#yellowstonecaldera

Old Faithful

We're in Yellowstone National Park of course, located in the northwest corner of Wyoming.

Old Faithful is a geyser that erupts regularly; it is, perhaps, the most famous example/evidence of the massive underground caldera. As one can see, it draws a crowd.

I was greeted in the Grand Tetons by a thunderstorm that followed me all the way around Jackson Lake and up into Yellowstone. The only thing that can make a landscape like that even more unreal to behold is when you see it in the middle of some severe weather. Everything—the jagged granite slopes stretching across the horizon, the wide open meadows dotted with elk or bison, the long, twisted wooden fences winding alongside the highway—it all makes you feel so small and insignificant with your fragile little human body full of all its ripe little organs, sitting in your tin can, rolling down an asphalt path. Then even the mountains are dwarfed by these gigantic weather systems moving overhead, and all your thoughts, even your thoughts of insignificance, are washed away in the rain.

The rain let up when I actually got to a populated portion of Yellowstone—the sprawling parking lot and inn next to Old Faithful. For all its wildlife and awe-inspiring wilderness, the populated parts of Yellowstone serve to make it the Los Angeles of the National Parks. It takes you forever to drive to any of the major destinations in the park, and once you get there, their accessibility to the public usually makes them far too crowded to enjoy anything. I had always pictured Old Faithful to be out in the forest—some holy destination viewed only by travel-weary hikers who had huffed it for miles over sketchy terrain just to see it erupt in all its magnificent glory. In reality, the geyser is just off a parking lot, flanked by benches, and a few minutes before it’s predicted to erupt, a bunch of fat tourists dressed in pastels and shorts come waddling out of the Old Faithful Inn, sit on the benches, and clap when the thing spurts into the air. It’s really not all that spectacular in the context of the whole situation.

I mean, it is but it isn’t.1

I parked the Oldsmobile in the Old Faithful Inn parking lot right when the world famous geyser was erupting. I heard the cheers, watched the thing erupt, watched the steam wash over the whole landscape, smelled the sulfur emanating from the earth, then entered the inn and walked up to the information desk. A cute blue-eyed girl with a long blonde ponytail and a grey polo shirt with its top buttons unbuttoned was seated there. She smiled up at me as I approached.

“I’m looking for a friend who works here,” I said. “You don’t happen to know Joe Richards, do you?”

She folded her small hands in front of her. “No, honey, I don’t know Joe Richards. Do you know where he works?”

I felt my cheeks blush, suddenly conscious of the fact that I was a little drunk. “I’m not sure, actually.”

“Well, then.” She unfolded her hands and furrowed her brow, reached down under the counter, and pulled out a small photocopied map. “Here is where we are,” she said, circling the inn with a pen. Then she swooped the pen in a wide arc around the back of the inn to where some little rectangles lingered crookedly around another parking lot. “This is employee housing,” she said. “Your best bet would be to just go there and ask around.” I looked at her lips—the bottom a little larger than the top, pouty, her teeth white and clean behind pink lipstick. Then back to her breasts. A sliver of her white bra strap just behind the collar of her shirt. I was definitely drunk.

She looked back up at me and I averted my eyes. I took the map. “Thanks.”

“No problem,” she said, smiling again. “Good luck!”

I walked back out through the parking lot and around the back of the inn. Down a driveway, I saw what looked like projects. The surrounding area was beautiful and wooded, but the actual housing was pretty drab. Large wood buildings painted dark brown, with dull gray shingles on the roofs.

As I walked down the driveway, I started thinking about what I should say to Joe. How I should approach the matter. I imagined myself knocking on his door and yelling “Police! Open up!” or something stupid like that. I imagined him tossing me over his broad farmer shoulders and squeezing me until my ribs cracked. I imagined the two of us running over to the general store and buying ourselves a big bottle of bourbon, some beer, and some firewood, then grabbing that girl from the information desk and one of her friends and wandering out into the wilderness to get drunk with the grizzly bears.

The first door I approached was open a crack, and I heard a couple of guys talking inside. I smelled pot, and through the crack, I saw what looked like a dorm room: a raised bed with a desk underneath, and a lamp and a computer on the desk. I knocked on the door. A wild-haired teenager with red eyes and bad breath answered.

“What’s going on?”

