by Tim Cahill
What she couldn’t take was winter’s last blast. Nobody can. There may be two feet of new powder in the mountains, but they’ll have closed the ski hill for want of business. Something in the body’s internal clock makes us pack the Rossignols away, informs us that this is the season of resurrection, and suggests a naked romp through fields of blooming wildflowers. Mid-March ought to be spring, dammit, but in Montana that season is at least another month or two away—an eternity of cracked engine blocks, broken spirits, and the animal longing for warmth. Jimmy Buffett encapsulated the psychological malady in a single telling line: “This morning I shot six holes in my freezer. I think I’ve got cabin fever.”
Here’s a word of advice: When you start thinking about stomping your toaster, stay out of the Stockman. Better to face the enemy in the domain of her harshest fury. Think Nietzsche: If winter hasn’t killed you yet, another bitter month of it is only going to make you stronger.
Toward the shank end of the month, when cabin fever descends like a sickly sad syrup of regret, I like to go cross-country skiing in Yellowstone Park. Up at the eight-thousand-foot level, in the caldera of that vast and ancient volcano, there are only two seasons anyway, August and winter. Even in March, temperatures can drop to the forty-below mark. In dry cold like that, snow crystals refuse to clump up and form stars. The glittering crystalline “diamond dust” of Yellowstone is light and ephemeral, and does not fall but floats on currents of air, where it bends the light of the sun and forms boreal rainbows that reflect off the rolling surface of the snow below.
Plodding through these polar rainbows are the denizens of the park, more pitiful and bedraggled than any patron of the Longbranch. The elk, the buffalo, the mule deer and coyotes, the bighorn sheep all congregate in a few very specific winter ranges. During the summer, they have more than two million protected acres in which to roam, but as high-country snow begins to pile up belly high on an elk—when feed is buried under layers of ice and simple walking takes dangerous amounts of energy—the animals are driven down into the geyser basins and the relative warmth of the low northern fringe of the park. During a summer’s drive through these areas, a tourist is likely to see a dozen or more animals; the visitor in winter can expect to multiply that number by two hundred, by three hundred.
Along the geyser-fed stretches of the upper Firehole River, steam rises in purely expressionistic clouds, and great beasts—thousand-pound elk, fifteen-hundred-pound buffalo—emerge out of the fog. A skier gliding along the bank is presented with the sight of a bull elk in midstream, feeding on aquatic plants. Mule deer haunt the area around Old Faithful, where there is warmth but no feed. The geyser basins have been methodically picked over by winter-ravaged beasts, and herds of buffalo grunt over the few dandelions that bloom in February at the edge of thermal pools.
The winter range I know best is an hour’s drive from my house, via the north entrance road, just outside Gardiner, Montana. This is the only road in the park that remains open all winter, and it presents the motorist with problems not covered in basic driver’s-education classes. With plowed snow sometimes piled to the eight-foot level on either side of the road, it is disconcerting to round a bend and encounter some belligerent half-ton animal who does not want to climb back up over the snow or yield the right-of-way. In a confrontation between a small Japanese car and large American moose, bet on the moose every time. Best to back up fast, crimp the wheels, pull on the emergency brake, and let the momentum and the slick surface of the snow spin you around in a reverse bootlegger’s turn. The moose drops her head, and the ruff around her neck bristles like fur on a hissing cat. Hit the gas before she charges and—please God—don’t spin out.
Moose hazards, however, are no great hindrance to the intrepid. There are places to ski everywhere along the north road. My favorite is a great, open plain, the Lamar Valley. March weather rumbles into the valley in absurd abundance; in a single day, you may ski through pellets of stinging spring snow, a ground blizzard, a display of diamond dust, and yet finish out the day badly sunburned. Rolling clouds soar overhead, and broken shafts of sunlight fall in obtuse angles throughout the expanse of the valley. Several small thermal pools flank the river. Steam rises into the still air through the shafts of sun, so that gentle pastels color the snow; the land itself seems to float and sway.
Wintering along the banks of the Lamar River is a staggering concentration of extremely large animals. In March, when the high-country snow is as deep as it will get all year, when the animals have all finally come down, the Lamar Valley is Americas Serengeti Plain. Herds of elk move through the slanting shafts of light. They stand stolidly, starving in the glowing pastel steam. Buffalo, singly and in herds, feed by clearing away patches of snow with their massive heads. They glance up at the touring skiers—nothing to eat there—and return to their meal, the humped back muscles rolling in the effort it takes to work through the snow.
A thoughtful skier, who doesn’t want to kill or be killed, keeps 250 yards between himself and any of the animals. All of them—buffalo and elk, mule deer and antelope, even the bighorn sheep—are starving. Their instincts are dulled by the proximity of death, so that it is quite possible to touch them. This is foolish, even suicidal. An enraged buffalo can run through deep snow faster than a man can ski, and not so long ago a French photographer was gored to death by a park buffalo. Mostly, however, the buffalo and elk of March are docile, in the manner of all starving creatures. Approaching too close is an unforgivable brutality. Should the beasts run from you, they may be using the very calories that will sustain them until true spring. Touch an elk, kill an elk.
