All In One Boat

Well! Imagine my surprise, after four days of trying and failing I just got an internet connection from Southern Alberta, Canada — the little town of Waterton to be precise, overlooking Upper Waterton Lake to the south. The United States is green and unguarded at the far end.

We are in the Prince of Wales grand hotel, recovering from a 5 hour hike on four hour legs yesterday.

Much to talk about but I’ll leave that for more time and a sturdier connection.

The Fourth of July Rodeo in Jackson, Wyoming begins with John Wayne’s slow spoken rendition of “You Ask Me Why I Love Her,” over the violins and swelling chorus of “America The Beautiful.” Then the girls on horseback come out –the Rodeo Royalty– each with a great flag. The Stars and Stripes is first, on a stunning horse with a stunning rider — around the ring several times. Then the Wyoming Bear Flag and flags of sponsors, whipping in the horse-run wind. The Star Spangled Banner is sung, a capella, to the usual effect of heightened emotion and grimaces at mis-hit notes in the nearly unsingable tune. And then the big bulls bang out of the chute with reed thin men barely aboard, some of them just out of high school.

A Rodeo isn’t something you want to see again and again if you’re not from the country. It’s hard to get the fine points of riding a 1,200 pound testosterone pumped animal with a sharp object strapped into soft parts goading him to a fury. Some of the riders stay on 8 seconds and bail, others barely make it past the gate. The eight second horn sounding to them, I suppose, like a big bronx cheer. The announcer always asks for a round of applause, small compensation for tough guy ignominy. Clearly some have an easier ride, the bull lashing and kicking in a relatively straight line, while others execute tight circles whipping their hindquarters in impossible projections of mass, a quarter ton landing and a quarter ton rising simultaneously. I suppose it’s like championship golf: not all bulls are equally ferocious but over a season the best rider will have the best total rides.

The men’s names are all Cody and Wyatt, Hugh and Tyler. I don’t know if they are rodeo names or everyday names. Lots of these cowboys come from rodeo families –”His daddy rode the bulls for fifteen years. His mama took top honors in barrel riding in ‘82″ — so perhaps they are named, six months before birth, with aspirational names of the mythical west. The bulls have names too: Freak on a Leash, Dr. Feelgood, Swamp Rat. Their county of origin is announced with special inflection, “Abilene! Texas!”, “Right here! in Jackson!, Wyoming!”

Following the bulls comes team calf-roping, a roper at the head and another trying to get a loop beneath both lifted feet of the skittering calf. Time counts. Twelve seconds is announced. A whoop goes up from the crowd. The next team misses the head; the crowd groans. A woman head-roper gets her calf and her partner gets one hind leg. Good work. The announcer goes on, streaming information about the riders, their cowboy heritage, their string of ribbons and broken bones together with nudges and reminders to patronize the sponsors. Frank Carmody’s head looks like it’s about to snap off while we hear about “the best fly fishing in the great mountain west at a ranch you won’t be sorry to spend a week at!”

…to be continued…

The cotton woods are in full shed these weeks along the Snake river riffling through Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Some breezy hours it looks like light snowfall over the dried prairie grass of mid-summer. Immense stretches of stone and weed along the river dikes look like the white grizzle of an old man’s cheek. “Unusual,” say the old-timers. “Usually this lasts for a week or so. It’s been going on for weeks now.” Mosquitoes fly, not in the horse-killing swarms of decades ago, hardly worth noticing until the painful welt rises.

From the trailhead to Death Canyon the path rises warmly through spruce and pine with the promise of a lofty view of Phelps Lake. It’s a good afternoon for walking and catching up with family matters, come from across the continent. Thirty minutes and breathing hard we hear a woman’s voice: “There’s a bear!” We stop and scan. There, ten feet ahead and four feet off the trail is a golden brown mat of hair. The head is the end closest to the trail and is buried in brush, pushing and rooting, like a dog frantic after a buried bone. “Thanks” we call and begin to back away, the direction we came from.

“Don’t leave us!” she calls and we realize that her first call was not simply informational. They are on the far side of the bear and afraid to walk the trail home, four feet from its nose. We stop and consider. The bear — still rooting after showing its face once — is too big to be a cub and too small to be full grown. A yearling perhaps. It looks like a brown bear. We scan 360 degrees for a mother. She is the one to fear, not the one before us. We humans talk in loud voices across the distance, hoping that will be enough to send it on its way. Lunch overcomes though. It pays no attention to us.

We consider what to do. We consider again the make and model of this bear. There is an old mountain joke about prepared hikers carrying little bells and small canisters of pepper spray to ward off bears. Being well prepared they will examine the scat that appears on the ground. Brown or black bear scat will have remnants of berries and grubs. Grizzly scat will have remnants of little bells and small canisters of pepper spray.

I find a stout, four foot pointed branch and heft it. It could put an eye out, properly thrust. My brother finds a similar stake. We straddle the trail and grasp our interior hands, lifting them above our heads. We extend our exterior arms with the stakes gripped tightly, making as big and imposing a form as we can. We growl. We growl loudly.

The bear lifts its head and stares, startled and making decisions. The moment of truth has arrived.

We growl again and take a step forward.