“Nothing,” I answered. “Just lookin’ for my buddy Joe.”

The kid flashed a wide, goofy smile. “Joe?! Joe Richards?!”

I smiled as well. Elated. I found my man. “I’m here to surprise him,” I said. As soon as I said the word “surprise,” the kid’s smile disappeared. His eyes dropped to the ground. My heart sunk.

“Oh, shit,” the kid said. “Where’d you come from?”

“Far away,” I said. “Is Joe here, or not?”

The kid swung the door wide, and a slightly older young man seated behind him—still not Joe—took a drag off a fat, badly-rolled joint. “Joe got fired,” he said.

The kid stepped back and motioned for me to come inside, but I shook my head and gestured back towards the inn, like I had something going on back there that I had to attend to. I didn’t. I didn’t have anything.

“Do you know where he went?” I asked.

This question was met with silence. I heard boots crunching on gravel behind me. An older man in a black polo shirt and khakis was walking down the driveway. He was apparently some kind of a security geek making the rounds, because the kid nodded towards him, gently pushed me backwards, stepped out of his room, and closed the door. I heard some shuffling around behind the door—a jar being twisted open and shut, the clattering of glass knocking against wood, drawers opening and closing, an aerosol being spritzed into the air.

“Evenin’!” the kid yelled, waving at the older man. I rolled my eyes. It all reminded me of high school, or freshman year of college, or any other situation where young adults are forced to live under an embarrassingly ignorant police state that does little but encourage more misbehavior. Everybody comes out looking like an asshole.

“Where did Joe go?” I asked again.

The kid didn’t say anything until the older man had passed and was down the road a ways, shining his flashlight into a darkened alley between two of the buildings. “Joe’s older brother moved out to Olympia a while back to start a construction business, and he was going there to work for him,” he whispered. He ducked back into his room, emerging seconds later with a small piece of paper in his hand. He smelled like Febreeze, and looked around nervously for the older man, who was out of sight. The kid handed me the paper, then perked up and started rambling on nervously. “This is Joe’s new address! He got fired ‘cause we were all wasted in here one night, and there were some girls hanging around, and when a ranger came by to tell us to be quiet, Joe told him we were all adults here, and that we’d be quiet when we damn well wanted to, and that he could go fuck himself.”

Classic Joe.

“Well, thanks for your help,” I said, before the kid could start talking again.

He now looked really concerned. Like I was about to go hang myself in the woods or something. “You need a place to stay?” he asked me.

“No thanks. I’ll be fine.”

“Well, you got a room?” he asked.

“No, no. I’ll be fine.” I waved at him like he was a mosquito, or maybe a member of Greenpeace, standing on the corner in the city, asking me for sixty seconds of my time.

“We’ve got bears, man!"

This kid was persistent. Or maybe just lonely.

“I know,” I said. “Grizzly bears.”

“Those things will eat you!” he yelled. I think he seriously thought that I was going to wander off and sleep in the woods. By myself. Without a tent or a sleeping bag. I started walking back to the inn. “I’ll be fine.”

“Well, you take care!” the kid yelled.

I had that strange feeling in my body that you get when you’re a little kid and you hear some old person that isn’t one of your parents talking for the first time. Does that make any sense? The substitute teacher will be standing up at the front of the room by the chalkboard, talking to you in a caring, nurturing voice, maybe even in a whisper, and you’ll have this feeling wash through you— it’s a physical feeling, like a tingling sensation, but it isn’t sexual or anything. It’s a feeling of weightlessness, and despite it’s pleasantness, it often comes off as a feeling that something is just not right in the world—a feeling that you are somewhere that you do not belong. I know the feeling so well.

I still get it sometimes.2

I had no idea what I was doing. What I was going to do. I didn’t have enough money to stay at the inn—I didn’t know how much longer I was going to be out on the road, and I needed all of my remaining $400 for gas and food. But I sure as hell wasn’t going to camp anywhere in Yellowstone without a tent, either. I went back to the car and laid down in the back seat with the door open and my legs hanging out.

