‘For it is my opinion that we enclose and celebrate the freaks of our
nation and our civilization. Yellowstone National Park is no more
representative of America than is Disneyland.’
John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley
Uranium. Steinbeck was wrong. A halo only needs to drop a few inches to become a noose. Yellowstone, the authentic, would become Disneyland. And Disneyland would become America. And America would become a theatre of manufactured experiences, a virtual video game, the myth-making machine of a lost generation, dominant hand out, searching for the signal, missing on the open range.
“We call it a drive-by shooting.” Said Richard, at breakfast next morning, referring to the way the licence plates and telephotos hurtle through the park. Richard was Nancy’s husband, a local fly-fishing guru, holding forth at the head of the breakfast table. Nancy served up omelettes and fresh muffins, and fruit. We had been joined by the Texans, and another couple from Colorado, heading to Mount Rushmore.
“We’ll be there by tonight.” He said. Richard ignored him, and continued his dissertation.
“During the construction of the post office in Gardiner in the 1950’s.” He said, “They found a Clovis obsidian projectile point dating from eleven thousand years ago. Yellowstone arrowheads have been found as far away as the Mississippi, which gives you some idea of the traffic.” I made an observation about the traffic.
“Three million visitors a year.” Richard said. “Two million in July and August and a million the rest of the year.” I sucked in my breath.
“Hell.” He said. “That’s the same number of campers that stay in the seventy-nine Jellystone Park Camp-Resorts each year, if you’d rather sleep near a Borscht Belt imitation of a bear, than the real thing.”
“I think I’d rather sleep near Yogi.” Said the woman from Colorado.
“Hello, Mr. Ranger, sir!” Said her husband. “I loved the cartoons as a kid, and wondered about the location of Jellystone, and pic-a-nic baskets.”
“Disney ruined us more than Hanna-Barbera.” Said Richard, speaking to Robyn and I.
“Your bucolic swim in the Yellowstone last evening has become a Casey Jr. Splash n' Soak Station. America is a Magic Kingdom of Manifest Destiny, the ‘Happiest Place on Earth.’ Disney World is laid out like a wheel of fortune, with Cinderella’s Castle at the hub, and spokes out to a Walt Disney World Railroad perimeter of inauthenticities. The first stops are Liberty Square, the Liberty Belle Riverboat, and the shops of Main Street, USA, with an emporium of souvenirs, a confectionary of sugared sweets, and at least three food outlets selling ballpark hot dog and fries, and other fare. Frontierland is a chimera of the Old West, with romanticized versions of cowboys and Indians, rivers, mountains and fauna. Animatronic grizzlies play banjos and washboard bass in the Country Bear Jamboree. ‘Thunder traveling over the Mountains’ Chief Joseph had become the rigor mortis reincarnation of Big Thunder Mountain. Once, when Disney saw a Frontierland cowboy walking through Tomorrowland, he built a series of utilidor tunnels to keep his version of America’s past from intruding on his vision of America’s future. Adventureland represents the mystery of foreign lands, like Tokyo Disneyland, Disneyland Park Paris, Hong Kong Disneyland, Shanghai Disneyland, and now the Nintendo video game, Adventures in the Magic Kingdom. Then there’s Disney's Wilderness Lodge, Disney's Fort Wilderness Campground, and Fantasyland’s Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh and the Enchanted Forest.”
“And the real authentic future?” Asked Robyn.
“The real future is Disney’s Tomorrowland.” Richard said. “At least that one’s accurate. The Seven Dwarfs Mine Train roller coaster ride.” He turned to the duo from Denver.
“All you’ll see, on your way across Wyoming, is gas well, gas well, big ass oil rig…gas well, gas well, big ass oil rig…”
“A man’s got to have more than that.” I said. “He needs something to believe in. Whatever happened to ‘take only what you need and leave the land as you found it?’”
“You give people a choice between truth and beauty.” Richard said. “They’ll take beauty every time. That’s why they let Disney get rid of the dirt and the bugs and the danger, and the need for redemption.” The guy from Colorado was getting antsy.
“Slap some bacon on a biscuit and let’s go.” He said. “We’re burnin’ daylight.” And we all shook hands, and went our separate ways.
Robyn and I kissed Nancy goodbye. She gave me some home baked ginger cookies, ‘in case the glove compartment’s hungry.’
We headed back south through the Roosevelt Arch. For the benefit and enjoyment of all the people. Robyn and I drove by herds of elk bums in the faint dawn light. The hawk that flew his loop de loop in front of our wagon was a hot damn. And there was more of that further south.
The alpine lakes and pines and waterfall and river would have felt at home in my Northwestern Ontario birthplace, except for the lazy buffalo lying on the warm sulfur caldera crust, the hills and jets and baths and lagoons and horizons of vapour steaming over green and boardwalks and dead sticks and trees, on yellow mud panoramas and brown mud flats and bubbling mud volcanoes, cauldrons of copper and hot ponds of blue opals and white opalescence, streaked banana and avocado jelly moulds, and the deep sapphire nuclear heavy water pool trapped in snow white crystal crunch we photographed our profiles on. Robyn and I were first domesticated in Rotorua, New Zealand and it was almost the same, but for the pines and buffalo. And the tourists.