The bear turns its head. The body follows, away from the trail. We growl again.

It pauses after ten yards and looks back. Emboldened, we growl several times, waving our sticks. The bear disappears in the thick underbrush.

We drop out sticks and unlink hands. “Come on!” I shout to the trapped hikers. They are still uncertain. We are anxious to leave. Our duty to strangers seems to be satisfied. “Let’s go,” I yell. “It’s gone!” “Are you sure?” “We’re going!” They come pell-mell down the trail and join us. “Thank you! We didn’t know what to do.” We take the next fifty yards in about as many steps and stop to introduce ourselves. “Brown bear,” we think. “Ha ha.”

Next time we’ll carry bells and pepper spray, maybe a klaxon, a hand powered air-raid siren….

We are feeling very divided today, crossing the Continental Divide three times in less than an hour — getting to sample western and eastern life-styles while on top of the world.

The road from Chico, Wyoming (see earlier post) south through Yellowstone Park is not as throttled with bear and moose watchers as we’d been led to fear. At least three regular travelers of the road told us to add several hours to our expectations and and extra dose of temper dampener. We avoid the big thronging points at the Northwest entrance and mid-way at Old Faithful and stop where there is no one, along meadows, lakes, waterfalls, hillsides with 19 year old lodgepole pine growth, repopulating the burned out wastes of the great 1988 firestorms. The extent of the furnace is stunning to see. Sky reaching bare gray trunks are everywhere but now the floor from which they rise is green with new growth, not sere and blackened ash.

We watch a downy woodpecker make his meal from delectables found in a couple of the old trees. Wild robins are everywhere, oranger than their manicured-lawn cousins, an artifact of diet perhaps. Cliff swallows do their roller coaster feeding loops along the Gibbon and Yellowstone rivers. Enormous ravens struggle awkwardly to flight, then land to preen and glisten in the mild warmth at 7,000 feet above the sea.

Walking in Lewis lake up to our shins we see white crowned sparrows feeding at the pebbled shore. The afternoon breeze is stirring the surface and breaking the mirror of the far hills. We hope for an osprey or a bald eagle but are not rewarded by such smaller glories and are content with the day entire.

The road exits Yellowstone Park and immediately enters Grand Teton Park and soon enough the greatest wonder of the world, the jagged teeth of the Tetons appear, taking a bite of the sky. Jackson Lake spreads blue and wonderous along the base, the liquid form of the great glaciers that once cloaked the peaks. From 100,000 years to 10,000 years ago the spires lifted above a sea of white, gouging, pulverizing ice carving the stone beneath, creating the great ribbed forms we see today.

Many years ago these peaks were the first experience of nature that lifted the heart of a 12 year old boy out the everyday world of bicycles, homework and baseball into the mysteries of the universe. Like staring into the black night of stars and trying to imagine beyond, and beyond, and beyond and…. The thrill is not gone.

Coming down the slope from the Bozeman pass east to Livingston, Montana, we look around, imagining. Once a shallow, wide sea lay over the lands at these longitudes and latitudes, splitting what would millenia later become the North American continent. The shore line rose in boggy, peaty marshes. Sand and silt came drifting down from the mountains to the west and built into enormous block of sandstone, pressing pressing down, converting biology into coal. The coke ovens of the late 1890s and early 20th century are scattered in ruins over those fields, like abandoned ships collapsed on the ocean bottom.

It’s a fine way to start a vacation. Out of the airplane and a quick visit back 70 million years in time.

We turn and follow south on Montana 89 towards Yellowstone, Wyoming and stop for the night at Chico Hot Springs, 20 miles north of Gardiner. Chico, like hot springs all over the area, south to Old Faithful, are fed by furnaces below, but close to the surface in one of the most thermically active zones in the world. A blast that could send ash and death as far south as Mexico could happen any moment, as it did 640,000 years ago. But we loaf along, with others, breathing in the mountain air and watching the knuckles of the western mountains glow golden in the the sun-set sky, then fade to gray.

A band called Twang, cowboy hats astride gray heads, is serving up goblets of sound in the Chico Saloon. We dance every dance, getting more fluid and daring as the beer works its spell and the couple sitting next to us urges us on by example: a sort of two-stepping jitterbug with the occasional three step thrown in for show. The floor is dusted with corn-meal and we feel Fred and Ginger deep in our feet. The tenor knows every song from Frankie Lane to Johnny Cash and we mostly do, too.

Coming back up the hill to make love in an old red, refurbished caboose, raised on the rails still beneath it wheels, dreaming as it rocks with us, of hauling coal and gold on the Northern Pacific Line. The curtained windows, four along the southern side, stir slightly as the mountain cool displaces day time’s heat.

Sitting outside on the attached iron porch in the morning, looking northeast across a high green valley lifting into gently, millennially eroded hills, also green. Tree swallows flashing their white bellies, turning and flashing iridescent blues and greens. A house finch going on endlessly in its pink tinged burble about the pleasures awaiting his lady fair. A short eared owl swoops by, annoyed by the crunching of hiker’s feet up the fire road.

It’s good to be away and being away to enter into otherness and elseness. Strange but still familiar, reminding us we are much more than we think we are.