I slept for a good eight hours or so. Just like that. Nobody even came to tell me I couldn’t sleep there, or to tell me that I should really at least have my door closed. I woke up in the morning under an unbelievable sunrise, a dark blue emptiness dotted with little red fireball clouds. I watched some bison shuffle around in the parking lot for a minute, blasting steam out of their nostrils every time they snorted. Then I walked into the inn and brushed my teeth in the gift shop bathroom. I bought a chewy bagel and a small paper cup of watered-down coffee that cost me almost three dollars, sat on a leather couch in front of the massive fireplace in the inn lobby, and glanced at a newspaper.

Beijing won the Olympic bid to host the 2008 Summer Games, beating Toronto by a wide margin. An Algerian-born shopkeeper was convicted of conspiring to support a plan for an Algerian terrorist to blow up the Los Angeles International Airport back in December of 1999. And the world’s third set of septuplets was born, each of them no bigger than a dollar bill. Other than that, not much was going on.

I finished my coffee, stretched, and moseyed around the lobby of the inn for a while, looking at old black and white photographs of tourists from the early 1900s in their wool dresses and suits, staring off over log fences down deep, roaring canyons, or clapping their hands in front of gigantic, gushing waterfalls. I walked up to the inner balconies of the inn—their stairs and railings worn smooth by a hundred years of use. I listened to a park ranger tell an old man chewing an unlit cigar about L.R. Piper, a banker from Ohio who had stepped out of the Fountain Hotel for an after-dinner cigar on the evening of July 30, 1890, and vanished.3 Then I refilled my paper coffee cup, walked back outside, and sat back in the driver’s seat of the Oldsmobile.

I grabbed my road atlas from under the passenger seat and measured out the distance from Yellowstone to Olympia. The drive would take me around twelve hours—fourteen hours including stops—which would land me on Joe’s doorstep around eight o’clock in the evening. As I considered that, I realized that another drive that would take only slightly longer would be the drive to Morrison, Illinois, where my parents were probably just waking up to start their day—Mom in her bathrobe, leaning over the bathroom sink to look in the mirror and put on her make-up, Don eating Cheerios garnished with a sliced up banana and reading the Chicago Tribune.

If I drove to Morrison, I would have a job and a roof over my head. I could start working at the hardware store. I could go to the pub after work every night and talk about the Morrison Mustangs football team with old high school classmates who had never left—kids who were now grown men with mustaches and calluses on their hands from working at the General Electric plant, or maybe at the Wal-Mart distribution center just outside of town. I could work at the hardware store and smoke weed and play video games and eat Isle of Rhodes Pizza and get fat and occasionally have sloppy drunken sex with one of the local girls who still liked to party, and maybe someday I would fall for one of them or she would fall for me, and we have a wedding at St. Mary’s and she would wear her mother’s wedding dress, and we could honeymoon at some lake up in Minnesota, then we could buy a crappy little fix-me-upper on the north side of Morrison with siding and shutters and a sloping square yard, and we could adopt a cat and a dog and have a few kids and walk around always smelling like a skillet because we never opened the windows because we had to keep the house warm, or we had to keep it cool, and we couldn’t go blowing money on our heating and cooling bills because Billy needed two fillings last month and that goddamned candy that he was eating all the time had finally gone and put us in the red. Then one day my wife would decide that she needed to better herself—that job at the bank just wasn’t cutting it and her boss was always staring at her ass and making lewd comments—and shame on him because he called himself a good Christian man—and she would decide that she really did believe in God after all and that we should start going to church, or maybe she would decide that she needed to go back to school, so she’d enroll in some class at Kickapoo Community College where she would make a split second decision that she loved kids so much and she really wanted to make a difference in the world, so she would take classes that taught her how to be a really great elementary school teacher. Then all of a sudden my shifts at the hardware store that I had taken over from Don would start to wear on me, because I would start to think that maybe I should be doing more with my life, as well—like my wholesome wife was—and she really did turn me on when she came home from school feeling all righteous and saintly—so I would quit drinking and I would pick up a bunch of hobbies so I felt like I was constantly bettering myself—hobbies that would take up my time so I didn’t go absolutely insane. Then one day while I was at a weird little store up in rural Wisconsin because that was the one place that I found where I could buy this special glass-encased pegboard on which to mount my new collection of rare pink-winged katydids, a bell over the door would ring, and I’d realize in that very moment that my wife and I had become my parents. And I’d be alright with that, really—my parents are good and decent people—but it would be a jarring enough revelation that I would leave the store without buying my pegboard, and I would go home and drink a beer, because sometimes a man just needs a beer.

