Back Mountain, where we sit to absorb a view of Yellowstone Lake. We register at the Bridge Bay campground office with half an hour to spare and spread a ripple of disappointment through a queue of less organised park visitors, people waiting with their elbows poked out of rolled-down windows for news of no-shows. Thomas loads the firewood he bought from the attendant who issued our tent permit into the back of the wagoneer with a smug little smile.
We drive deep into the campground, on and on over its sandy track until we work our way to its far edge and join a circle of tent people. We sit in the wagoneer and look out across the site. It’s washed in the clean, plain light a rinsed atmosphere allows through. The engine ticks.
We have a taut tent and full stomachs when night reveals the stars and lets the gibbous moon glow. Crouched by the fire pit, Thomas over-engineers the kindling arrangement and talks (caldera lakes, magma, Iceland) through my attempts to interfere until I let myself give up and sit with my fingers laced between my knees, nodding and sometimes making a noise that could denote interest. The notion that there never was a time when I liked to listen to him drops away, but the feeling is like déjà vu. I remember something, but there’s the sense that I am remembering something that never happened.
Thomas lights a match and touches it to the six points of his newspaper hexagon. Pine needles curl and flare. Flames crawl up the struts of his kindling tipi until we stare, in remarkable silence, into a cone of firelight. Thomas says nothing when I lay on a couple ofpage 214 logs. Carefully, respectfully, I do this. They catch and the fire masks the stars and offers in their place a closer, cruder spectacle. We watch heat knit together across pieces of breathing wood. Coals draw in hot orange lines and exhale darkness.
Ours is one of twelve campfires in this clearing by the lake. In the distance we can hear RV people with their electrical appliances and boozy hilarity, but our ring of protective fires demands feeding and a quiet broken only by murmurs of bedtime.
I lie in the tent and my closed eyes see embers.
I wake up alone and wallow in the morning smell of canvas and remember how my parents sounded beyond the tent walls, talking and arguing and shuffling cards. What I can hear is the eruption of Thomas’s coffee pot. I roll onto my stomach to stretch out the faint soreness of a night spent on an inch of air above cold ground. Just as Thomas can hear me rustling, I can hear him meting out portions of coffee into the plastic mugs he found in Dad’s camping gear. It’s nice of him to think of me but I decide to feign sleep a while longer, to wait for his coffee to take effect and send him tootling off to the ablutions block. I’ll strike camp while he’s gone.
He wants to check the eruption times at the visitor centre but I notice the crowds coalescing in the viewing area and convince him they’re a good indicator of an imminent eruption. We join in the wait.
Thomas knows many facts about the plumbing in the Upper Geyser Basin. The woman beside me complains that no one picks up the animal poop around here. The woman beside Thomas critiques the latest pickings at an outlet store in Pocatello.
A jet of water spurts from the low silicate dome we’ve all encircled and diamond blobs slop to the ground. Another small jet, and then a hot column springs up against the morning. Exuberant water rains down. Banners of steam unfurl.
No one is quiet for the eruption, but it has transformed facts, criticisms and opinions into noisy joy. I photograph every part of the scene: the geyser, the spectators, Thomas, his face rendered sweet by the fulfilment of a childhood desire. Then the water collapses and the steam drifts away.
page 215Thomas stares at the stillness on the dome and feels in his pockets for the crinkle of his notes, which he finds and consults. He doesn’t share whatever information he finds there with me. He drops the hand holding the papers to his side and I feel a little sorry for him. ‘Old Faithful,’ he says, kind of ticking it off his list.
‘Yep.’ I touch his sleeve. ‘Come on. Let’s go walk around.’
My first time in the Upper Geyser Basin, I was ten years old and it was new to me. I made a lot of noise. Dad told me to relax and listen to the air, and stop reading the goddamned interpretive panels.
‘You’re not in a museum,’ he said. ‘You’re outside for pity’s sake.’
He claimed his own thoughts on a trail sounded like wind on a peak and the next week we climbed Sacajawea, the highest peak in the Bridger range, so he could show me what he meant. Up there was a whispered whistle so low it could have been imaginary. Moulting mountain goats shared the place with us, their pink, muscled shoulders and chests glossy in the high altitude sunlight. Their hooves clacked on the loose stones. I disappeared into the whistle, the gloss, the hooves, the stones.
I lead us around the Upper Geyser Basin. We cross the Firehole River twice, pass the sparkle and colour of geysers and pools without a single line of commentary from Thomas. Daisy Geyser splutters to life as we pass, and behind these steamy exhalations I hear a chorus of disappointment.
As we carry on towards the nearby Splendid Geyser, the thud of our boots on the boardwalk draws the automatic gaze of the three disappointed. They have to be a father and his sons; the boys will crease and thicken with age until they are indistinguishable from their dad and from each other. All three wear steel-rimmed glasses with lenses darkened by the sun, white T-shirts, and caps that advertise agricultural implements. Though standing, they seem settled in this spot. Three daypacks, surrounded by picnic gear and draped with doffed jackets, occupy a nearby seat. The father lifts a thermos cap to his mouth, blows across the surface of whatever it contains, and sips.
‘Beautiful day,’ he says, after swallowing.
Thomas nods. I say, ‘Sure is.’
page 216‘Another one. Me and the boys, this is our fourth time up here this summer already.’
‘Five, Dad,’ says the younger boy.
‘Five times, so it is. We just want to see this dang geyser erupt. Thought we stood a chance with yesterday’s storm front passing through. Storms indicate a drop in barometric pressure, you know, and that drop lowers the boiling point of the Daisy group’s plumbing system and that’s been known to send Splendid up two hundred feet into the air. But that Daisy going off’s a bad sign. She goes off every two hundred and forty minutes or so unless Splendid’s going to oblige. Still, last time we gave up a gal from Idaho had her patience rewarded at ten o’clock that night.’
‘Five times.’ I shake my head to show how impressed I am by their dedication. ‘Always here?’
The dad shrugs. ‘You got to be somewhere.’
He doesn’t say anything else, turns back to watch Splendid’s low, quiet dome.
Thomas looks relieved, like he thought this guy was never going to shut up.
We move to the railing and join in the now-silent vigil. I must be smiling, because when Thomas looks at me, he smiles back. We are damp with steam, at times almost hidden by it, and all around us the earth snorts like dragons.