by James Perry
For those twenty minutes I became John Muir on the mountaintop, Henry David Thoreau in the Walden woods, Walt Whitman everywhere; singing a song of Yellowstone, of nature, of myself. I was gabbling like a madman until tears came to my eyes. I was having fun at last.
When the Volcano Blows
ALSTON Chase wrote a book called Playing God in Yellowstone in which he lambasted the Park Service for what he saw as their mismanagement of America’s crown jewel. He denounced them for promoting unwise development projects, for having exterminated the wolf, for trying to silence even their well-intentioned critics, and for failing to protect the Park's endangered species while allowing others to increase beyond the carrying capacity of the land.[3 ] What I found odd was that after he'd penned about 300 pages of his critique, the author then made a convincing case for the imminent destruction of Yellowstone by catastrophic volcanic eruption. A detail which made it difficult to care any more about the perceived shortcomings of Park administration. After all, why bother splitting hairs over wilderness management policy if the whole shebang is scheduled to go sky-high any day?
It's true that Yellowstone sits upon a massive plume of magma which drives the thermal features. It's also true that this region has erupted with frightful regularity in the past. In fact, geological studies of the Lamar River valley have revealed the remains of twenty-seven forests which have been buried by mud and ash in successive volcanic eruptions. And it's true that if the past is any indication we are due for one of the major eruptions which occur about every 600,000 to 700,000 years (the last one having taken place about 640,000 years ago). It's also true that these eruptions are mind-bogglingly powerful. Hank Heasler, the Park Geologist, has stated that the caldera-forming eruption in Yellowstone was "one of the 2 or 3 largest volcanic eruptions the world has ever known." It’s been suggested that such an eruption would cloud the skies of the world with ash for years, potentially ushering in a new Ice Age. Scientists are hard-pressed to convey the tremendous destructive force behind these eruptions, of which the Yellowstone region has endured at least three. I've seen brave attempts by geologists to put the eruptions into some kind of perspective: "The [first] Yellowstone eruption 2 million years ago may have been more than 8,000 times larger than the 1980 Mount St. Helens explosion" ... "Two hundred miles downwind from Mt. St. Helens, in the State of Washington, the amount of ash that has accumulated as a result of Mt. St. Helens' recent eruptions is three inches. The ash here [a comparable distance from the most recent Yellowstone caldera eruption] was sixty feet thick" ... "even spread over California, the volcanic material would be 20 feet deep" ... "more than enough to fill the Grand Canyon in Arizona" ... The three caldera eruptions were "the granddaddies of them all". None of which really manages to convey the basic idea that if Yellowstone blows, the world as we know it will end.
There is even a theory which links the emergence of hot spots to mass extinctions, including the Cretaceous Extinction which killed off the dinosaurs. So that instead of a meteor crashing into the planet from outer space, as one theory goes, the force that periodically wipes out most of life on Earth may come from within. Very Freudian.
A recent article in the L.A. Times referred to an underwater exploration of Yellowstone Lake which revealed a fantastic landscape of fevered geologic activity. Like Jacques Cousteau's visions of deep-sea gardens sprouting along the trans-Atlantic rift, the submersibles which photographed the lake bottom in Yellowstone brought back images of otherworldly beauty: thermal vents, a moonscape of craters, columns of silica rising like the spires of a gothic cathedral, and a mysterious bulge rising a hundred feet high and over two thousand feet across which seemed to suggest a resurgent volcanic dome. Although later Park Service reports tended to downplay the implications of the discovery and any attendant danger, the fact remains that Yellowstone Lake has seen considerable eruptive activity in the past. The entire West Thumb of the lake was created by a volcanic upheaval which occurred about 125,000 years ago, and nearby Duck Lake was formed by a hydrothermal explosion less than 12,000 years ago. Here, hidden beneath the placid waters of this pristine mountain lake, was smoldering evidence of the destructive forces which had cancelled out dozens of Yellowstones in the past.
But like residents of California who feel a strange pride for living in an active earthquake zone, where talk of the Big One can make daily life seem heroic and living through a temblor of any size reinforces the vanity that the gods favor us, Yellowstone employees live in deluded comfort as well, secure in our belief that the Volcano God will smile upon us for another season. And even if he doesn't, we're taking you with us.
