Worst Kind of Tourists

(Apologies, again, for tardy posting. We have these past few days been off line, again. Here are a few days worth of musings.)

YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK, Wyoming -- We're stuck. But hopefully not for long. It has been a full day of driving through Yellowstone and now, almost out, with one more high pass to clear, we find the brake pedal going, disturbingly, all the way to the floor. Even more worrisome is the part where it doesn't do anything to actually stop the vehicle.

This started to happen, fortunately, just after we had come down from a steep mountain pass and not during.

But, like I said, hopefully this won't be a problem for very long. Even more so, we hope, it won't come back when we're driving along that aforementioned steep mountain pass still needed to be crossed.

I have spoken to two mechanics and have been given assurances. The first, a local mechanic, although on the other side of the twice-now-aforementioned pass, who apparently deals with this kind of thing a lot, told me that in all likelihood the break fluid had vaporized, which sounds bad, but he assured me, is not too big a deal. The trick he said, is to just let everything cool off for about an hour or so and and everything should be back to normal. I do not know this mechanic, however, and am only able to trust him so far with the lives of my wife and kids. I could live without me, but I could definitely not live without them.

So, I needed further assurances. Fortunately, Darrell, my aforementioned friend of a previous post who also happens to be a world-class mechanic who I do trust with the lives of my wife and kids, after a bit of testing and guided probing of the Heart of Gold, verified completely what I had been told.

So, we're waiting for things to cool off.

In the meantime I can tell you that Yellowstone is a complete dump. Trees and dirt and rocks everywhere, water spraying uncontrolled all over the place, animals getting in the way of me getting through the park. Plus these pesky mountains. Not only that, but I got yelled at. By the park ornithologist, or at least that's who he said he was, although in my opinion ornithologists aren't really to be trusted. Especially the ones who yell at me.

As it turns out I deserved it, though. In my defense, the 13-year-old girl who worked at the check-in at the campground we stayed at last night told me that you couldn't stop and park in front of the bald eagle's nest, which was high up in a tree not long after you got into the park, BUT you could park down the road a bit and walk over to it.

This is exactly what I did. It was early morning and we were among the first people into the park, the kids were just waking up, and it seemed a reasonable enough thing to do. I hiked up a bit, not all the way to it, but close enough to watch the mother eagle standing proudly in her nest looking things over in that way that eagles do from high atop trees. I took it all in, snapped a few pictures, and turned around to make my way back to the HOG.

That's right about the time when the ornithologist drove by and started yelling at me. Apparently, it was people like me that caused "the eagles to fail." I'm pretty sure those were the words he used, which I remember thinking was ironic because I had just read the day before that the bald eagles had just been taken off the endangered species list. I didn't say that of course, just continued to apologize profusely while he yelled at me some more and told me how I could be taken before the Yellowstone judge, be fined a lot of money and that there were millions of people who came through this park every year and I, surely, must be one of the very worst, etc, etc. I agreed and, for some reason, began hearing verses of Alice's Restaurant floating through my head, specifically the part about the police taking a bunch of "8x10 color glossy photos with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining how it was to be used as evidence against me." I didn't mention that either. I just kept apologizing and promising that I didn't know and that I would definitely never, ever do it again.

But that's not what I came here to tell you about.

I have felt like the worst kind of tourist here. And not for the reason I just mentioned. At least not mostly. Yellowstone National Park truly is, aside from being a dump, a national treasure. The outdoors have always been a place of worship for me, a place where I find it so much easier to connect with God, so I was not kidding when I described it earlier, even more seeing it, as a national cathedral.

In short, it is a place I could imagine spending a lot of time in. To try and drive through in a day has been like walking around Disney World, but not going on any of the rides -- it looks nice and all, but you're missing so much of the joy, so much of the point. And then, on one of the few moments I step toward a ride, Donald Duck yells at me and, of all things, tell me to get back in my car.

Yellowstone, clearly, is a place that you could spend days, weeks, even months and still not take it all in. This is the kind of place where I could really go camping. Just so we're clear, RVing is not camping. Yeah, they go park in places called campgrounds, it's still not camping. Anytime you literally bring the kitchen sink, it's not camping. Not my kind of camping, at any rate.

To me, camping is stuffing enough food and water for a few days to a few weeks into an unbearably heavy backpack and stumbling around the woods and mountains as far away from other people as possible and pitching tents and freezing in sleeping bags and lighting fires and smelling of smoke and getting dirty and eating meals that tastes all the more exquisite for having been carried around so and looking up at impossibly bright stars and saying things like "it just doesn't get any better than this." That's real camping. Not pressing a button and turning the couching into a bed and turning on the furnace when it gets a bit cold. But I digress.

Yellowstone is place where I could do some real camping. But alas, we have only enough time for the windshield tour.

We did, however, pay our obligatory respects to Old Faithful. Unexpectedly, it was every bit as awesome as our imaginations made it out to me. Right on cue, it burst forth, sending spray and steam high into the morning sky. Even Amelia, who has been hard to impress on this trip, gasped with delight. Noah was absolutely dumbfounded and after its several-minute-long eruption, asked innocently, "can we do that again?!"

My favorite moment, however, came from hearing the stories of others. Heading back to the RV, I spotted a pair cleaning the logcabin-style bathrooms near the entrance to Old Faithful's stage.

While Marley and the kids went to fix some breakfast, I cut a beeline for them. Bathroom cleaners have the best stories. Turns out John and Verna were husband and wife, both forest service employees, with as they admitted freely "the best jobs in the world." Both retirement age, they had been working in Yellowstone for 10 years. John estimated he'd seen Old Faithful do her thing no fewer than 3,500 times over those years.

"I always stop whatever I'm doing and watch. It's impossible for me not to," he said. Surprisingly, it's not so impossible for many of those 3 million visitors they see come through the park every year.

"A lot of people," said Verna, "see it go up and then run back to the parking lot and leave. You'd think after traveling this far they'd wait a few minutes and see the whole thing." As park custodians they see the very worst in the tourists, having to follow behind them to pick up their messes. "I still can't believe people would litter in place like this, but they do" said Verna shaking her head sadly, holding up the full bag of trash she'd already collected this morning as if to prove she wasn't making it up.

One of my favorite questions to ask people is "what's the craziest thing you've ever seen?" John and Verna both had some pretty funny stories, some of the most ridiculous involving people running out to Old Faithful to try and look down into the hole from which she erupts.

Invariably those people "get an all expense paid trip in the back of a squad car to go see the judge and get slapped with a $1000 fine," said John.

"Yeah," I said, sheepishly, "I've heard about that judge."

While our visit has been all too brief, Yellowstone has revealed many of her jewels to us. Whole herds of buffalo, lone riverside bison, distant bear, boiling mud, wandering deer and moose, amazing vistas, unforgettable terrain.

And brakes that, hopefully, now have fully healed.

And an eagle that I can only hope was not nearly as scarred by my proximity as I was by the ragings of an irate, if perfectly justified, ornithologist.