Q. What’s the best part about farting in Yellowstone?
A. You can blame it on the geyser!
You can probably infer a few things from this joke we made up. First, Yellowstone smells like rotting eggs. Second, we’ve been together in car and tent enough now that bodily emissions are often at the forefront of our conversations. (I really have my grandfather to thank for this tendency, who nobly taught all the cousins to belch on command, and provided us with the “Vibrato Scale” with which we could reliably rate our flatulence. I don’t know whom John has to thank.) Third, we’ve started making up jokes, which is traditionally the province of truckers and traveling salesmen. I’m not sure what it says about us, exactly, except that we’ve spent a lot of time in the car and that our ability to distinguish between good jokes and farting jokes is on the decline. In case you’re not sure: That joke is hilarious.
Brinkman is doing just fine. We haven’t quite figured why he keeps getting out of balance, but it might have something to do with the fact that he’s 16 years old—an adolescent and an old man at the same time. He was in boyish spirits the other night, however, and managed to save us from being trapped in Yellowstone. The thrilling adventure follows.
The Thrilling Adventure (and scenic details for the adventure-skittish reader):
We set up camp in Shoshone National Forest, about 40 miles east of Yellowstone. The camp sites are quieter, emptier, and more scenic there – we were right on the Shoshone River, across from a sheer break of rock tumbling up out of view. We ate raspberry pancakes the following morning, and set out for the east entrance to the park, which we discover is under construction – hour-long waits up a steep, one-lane, dirt road in the nation’s busiest National Park. We muscle through, and emerge onto the east rim of the caldera. Yellowstone was a vague place in both our minds, full of bears and geysers and not much else. In fact—a fact neither of us realized—the park is an old volcano that simply collapsed. The caldera is formed by the collapsed basin, which was then filled in by immense lava flows, creating rolling hills and meadows in the midst of a huge lodgepole pine forest that burned in fires in 1988. In the middle of it all is the largest alpine lake in the world—stretching 480 feet down toward the heart of the mountain and averaging 40 degrees cold in its depths. In various little geyser basins, however, the volcano retches up its heat in the form of hotsprings, mudpots, fumaroles, and the big daddy geysers, whose microbes oxidize iron and sulfer to create chemical-looking spits of color in the desolate grounds (the heat kills almost everything else alive). It’s one of the most active geothermal areas in the world. The landscape is amazing in it’s variety and extremity.
The flip side is that it feels like one of those safari parks you find outside of struggling tourist towns: BearWorld, or Wild Walks, or I’m So Captive. The difference, in theory, is that wildlife really is wild in Yellowstone, but you almost wouldn’t know it. We thought we saw a bear, but it turned out to be a buffalo swimming across the river and walking into traffic, entirely unconcerned with the herd of metal beasts stopped in its wake (wildlife jams we called them, where the cars pile on top of each other to see the biggest animal they can). There’s something like 200 miles of road in Yellowstone, as well as gas stations, an Auto/RV repair shop, lodges and inns, campgrounds, general stores, souvenir shops, amphitheaters, and just immense numbers of people. We had the constant sensation of moving through it passively, despite the severity of the wilderness just off the road.
Anyway, then we thought we saw a wolf (it was a pronghorn). Then we thought we’d see Old Faithful.
At ten to six, we arrived to get a front row seat for the show on the giant platform built around the little geyser that could. By 6:40—no geothermal expulsion in sight—we realized we had to leave, and fast, to get out of the park by 8:00 when the east road was closing for overnight construction. We were 65 miles away, and at a speed limit of 45 mph, we were not at all assured of making it. To emphasize the real hazard this posed to us, understand that there was absolutely nowhere we could sleep in the park, and the nearest other exit would put us out about 250 miles from our tent and everything that could keep us warm for the night. We had to average almost 60mph up hills that Brinkman could only climb at 35mph, around windy park roads, contending with slower-moving RVs and wildlife jams. John turned to me and said, “Hon, are you prepared not to make it out of the park?” To which I replied, “Hell no. Drive.” And he did. A nail-biting hour and twenty minutes, the whole of it spent on the literal edge of our seats, forming motherload knots in our backs. Brinkman was in perfect form, roaring up the pass, shooting past RVs, gliding down hills well beyond his usual top speed with barely a shimmy. But at 7:58, one mile from the road closure, a police car was turned out in the road and we were crushed. We slowed down to plead with her to let us out anyway, and she said such glorious words we almost kissed her hands: “Hurry up.” We were the last ones out of the park, and missed the gate closure by about 1.5 minutes. We got out of the car and gave each other the hugest, most bringin-it-back high five the 21st century has ever seen.
Postscript: The next day, on a hike back in the park, we finally got to see Old Faithful blow it’s load from on top of a fire-stricken mountain. From four miles over and a half-mile up, it looked like a little kettle screaming. Yellowstone is a furious place, strangely subdued. Despite the fact that it was so trafficked and so packaged, it managed to surprise and delight us every time we caught a glimpse of it’s tantrums and fits of wilderness. Let's all go to Yellowstone.