Los Angeles
AS close as I feel to Yellowstone, so my brother feels about Los Angeles. The joke in the family is that he’s the city mouse and I’m the country mouse, but I would always enjoy driving out to see him after a season in the Park, exchanging my beloved natural landscapes for his beloved urban sprawl. Sadly, it didn't work both ways since he never bothered to visit me in the Park. He was, like most big brothers, dismissive of his younger sibling. The idea of "sitting around in the woods with nothing to do" simply didn't appeal to him the way a visit to the Big City appealed to me. When he thought of Yellowstone he equated it with Frontierland in Disneyland, minus the rides. LA was the real world, LA was where it was happening. But for me, it was La-La-Land; a thirty-five million person pile-up at the western frontier where our nation's destiny became less manifest and more hallucinatory before being swallowed up by the Pacific. If any place was real, it was Yellowstone.
Whenever I showed up in LA we would immediately make the rounds of our favorite hangouts: lunch at Barney's Beanery off Santa Monica, a browse through the tea-scented aisles of the Bodhi Tree bookstore on Melrose, a large bowl of miso ramen at Asahi Ramen in Little Tokyo West, and there was usually a gig at night for one of the bands he followed at the Troubadour or the Coconut Teaszer. Once, we drove out to Riverside to visit the old neighborhood where we’d passed several golden summers as kids. We found it, astonishingly, much as we remembered it. This was California after all, the land of impermanence, and we were expecting to find an area that had been overbuilt with strip malls and parking lots. Instead, our old stomping grounds were perfectly preserved, if in a bit of disrepair. No new houses had gone up, the field of stickers beyond the terminus of our dead-end road was still wild and overgrown, and the dirt path leading to Fran’s Variety Store was still being used by a new generation of tykes on bikes (although Fran’s had devolved into an evangelical mission). We even found the old tree fort, a warped platform within arm's reach that had seemed so inaccessible to a seven-year old. Except for the reduced scale of things in our adult eyes, it all seemed dreamily familiar. There were workmen tooling around our old house, which was empty, and they let us prowl around our childhood home remembering. We drove on to our old school, Edgemont Elementary, and stared at the empty schoolyard like a pair of ghosts. Suddenly we heard a sound from long ago; a simple, musical jingle. We turned and looked up the road to confirm what our ears had already recognized: the ice-cream man, in his little white truck, moving slowly down the street. It was too much. It was like a Twilight Zone episode and all we had to do was buy an Eskimo Pie from this man and bite into it to be magically transported back to 1967 and the sunny, uncomplicated days of bicycles, ant hills, and Tang. “We have to buy an ice-cream!” my brother said, sensing the opportunity. But neither of us moved, held fast perhaps by the silliness of the idea of two grown men running after an ice-cream truck. We stayed put and watched him turn the corner, his jingle fading away in the air, into the past.
Somewhere close by, smoke whorls were rising in the air from Rod Serling’s cigarette. His punctuated voice ending the narrative: “Two brothers. Both of them convinced that the worlds in which they live are substantial and real. What they will soon realize however, is that the real world has very little to do with either of them, because Yellowstone and Los Angeles are located at opposite ends...of the Twilight Zone.”
Savage Days
THE old order finally came crashing down in 1999. That was the summer when the last vestiges of the ossified managerial staff in the dining room crumbled to dust and the loonies took over the asylum. It all began when the Food & Beverage manager resigned under pressure from HQ because she failed to live up to corporate expectations, which had become more and more unrealistic with each passing season. Greed knows no bounds, and this last corporate lapdog was simply the poor unfortunate to be left without a seat when the covetous game of musical chairs came to an end. When she departed, most of her flunkies went with her, unable to survive without her sponsorship. It really did represent the end of an era. These were people who thought it was amusing to go on company booze-cruises sporting t-shirts that read, "Profits Before People." But, like Rome, the old order simply could not continue to produce these loyal centurions indefinitely, and the barbarians finally had their day.