I stuffed the road atlas back under the passenger seat, started the Olds, and pulled out of the parking lot. And when I got to the on ramp for the highway, I headed west. I was headed to Olympia. To a bright new frontier. No looking back.

Passing a few more geysers just north of Goose Lake and Feather Lake on the way out of the park, I saw a family walking down a long wooden pier, away from the steam washing over the landscape behind them. They crossed a small hill and returned to their station wagon on the shoulder of the highway. They were a mother and father with a teenaged daughter and a slightly younger son. Their station wagon had a “Proud Parents of an Honor Student” sticker on the bumper. The daughter sat in the front seat with the father. The younger son was wearing an Aerosmith shirt, and got in the back with the mother, who immediately started looking at a map. I thought of Jack and Jackie Duffy, with teenaged Jeni and little Jim. I wondered if Jack ever took Jackie and Jeni and Jim on vacations anywhere. Mom loved vacations. I couldn’t imagine Jack not wanting to travel, being the history buff that he was, but maybe he really didn’t and that contributed to her decision to leave him. A young family that doesn’t travel together in the summertime is a pretty unbearable bore, even if the trip is only for a day or two. Do what you can afford, sure, but make sure it’s something. That sort of thing is important.

After passing that family and a few more cars, I didn’t see anyone else for miles. I drove through several miles of burnt forest on the northwest side of the park—the bare white stumps pointing up into the blue sky, the ground beneath them a light, golden brown. As I crossed the border into Montana, I started to feel really alone—oddly alone, like I had passed through a portal into an alternate universe, or a Hitchcock movie. I entered the town of West Yellowstone, passed the “Leaving Yellowstone National Park” sign, and still saw no one. I passed a pizzeria, two motels, a gas station, two more motels. Still no one. I passed three or four more motels. No one. As I left West Yellowstone, a light rain began to fall, and I began to really wish that the radio worked. I drummed my fingers on the steering wheel and hummed.

Hegben Lake. Flat, golden ground. Sloping green hills on the horizon, some of them brushed with snow. The Grayling Arm of Hegben Lake—the part that is closest to the highway—is long, flat. Looks like more of a marsh than a lake. You picture a man running across it, passing witnesses thinking that he is Jesus—“He walks on water! We have been saved!”—the poor guy is really just chasing his dog that got off the leash. He lives on the Grayling Arm. The arm is his home. You weave around to the main body of Hegben Lake and the landscape shrinks: it’s a golden hill, you, then the lake, and on the other side, a lush green mount. You feel as though you are in a flooded hallway. The lake thins—narrower and narrower—it is a river, a stream, a creek, the land flattens out completely, the highway turns north, and you are still alone. Even more alone because you are the only bump on the vast landscape. And you are the only bump for miles. There are snow-capped mountains on the horizon, certainly, but the horizon seems like forever away from wherever you are. It would take you days to get there, and it will.

The rain began falling in sheets just outside of Butte, right around the small town of Anaconda, where I had nightmares of breaking down, trying to hitch a ride, and being swallowed by a giant snake. The rain was falling so hard that it was blinding me by the time I got to Missoula. My windshield wipers weren’t doing much of anything, and the relentless and chaotic tapping of the rain drops on the roof and windows of the car was driving me insane, so I stopped to take a break and get a bite to eat.

It was noon. I was on Broadway Street. The only people I saw out and about were running from their vehicles into buildings, holding jackets or newspapers or plastic shopping bags over their heads. I passed a fly fishing shop, a casino. I almost pulled into the drive-thru of a McDonald’s, but Missoula was a city—the population sign had read over 60,000—there had to be better food somewhere. A bar, hopefully. Broadway seemed to be getting more residential, though. A motel, then a long string of nothing but houses. Then a library, maybe, another motel, a bank, a dingy little strip mall. Then I was downtown all of a sudden. Some taller office buildings. I turned off of Broadway.