Hundreds of the animals alive on a mid-March day will not last until summer. They have reached the edge of their tolerance, and a late spring blizzard or a brutal cold snap will kill them in droves. The skier marks those who will not survive: a yearling elk, a venerable and grizzled buffalo. It is a drama of real life, real death, and no one can ski the valley without feeling the truth of it building like unbidden tears, and without somehow celebrating the brutality, and the strength, of life. It is a thought to take back to the Longbranch or the Stockman or the Mint: One more storm won’t kill me.
A Camp at the End of Time
The Missouri Breaks is a stretch of high prairie in northern Montana. Not too far from the town of Roy, which is difficult to find on most maps, an obscure road cuts into the heart of the Breaks: thirty-seven miles of rutted dirt, a morass of muddy potholes in the wet seasons, a treacherous iced-over washboard in the cold.
At its outer expanse, before the land begins its gradual run down to the Missouri River, the Breaks is a simple shortgrass prairie, a high, windblown, sage-littered flatland, seldom visited. Prairie dog colonies along the road look like little areas of atomic desolation. The grass there is cropped right down to dark earth, and at least one of the stout, burrowing rodents will be standing atop his mound, barking out a warning, his short, black-tipped tail vibrating rapidly.
As the road begins to slope down to the Missouri, there are small, stunted stands of ponderosa pine, and the land begins to fold in on itself, all the tree-lined drainages meandering endlessly down to the river. Mule deer and whitetail bed down in the tall grasses of the dry creek beds, and an occasional elk can be seen.
I am driving down the road in a four-wheel-drive pickup with my sometime racquetball partner, one Blasius Bauer. We have driven down out of the mountains where we live to this strange, broken flatland because Blasius thinks I ought to see the Breaks. From what I can gather, it is a land that speaks to him spiritually.
About halfway to the river, just where the expanse of sage (antelope country) gives way to the pines (deer habitat) there is a ramshackle, weatherbeaten settler’s cabin. Photographers win prizes taking shots of such abandoned cabins. They use telephoto lenses and frame the cabin in the lower third of the picture, with the sky stretching away forever above and the prairie rolling into infinity beyond, so that the impression you get is that the vastness of t
he land itself defeated the people who lived there.
“I have,” Blasius says, “a recurring dream about that cabin.” In his dream Blasius is on foot, inexplicably wandering the prairie, He comes upon the cabin and knows instinctively the woman who lives there and why he has come. But she is not there, and he can’t say the words he needs to speak: an explanation, an apology. The cabin is entirely empty except for hundreds of dolls scattered about—sitting against the walls, propped up on the bare wooden table—and they stare at him with cold, ice-blue marble eyes.
Some land has the power to do that, to snap the thread of linear thought so that the mind spins free.
It is late November, the last full weekend of deer-hunting season, but a sudden cold snap has hit the Breaks. It is nearly fifteen degrees below zero, and the deer are huddled in the hollows, staying out of the wind, so that the prairie seems entirely devoid of life. We pass a few hunters. They are cruising in four-wheel-drive vehicles much like ours, rifles on the rack in the back window, two or three men in the front seat. They wear blaze-orange vests and hats, and they stare out into the land with forlorn, hungry eyes. These are the unlucky ones, the late hunters, the patently unsuccessful.
We camp at the mouth of Soda Creek on a sloping black expanse of earth that forms the bank of the Missouri. The river is frozen solid all the way across, and it is partially covered with swirling patterns of wind-scattered snow. An occasional gust of wind whistles down Soda Creek Canyon and spills out onto the ice. It is a lonely, short-lived sound, resonant, empty, and cold. Blasius and I take turns trying to describe the sound, and the barehanded work of setting up the tent has left us chilled and has colored our imaginations to a purple pitch. “It is,” I say, “the sound of the last frozen god, blowing across the last empty beer bottle in the universe.”
We tromp along the bleak banks of the river, kicking among the rocks until we come to a series of mounds Blasius wants to show me. The rocks have been exposed by the rise and fall of the river, and one formation looks like a monstrous kangaroo: There are the same short forelegs, a heavy pair of hind legs, and a long, curved-back tail. The head is ovoid, longer than it is high, and about the size of a large watermelon. The entire rock formation is thirty feet long from tip of tail to end of snout.
Blasius thinks the formation is a fossilized dinosaur. I am not so sure, but he shows me three more nearby rock piles, all in the same formation. Blasius once dug a bone out of one of these piles. It looked like a section of spine, and he took it to the Rocky Mountain Museum in Bozeman, where they told him it was somewhere between 70 and 120 million years old, which would place it in the Cretaceous period of the Mesozoic era: the age of the last dinosaurs. “I can’t figure out why they all laid down to die together,” Blasius says.