When the F & B manager left, she was replaced with a pleasant young woman who probably would have been fine except for the fact that she was in the middle of a wrenching divorce that caused her to break down in tears in front of her staff. She threw in the towel after a few awkward weeks and was replaced by her assistant, who dismayed her superiors by accepting a job in the real world after just a few days. By this time the dining room was running itself, according to the rules of the inmates, so that when the fourth F & B manager arrived, no one noticed or cared.
By the end of the season we had a host who wore a pink feather boa around his neck and would use it to indicate tables to the guests with a dramatic flourish; there was the waitress who wore red satin pajamas for her breakfast shift and would pull a chair up to the fireplace, sipping coffee and nonchalantly pointing out the self-serve buffet to the guests; and who could forget the assistant dining room manager who had ceased to care and walked around the restaurant smoking and insulting the guests?
After having worked under the ancien regime with its fervor for keeping the staff in line, I marveled at how far the pendulum had swung - as if by some natural law - to the opposite extreme, and I was proud to count myself among the savages.
* * *
Concessionaire employees have tested the patience of their conservative minders since the Park's inception. Here is a quote from Brit Fontenot, writing for the quarterly, Yellowstone Science, in reference to the first sit-down strike in American history, which took place in Yellowstone in 1884:
The park's working class represented a culture ignored by most people - one that park promoters ... attempted to hide from view in their efforts to maintain the illusion of an untouched, unspoiled, natural wonderland. For park promoters, the notion of laboring in Yellowstone contradicted the very intent of the park; "for the benefit and enjoyment of the people."
Yellowstone employees have always lived this nameless, adumbral existence, and in the eyes of those who would sell the Park as a for-profit pleasuring ground, for good reason. Years ago there used to be a celebration called "Savage Days" - part parade, part drunken revel - in which Park employees would dress up in costumes and decorate their vehicles before driving slowly past groups of tourists; shaking them down for tips, shouting irreverent insults, and generally being an embarrassment to their employers and the Park Service. Something had to be done. So, in the 1950's, Savage Days was officially given the axe and replaced with "Christmas in August,” a more acceptable and low-key event based on the apocryphal story of a group of late nineteenth- or early twentieth-century tourists who were stranded at Old Faithful by a freak August blizzard and who decided to make the best of a bad situation by pretending it was Christmas. What better way to bring down a pagan holiday than with the sword of Christianity? Thus, Savage Days passed into history as the new myth took hold under the patronage of the crown.
But as the fall of the old regime showed, the barbarians still lurk just beyond the gates of Rome.
Part Five
Snowcoach Driver
I LANDED a snowcoach driving job in the winter of 1999-2000. I can’t think of a better way to ring in a new millennium. My days would begin at five o’clock in the morning when I stepped outside and the sub-zero cold would freeze my nose hair. Trudging through knee-deep snow to the garage I'd grab a broom and whisk the accumulated snow from my coach parked outside. Then I'd fire up the beast, always thankful to hear the engine spark and see the twin stacks at the rear of the coach shudder to life. Our snowcoaches resembled World War I-era tanks, though they'd been designed initially for civilian purposes, serving as postal vehicles and school buses for the harsh Canadian north. They ran on two tank-like tracks with skis up front for steering. Instead of a gun turret, there were hatches which the passengers could pop open for a panoramic view of the winter wonderland around them. Standing on the roof of the growling vehicle as the wind howled around me, I would crack the crust of ice from the metal surface with the handle of the broom and sweep it into the air where the wind would send it flying back into my face. Then I'd pull out my ice scraper and chip away at the hard film covering my windshield until I'd cleared a fist-sized hole to see through. By then the coach would have warmed up to maybe twenty degrees and I'd climb aboard. It was the kind of gritty job that I knew I'd be telling my kids about one day: You kids today have it easy. I remember when I had to kick bison out of my way as I walked to work through twenty-foot snowdrifts to fire up my 1970 Bombardier snowcoach in Yellowstone Park... I'd ease the gear shift back and the yellow behemoth would lurch forward, freeing itself from its resting place with a crunch of treads. After the #1 driver made sure that all the coaches had been properly cussed into service, we would then caravan to the Snowlodge and load luggage while the guests remained inside by the fire. We were like a merry chain-gang as we grabbed duffel bags, suitcases and cardboard boxes, pitching them up to the arms of the driver who stood on the roof of his coach and stowed the lot as best he could. When the luggage was secured under a heavy tarp we would turn our attention to tying down the skis, an operation that invariably found us cursing savagely at the rubber fasteners that had no tensility in the cold. At last we'd pull the final strap into place or make do with bungee cords. Then the guests would be called from the lobby and they would baby-step along the icy path to squeeze themselves into our coaches. Pumped up from our exertions and showing rosy cheeks we'd wipe our runny noses and greet our passengers with wide grins, inviting them to enjoy the rocky ride, comparing it to the days of stagecoach travel when anything could happen and just getting there was part of the adventure. Then one of us would grab the radio and give the word: "2905, this is 718. Tally-ho!"