In a small business district I found a local market and deli, parked the Olds right out front, threw my jacket over my head, and ran inside for a sandwich and some snacks. At the deli counter a giant lumberjack of a man in a white apron, a hair net holding back his curly brown hair, made me a turkey sandwich, piled high with thin-sliced, smoked turkey, Swiss cheese, and avocado. I grabbed a bag of cashews and an apple for good measure, as well. Then I paid an adorable stoned high school girl working one of the registers. She looked like the first girl that had ever dumped me. Short and skinny, no boobs, horse face. Beautiful, straight, sandy blonde hair. A white feather on a silver chain around her neck. She said “$11.84, sir,” and gave me this look like I was seventy years old and she was nine. I ran back out to the Olds, and when I turned the key in the ignition, the radio crackled.

I had static! I turned the knob, slowly, being sure to hit each decimal. There still weren’t any actual radio stations coming in, but something was working. So I ate my lunch, sitting there in the Olds under the pounding rain with the dry heat blowing and the radio crackling and buzzing and hissing, and I felt temporarily satisfied. Still unbelievably alone, but satisfied.

After finishing my lunch I got a large coffee in the drive-thru of one of those coffee shops with “grounds” or “ground” in the name—there are so many of them—then jumped back out on the highway and rolled out of Missoula in mere minutes, the rain still pounding and the radio still hissing. I passed the Missoula International Airport and got out there where there was nothing but golden ground and gigantic billboards and green hills on the horizon and gray sky above, and when I-90 started following the Clark Fork I really started cruising—seventy miles an hour became eighty, which became ninety, which became me no longer even paying attention to the speed dial.

I thought about Joe. I wondered what he was doing with himself in Olympia—what had made him decide to go there and live with his brother in the first place. Joe and his family had always been unbelievably tight—more so than most families I know of. Joe has his two parents, plus three brothers and three sisters—seven siblings who always acted like they would die for each other, and I honestly believed that they would. And the kids were so loyal to their parents, they made most kids look like ungrateful assholes. When Joe’s parents had opened a restaurant just outside Morrison and had needed some extra hands, every kid had offered to help. Joe was living in a suburb of Chicago at the time, and he had dropped everything he was doing there—which wasn’t much, but still—he had moved home to Morrison and worked at the restaurant, probably right up until he had decided to move to Yellowstone. Shit, working the restaurant is probably what had motivated him to move to Yellowstone. When he had been fired, then, he probably heard that his older brother Ben was getting a construction company off the ground and he probably hadn’t had a second though about it. “Looks like I’m going to go work construction.”

I wondered what Joe would look like—how he might have changed since I had seen him last. He had always been shorter than me, but he had also always been able to beat the shit out of me whenever he felt like it. He had tree trunks for legs, a wide torso, and broad shoulders, and his mop of curly brown hair and his round but handsome face sat on a thick, tan farmer neck that was usually adorned with some kind of Native American beaded necklace. All throughout our teenage years, he looked like a football player who smoked a lot of weed during his off hours—a look a lot of guys around the world embraced, especially if they came of age during the ‘90s. And for Joe, the look really worked. It fit his personality perfectly. The fact that he had started smoking weed and reading feverishly at an early age was probably a good thing, too, because if he would have gone the other route and been one of those stupid and shallow, aggressive athletic types with the bulging biceps and the white college baseball cap and the perpetual cloud of acrid deodorant spray hovering around his head all the time, he would have been a real animal for society to deal with. Instead, he was a perfect balance of both worlds: a sensitive and fiercely loyal young man with a great sense of humor and a good head on his shoulders who was also a man’s man, and could tear your goddamned arms off if you did something worthy of such a thing.

Joe was a big influence on me in that way—I had neither the strength nor the stomach to tear anyone’s arms off, but throughout our time together, I had learned from him how to be a man: how to look when I smoked a cigarette, how to hold my booze, how to talk to women, and how to treat my family. Joe and I not only grew up together, we came of age together, and most importantly, when it got to that time when high school was over and we realized that it was time for us to go our separate ways, we did just that. We didn’t fuck around with that “best friends forever” shit that some people do. We just smoked a joint, shared a sunset, and said “See you when I see you,” which, in my opinion, is how it should always be done. But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t miss him. And thinking about him right then, driving into Idaho through the Coeur d’Alene National Forest, I was happy that I had decided to go find him.