The largest active geyser on earth, the Steamboat, awaited in Norris Basin. It erupted while we were still high on the hill that would take us there, and we still had to look up. It exploded at the epicentre of the world’s largest supervolcano, the one that was threatening to do it again. The Yellowstone caldera had erupted three times in the last 2.1 millions years. The first was the most violent, ejecting almost six hundred cubic miles of planetary material into the atmosphere. The second, a tenth of that, was still large enough to cause a significant impact on world weather patterns, and cause the extinction of numerous North American species. The last occurred just over half a million years ago, a thousand times more powerful than the 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption, creating a caldera a kilometre deep and 75 by 45 kilometres in area. Since this last supereruption, there have been at least thirty smaller cycles that have filled in the concavity with ash and lava, flattening the bowl into the platelike landscape that Robyn and I were standing on.
There were earthquakes, hundreds of them, at least six with a Richter magnitude of six or more, in historical times. One in 1959 came in at 7.5, killed twenty-eight people, and caused large cracks in the ground, and geysers to erupt. Earthquakes came in ‘swarms,’ 250 over four days in 2008, and as many over two days, in 2010.
The Norris Basin was closed temporarily in 2003, because of increasing water temperatures, new fumeroles, heightened geyser activity, and the discovery of a structural dome of swelling magma six miles underground beneath the surface, a ‘pancake-shaped blob’ of molten rock the size of Los Angeles, pushing toward the earth’s surface. On March 10, 2004, a biologist discovered five dead bison that had inhaled toxic geothermal gases. Two years later geologists reported that the flow of the Mallard Lake and Sour Creek Domes had risen faster in the previous three years, than at any time since records began in 1923. Experts have informed the public that there was no increased risk of a volcanic eruption in the near future.
“So there’s no possibility of another eruption?” Robyn asked.
“Possibility is a big word.” I said. “An age-of-the-universe word. Probability, however, is a word just waiting to bushwhack you. If Yellowstone goes off again, and some people think its not that far away, there will be a layer of ash ten foot deep a thousand miles away. You’ll see lava in the sky, and millions of people will be homeless.”
We continued our drive south, toward the most famous geyser on earth, the one you could set your watch by. There were areas still black from the previous season’s fires.
“These weren’t the worst ones.” I said. “In 1988, a third of the park burnt down. On ‘Black Saturday’, August 20, 1988, they lost more than 150,000 acres, two of the twenty-five thousand firefighters, 120 million dollars, 345 elk, 36 deer, 12 moose, 6 black bears, and 9 buffalo.
“But that’s the way this ecosystem works.” Robyn said. Lodgepole pine cones open only with fire, and their seeds are held in place by a resin which the flames melt and disperse. The Douglas Fir thick bark protects the inner part of tree, and the grasslands had a natural burn cycle of a quarter century. Fire is a part of nature.”
We came across a sign, better suited to a turnpike than a park. Gas… Food…Lodging… Right Lane.
“It seems like an overpass.” Robyn said.
“It is too!” I said, and our wagon pulled off into a spiral, through a series of numbered parking lots that would have been better attached to a automobile plant. There were about that many cars, from all over America. I found the Old Faithful Inn, and the clock on the wall that indicated the time of the next gusher, and Robyn found the shops. The rock fireplace was four stories high, backdropped by lodgepole and beam and centred by an elk skull and two Arts and Crafts lanterns.
The amphitheatre outside, surrounding the geyser launchpad dome was big enough to host the second coming of Christ and, when Old Faithful arrived on cue, there was that much water that it mingled into the white clouds hovering above. Bubble bubble whoosh.
“About as much water as our oil well hit in Texas.” I said, a story better left untold. The one that should be told was coming after us, however. Not long after our visit, Barack Obama shut down the National Park Service for two weeks in a de facto neo-monarchical violation of what even the English recognized as a Charter of the Forest in 1219, two years after King Henry III signed the Magna Carta. The Park Service morphed into the paramilitary wing of the Democratic National Party, and spent more money trying to close down the great outdoors, than they would normally do in keeping them open. Mark Steyn had it right.
‘The most extraordinary story is the tour group of foreign seniors
whose bus was trapped in Yellowstone Park the day the shutdown
began… pulled over photographing a herd of bison when an armed
ranger informed them, with the insouciant ad-hoc unilateral
lawmaking to which the armed bureaucrat is distressingly prone, that
taking photographs counts as illegal “recreation.” “Sir, you are
recreating,” the ranger informed the tour guide. And we can’t
have that, can we? ordered back to the Old Faithful Inn, next to the
geyser of the same name, but forbidden to leave said inn to look at
said geyser. Armed rangers were posted at the doors, and, just in case
one of the wily Japanese or Aussies managed to outwit his captors by
escaping through one of the inn’s air ducts and down to the geyser, a
fleet of NPS SUVs showed up every hour and a half throughout the
day, ten minutes before Old Faithful was due to blow, to surround the
geyser and additionally ensure that any of America’s foreign visitors
trying to photograph the impressive natural phenomenon from a
second-floor hotel window would still wind up with a picture full of
government officials. The following morning the bus made the two-
and-a-half-hour journey to the park boundary but was prevented from
using any of the bathrooms en route, including at a private dude
ranch whose owner was threatened with the loss of his license if he
allowed any tourist to use the facilities.’