My coach broke down twice that winter, which was par for the course. Ancient contraptions that they were, the 1960's and 70's-era Bombardiers were temperamental beasts. It was not at all unusual for one of them to throw a track or leave a trail of nuts and bolts on bumpy roads. Our mechanics were wizards of the quick fix. "That should hold for now," was the usual prognosis. "Just go easy on her." But telling us to go easy on our vehicles was like telling a boxer not to scuff his gloves. The roads, while freshly groomed and delightful to ply in the morning, were horrendous by afternoon. Thousands of snowmobiles would see to that. The smooth surface would be churned into kidney-pounding moguls and the passengers would be reduced to infantile whining. I once had a woman in my coach who was seven months pregnant threaten me with a lawsuit if she miscarried because of the jouncing her belly was being subjected to.[4] So it was unusual if Dispatch did not receive some SOS in the course of the day. If you were lucky these mishaps occurred close to home base, but they rarely did.
My first breakdown was uneventful. I was doing a tour of the Canyon area and stopped to gas up. When I got back in the coach, it refused to move. It just groaned like a stubborn beast of burden that's had enough for one day. There was a mechanic at the gas station, and with his help I pried up the floorboards and we looked at the jumble underneath. "What a piece of shit," he mumbled. He walked off and I had to call in one of our wiz
ards who rode the forty miles on a snowmobile with his tool kit in tow. The second time I ran into more serious trouble. On a south run to Flagg Ranch my coach started to vibrate more than usual. I slowed down and listened more carefully, then one of the passengers shouted, "Hey! We're on fire!" I looked back and saw the coach filling with smoke. I hit the brakes - which we're only supposed to use in an emergency because they're metal-on-metal brakes and raise a helluva stink when applied - and everyone dove out of the coach when it came to a stop in the middle of a lonely stretch of road. Smoke continued to pour out of the back and I noticed a long green liquid trail heading up the road from where we'd come. The engine block had cracked and I'd lost all my antifreeze. I took off my hat as the engine gave a final sigh and expired, resigning itself to the cold. It was only a couple of days from the end of the season, but my coach had given up the ghost. My passengers took it well; taking pictures of the smoldering vehicle and cracking Donner party jokes.
What really made the job something special were those early mornings when we got to dead-head from Old Faithful to West Yellowstone or Flagg Ranch. After starting the trip in darkness the sky would begin to lighten and reveal a stunning winterscape. Thermal features would have laid a heavy mist over the hills and a weak sun would turn them pastel colors. There were stretches of road that were lined with ghosts; trees that had been covered in frozen mist and looked as though they would shatter at the sound of a cough. In this lunar world it would be hard to imagine any living creature having survived the sub-zero night. And yet there were herds of bison, clustered together on bare patches of ground where thermal activity had melted the snow. They sat like tired old men, their great heads unmoving and beards covered in ice. Only the steam rising off their shaggy backs indicated that they were still alive. Sometimes I would stop the coach as I came to a clearing and turn off the engine. I'd raise the hatch and let the silence rush in on me. There would be a few thrilling moments like breathing underwater as I marveled at the beautiful and inhospitable world before me. Then the fear would come; the cold quickly penetrating my clothes and the silence becoming deathly. It would be with a real sense of humility that I held my breath before hitting the switch to - hopefully - fire up the engines once again.