I am walking off the pile, measuring the distance of forelegs from head, the length of the spine, and I am thinking, flesh eater. The herbivores, such as the brontosaurus, were great long-necked beasts set on four pillarlike legs; and though they weighed in excess of thirty tons, their heads weren’t much larger than ours. The carnivores—Tyrannosaurus, for example—were smaller and somewhat more agile. They carried their short forelegs close to the chest and must have walked with a bobbing, side-to-side motion, rather like chickens. The head was massive and shaped like the one outlined in rock at the bottom of the Breaks.
We kneel to clear some fine, powdery snow off the rocks, and the incongruity of clearing snow off the remains of a dinosaur snaps the linear thread. I am imagining a time-lapse film of the world, two or three frames every million years or so. There is a long, long run of bare, mud-brown hills and rolling sand dunes from pre-Cambrian times, and it is a world without life. Half a billion years ago we see the first marine invertebrates, and 100 millions years later the first plants invade the land, followed by lobe-finned fishes and amphibians. Vast jungles of fern cover the land, and fin-backed reptiles move through the coal forests in company with small, mammal-like reptiles.
Then, in the Triassic period of the Mesozoic, about 225 million years ago, the first dinosaurs burst upon the land, and they rule for 140 million years. The Missouri Breaks is a vast swamp, steaming, humid, choked with vegetation, rather like today’s Amazon basin. The largest animals ever to walk the earth dominate the swamp, and then, in a span of only 10 million years—sometime between 70 and 60 million years ago—they all lay down to die.
No one knows why. There may have been too much CO2 in the atmosphere or too little. Volcanic activity may have cooled the earth, or solar eruptions may have baked it. The animals may have become vastly overspecialized, or there may simply be a kind of racial life span that the dinosaurs outlived.
Pieces of the dinosaur, this creature of rock, crumble in my hands. Above, high cirrus clouds blow across a sun you could stare into without squinting. It is a feeble silver sun, without warmth, and its glow is that of a cold, imperfect gem. Sparse snow, fine as talc, drifts down out of glacial skies.
H. G. Wells wrote about such a world in The Time Machine. “So I traveled, stopping over and over again, in great strides of a thousand years or more, drawn on by the mystery of earth’s fate … then I stopped once more … and the red beach, save for its livid green liverworts and lichens, seemed lifeless. And now it was flecked with white. A bitter cold assailed me. Rare white flakes ever and again came eddying down … a certain indefinable apprehension still kept me in the saddle of the machine. But I saw nothing moving, in earth or sky … I fancied I saw some black object flopping about on this bank, but it became motionless as I looked at it, and I judged my eye had been deceived, and that the black object was merely a rock. The stars in the sky were intensely bright and seemed to me to twinkle very little.”
The banks of the Missouri were black where I stood, and I felt as if we had set up camp at the end of time. In a few billion years the sun will go nova, and it will fill the sky and blister the land. Then it will slowly die. If there are still men alive—if we haven’t left the dying planet, if we haven’t killed ourselves, if there is not too much CO2 in the atmosphere or too little, if there is no racial life span—then the last of us will lumber over the land, lumpish creatures bundled in layers against the cold. Some few hunters, the late and luckless ones, will walk the earth with hungry, hopeless eyes. Others of us may squat in the dirt, scrabbling among the rocks and bones, finding evidence of a warm, forgotten time.
The traces of our life here will lie cold and still, dreaming, like the brittle eyes of dolls in an abandoned cabin, and the last men will look to them for explanations, or apologies.
ALSO BY TIM CAHILL
“Cahill can be a lot of fun to hang out with.… He is
blessed with not only wit and style but feeling and compassion.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
JAGUARS RIPPED MY FLESH
Tim Cahill has scaled Mount Roraima in the Guiana highlands; dined on turtle lung at an aboriginal funeral in Australia; and harvested poisonous sea snakes in the Philippines. This classic collection of adventure travel writing is an exhilarating roller-coaster ride of a book.
Travel/Adventure/0-679-77079-8
PECKED TO DEATH BY DUCKS
From the wastes of Antarctica to the blazing oil fields of Kuwait, and from an evening of demonic possession in Bali to a session on Guatemala’s Throne of Terror, Pecked to Death by Ducks is a grand tour of the earth’s remote, exotic, and dismal places.
Travel/Adventure/0-679-74929-2
ROAD FEVER
Engine trouble in Patagonia. Sadistic troopers in Peru. Document hell in Colombia. These are just some of the perils that Cahill braved in the course of a 15,000-mile road trip from Tierra del Fuego to Prudhoe Bay in a record-breaking twenty and a half days.
Travel/Adventure/0-394-75837-4
A WOLVERINE IS EATING MY LEG
Fearless and hell-bent on destroying all obstacles in his path, Cahill takes us to places rarely seen and barely endured. Not only has he survived fantastic journeys through the Him
alayan rapids, the Grand Terror of Montana, and Dian Fossey’s forbidden zone, he dares us to follow him wherever danger and craziness lurk.
Travel/Adventure/0-679-72026-X
VINTAGE DEPARTURES
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