You can probably infer a few things from this joke we made up. First, Yellowstone smells like rotting eggs. Second, we’ve been together in car and tent enough now that bodily emissions are often at the forefront of our conversations. (I really have my grandfather to thank for this tendency, who nobly taught all the cousins to belch on command, and provided us with the “Vibrato Scale” with which we could reliably rate our flatulence. I don’t know whom John has to thank.) Third, we’ve started making up jokes, which is traditionally the province of truckers and traveling salesmen. I’m not sure what it says about us, exactly, except that we’ve spent a lot of time in the car and that our ability to distinguish between good jokes and farting jokes is on the decline. In case you’re not sure: That joke is hilarious.
Brinkman is doing just fine. We haven’t quite figured why he keeps getting out of balance, but it might have something to do with the fact that he’s 16 years old—an adolescent and an old man at the same time. He was in boyish spirits the other night, however, and managed to save us from being trapped in Yellowstone. The thrilling adventure follows.
The Thrilling Adventure (and scenic details for the adventure-skittish reader):
We set up camp in Shoshone National Forest, about 40 miles east of Yellowstone. The camp sites are quieter, emptier, and more scenic there – we were right on the Shoshone River, across from a sheer break of rock tumbling up out of view. We ate raspberry pancakes the following morning, and set out for the east entrance to the park, which we discover is under construction – hour-long waits up a steep, one-lane, dirt road in the nation’s busiest National Park. We muscle through, and emerge onto the east rim of the caldera. Yellowstone was a vague place in both our minds, full of bears and geysers and not much else. In fact—a fact neither of us realized—the park is an old volcano that simply collapsed. The caldera is formed by the collapsed basin, which was then filled in by immense lava flows, creating rolling hills and meadows in the midst of a huge lodgepole pine forest that burned in fires in 1988. In the middle of it all is the largest alpine lake in the world—stretching 480 feet down toward the heart of the mountain and averaging 40 degrees cold in its depths. In various little geyser basins, however, the volcano retches up its heat in the form of hotsprings, mudpots, fumaroles, and the big daddy geysers, whose microbes oxidize iron and sulfer to create chemical-looking spits of color in the desolate grounds (the heat kills almost everything else alive). It’s one of the most active geothermal areas in the world. The landscape is amazing in it’s variety and extremity.
The flip side is that it feels like one of those safari parks you find outside of struggling tourist towns: BearWorld, or Wild Walks, or I’m So Captive. The difference, in theory, is that wildlife really is wild in Yellowstone, but you almost wouldn’t know it. We thought we saw a bear, but it turned out to be a buffalo swimming across the river and walking into traffic, entirely unconcerned with the herd of metal beasts stopped in its wake (wildlife jams we called them, where the cars pile on top of each other to see the biggest animal they can). There’s something like 200 miles of road in Yellowstone, as well as gas stations, an Auto/RV repair shop, lodges and inns, campgrounds, general stores, souvenir shops, amphitheaters, and just immense numbers of people. We had the constant sensation of moving through it passively, despite the severity of the wilderness just off the road.
Anyway, then we thought we saw a wolf (it was a pronghorn). Then we thought we’d see Old Faithful.
At ten to six, we arrived to get a front row seat for the show on the giant platform built around the little geyser that could. By 6:40—no geothermal expulsion in sight—we realized we had to leave, and fast, to get out of the park by 8:00 when the east road was closing for overnight construction. We were 65 miles away, and at a speed limit of 45 mph, we were not at all assured of making it. To emphasize the real hazard this posed to us, understand that there was absolutely nowhere we could sleep in the park, and the nearest other exit would put us out about 250 miles from our tent and everything that could keep us warm for the night. We had to average almost 60mph up hills that Brinkman could only climb at 35mph, around windy park roads, contending with slower-moving RVs and wildlife jams. John turned to me and said, “Hon, are you prepared not to make it out of the park?” To which I replied, “Hell no. Drive.” And he did. A nail-biting hour and twenty minutes, the whole of it spent on the literal edge of our seats, forming motherload knots in our backs. Brinkman was in perfect form, roaring up the pass, shooting past RVs, gliding down hills well beyond his usual top speed with barely a shimmy. But at 7:58, one mile from the road closure, a police car was turned out in the road and we were crushed. We slowed down to plead with her to let us out anyway, and she said such glorious words we almost kissed her hands: “Hurry up.” We were the last ones out of the park, and missed the gate closure by about 1.5 minutes. We got out of the car and gave each other the hugest, most bringin-it-back high five the 21st century has ever seen.
Postscript: The next day, on a hike back in the park, we finally got to see Old Faithful blow it’s load from on top of a fire-stricken mountain. From four miles over and a half-mile up, it looked like a little kettle screaming. Yellowstone is a furious place, strangely subdued. Despite the fact that it was so trafficked and so packaged, it managed to surprise and delight us every time we caught a glimpse of it’s tantrums and fits of wilderness. Let's all go to Yellowstone.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home