The geyser Nazis had repealed the Charter of the Forest. An English peasant had enjoyed more freedom on the King’s land in the 13th century than a freeborn American did in a public national park in the 21st. The Japanese and Australian tourists that had come to see the authentic ‘land of the free’ missed it. The truth didn’t live here any more.
The metaphors chased us through the southwestern portion of the park. We crossed the Continental Divide three times, the Snake River flowing off to the Pacific on our right, the Yellowstone on our left, streaming to the Atlantic via the Gulf of Mexico. The signs on the shoulders ordered us to slow down. We saw wildlife from afar, Until we hit them with our car.
There was one more national freak to celebrate, before Robyn and I ejected out the bottom of Yellowstone.
“It was just about here.” I said, stopping at the top of a steep slope. “Shoshone Point. The last stagecoach holdup of the Old West. Forty of them, actually. The man was as sharp as a mashed potato, but even a blind pig can find an acorn once in a while.”
In 1876, the year Wild Bill Hickok was assassinated, holding his poker Dead Man’s Hand in Deadwood, a 23 year-old petty criminal left there for Idaho, where he got to reading a story about the James-Younger gang. Edwin Burnham Trafton resolved to become a criminal of no small notoriety, but he remained an inept amateur, and ill-equipped for the task. He always got caught, his prison sentences approached a century, and his only luck came because of his likability, in the form of latent leniency.
In 1889 he was sent to the Idaho State Penitentiary in Boise for rustling cattle, returned for robbing a store in Rexburg, and again for stealing more cattle. On one occasion Ed tried to set up another man. He wrote out a suicide note, signed the man's name to it, and headed to the cabin to murder him. But Ed was captured creeping by the owner, who got to read his own fabricated suicide note. A decade later, Ed concocted what he thought was an absolutely foolproof plan to rob his mother of ten thousand dollars. She had him arrested and sent to the Colorado State Penitentiary. No reporters took any notice, possibly because of Halley’s comet, passing overhead.
In 1910 a U.S. Mail carrier opening came available for ‘a good, honest, trustworthy man,’ in Yellowstone. They hired Ed because he knew the area. When Yellowstone was dedicated as a national park, it meant that any crime committed within its boundaries would be a federal crime, which, one would think, would be some kind of deterrent. When tourists arrived at Yellowstone, they were required to leave their firearms with park rangers. Automobiles were prohibited in the park. Instead, a regular schedule of stagecoaches, drawn by a team of four horses, was established, to carry up to eleven passengers on a four-day tour.
On July 29, 1914, Ed Trafton, still on parole, robbed all 40 stagecoaches of the Yellowstone Stagecoach Company in a morning. When the first stage arrived, Ed ordered the driver to pull it behind a rock outcropping where it would not be visible to the other approaching coaches. Wearing several layers of extra clothes and a black mask, he ordered the passengers to disembark and place their valuables on a blanket he had spread on the ground. Ed told them his ‘partner’ was covering them from a nearby rise, and that he wanted ‘cash only.’ He asked the women to ‘hide their jewelry,’ refused to take one young girl’s money because she was ‘too pretty to rob,’ and returned one elderly lady’s cash because ‘you look like you need it more than I do.’ His hijinks and joking earned him the sobriquet of ‘The Merry Bandit.’ Ed even pulled down his mask for photos, and one victim later made the comment that it was ‘the best 50 bucks I ever spent.’ Ed’s assembly line got away with three thousand dollars from 165 passengers. But no one paid much attention, because of the breakout of World War I.
Less than a year after the robbery, Ed was turned into the local police in Jerome, Idaho, by his wife. It seems that Ed, while constructing an armoured car to use in the planned kidnapping and ransom of the president of the LDS Church, was also having an affair with the neighbour’s wife. No one read about his sentence to five years in Leavenworth, possibly because of the sinking of the Lusitania.
When Ed got out of prison, he went to Hollywood in an attempt to sell his story. In 1924, he died with his boots on, while eating an ice cream cone. They found a note on his body. This will introduce Edwin B. Trafton, better known as Ed Harrington. Mr. Trafton was the man from whom Owen Wister modeled the character of 'The Virginian. Ed also claimed that he rode with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in the Wild Bunch, but it is a matter of record that he did build Wister’s cabin, when the author moved to Yellowstone in 1912. The verdict, like most things associated with Ed Trafton, is still awaiting authentication, and redemption.
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