The Pacific Northwest! I had never seen the Pacific Northwest. I only knew it from what I had seen on television and in the movie theater, and none of those shows or films ever really talked about the region, they only showed it, as if no words could possibly do it justice. From what I had seen, it looked like a dark and magical place—all clouds and rain and deep forests and rugged coastline. Small timber towns, where the men wore heavy denim and cut down trees and had big dogs, and the women were all quiet and brooding and well-read, but weren’t afraid to pick up a shotgun if there was a clatter in the driveway late at night. Small, sleepy cities dotted with cluttered bookstores and drive-thru espresso shacks. And Seattle! Seattle had always held a special place in my imagination, as well. The glistening pavement, glazed with rain; small, steamy rock clubs packed with sweat-soaked dancers and beer-swilling drunks; small house windows filled with yellow light and the cool blue glow of televisions; cars swishing up and down hilly streets; Pike Place Market bustling with shopping bag-toting tourists, their faces stuck to the back of their cameras; the Space Needle thrusting its ring of light up into a thick charcoal sky; and Mount Rainier observing it all from its stoic and lonely perch on the desolate horizon to the southeast.

I got my first view of Mount Rainier from Ellensburg, Washington, at around five o’clock that afternoon. I was coming around a bend in the highway, the rain finally behind me, when a splash of sunlight threw itself out over a large, golden meadow. Behind the sun-drenched meadow, green hills sloped towards the horizon, and right where they should have met the sky stood a massive, ghostly form—a white dome that looked like it came more from the sky than the earth, hazy, as if it might blow away or evaporate at any minute. It was one of the most breathtaking views I had ever witnessed, if only for the fact that it appeared so suddenly. And to make the moment even more shocking, right when the giant mountain came into view, the radio came in crystal clear. The static disappeared, and Elton John belted “Rocket Man” through the dashboard:

Rocket man! Burning out his fuse up here alone.

The song made me think of Jeni—the biggest Elton John fan I had ever known. I had never really liked Elton John all that much, but the thought of my sister made me tear up, anyway, and I pounded on the wheel and sang along:

And I think it’s gonna be a long, long time ‘til touch down brings me ‘round again to find I’m not the man they think I am at home. Oh no, no, no! I’m a rocket man!

Rocket man! Burning out his fuse up here alone.

I sang along with every word, awkwardly, emotionally, thinking of Jeni and how she probably called our mother every weekend—thinking of her sweet and pudgy face with tears in my eyes until the song ended and I was jarred back to reality with a commercial in which a gravel-voiced man was screaming at the top of his lungs about a sale on big & tall overalls at a feed and farm supply store. I turned off the radio and rolled on in silence towards Mount Rainier, Seattle, Olympia, and the setting sun.

 What is spectacular about Yellowstone is the fact that all those geysers spurting into the air prove that the Yellowstone Caldera is still active. A caldera is a volcano, but instead of presenting itself as a high-peaked mountain built up from magma or lava, it’s just a gigantic chamber full of magma, hard to spot unless you really know what you’re looking for. Its eruptions are large enough that the chamber basically empties itself out and collapses, sending everything below it and inside it and even above it exploding out into the open air. The Yellowstone Caldera is roughly forty miles across, and it’s last eruption, some 600,000 years ago, covered what is now the United States in volcanic ash all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico. Picture, if you will, the two million people that visit Yellowstone each year during the summer months, covered in ash, running for their lives as the Earth below them is swallowed into a scalding sea of incandescent lava. ↩︎

 I discovered while writing this that the mysterious feeling has finally earned a name due to the emergence of several videos, blogs, and articles on the internet that have committed themselves to not only discussing it, but also trying to help people achieve it. It is called Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, and is referred to by some as a “brain orgasm.” The feeling is triggered by different things for different people, but most seem to agree that whispering or particularly soft voices are a trigger, which would explain the feeling many people get while watching Bob Ross explain how he paints a picture. Other triggers are crinkling paper, a brush running through hair, the soft crinkling of paper. There are scores of videos on YouTube that are meant to trigger ASMR. Most of them are hosted by attractive young women, who speak softly into the camera, telling the viewer how beautiful he or she is, or maybe pretending to give the viewer a haircut or massage his or her shoulders. These hosts use 3D microphones and viewers are meant to wear headphones to enhance the experience. It’s really weird shit, but for some people—myself included—it works just as well as listening to Bob Ross. ↩︎