Out of the Wild

The summer season at Yellowstone comes to a close after two days of scrubbing floors and polishing hard-to-reach places on stainless steel.  A cool breeze shimmies the tree branches while a family of deer snack on leaves from a bush I can’t identify.  If I lived here permanently I would call the bushes mine since they inhabit the area around my home, but those who live here year-round know they can’t claim any land as their own.  I clean out my cabin until it looks properly vacant.  I meticulously arrange my luggage into the backseat and the trunk of my car, a twenty year old Chevy Lumina with a cracked windshield. 

Hugs and handshakes are exchanged on the last morning.  I don’t make any promises because I’m making this up as I go.  I hand in my paperwork and key to personnel and wait in the parking lot for my girlfriend, Erin, to do the same.  The location manager approaches me on the way to his office and asks where I’m going.

“To Spokane,” I say, although that only explains a tiny percentage of my itinerary.

 

“It’s a beautiful drive,” he says.  “Through western Montana.”

A few weeks ago Erin and I drove to a coffee shop in Gardiner, Montana to plan our road trip and map out our course until we reached a place where our phones would work.  In the parking lot outside the Roosevelt Lodge my phone doesn’t receive a signal, so I ask the location manager which roads to take.  I know where I’m going because there are so few places to turn in the West, but I want to double-check.

He tells me to drive to Bozeman and then head west on Interstate 90 that would take me all the way to Seattle.  Erin emerges from the personnel office and steps inside the passenger seat.  The location manager and I shake hands and wish each other good luck.  I get in the car and shut the door. 

I’ve made some modifications to the car to make it more comfortable, seeing as I will be driving thousands of miles and living in it for over a month.  The driver’s seat isn’t properly welded to the floor, so it jostles back and forth when I stop or accelerate.  To stabilize the seat, I used Erin’s backpack as a wedge.  I stuffed my eighty liter hiking backpack with things I don’t need for the trip and use this to fill in the rest of the gap between the front and back seats.  Then I placed pillows on top of the luggage to make the surface even with the bench.  To create the bed, I jammed the buckles into the gaps in the bench and added a few sheets, a sleeping bag, and two blankets to serve as padding.

Inside the trunk I am storing my fold-up bike, Erin’s suitcase, several boxes of my books, my clothes, my hiking gear, a canister of bear spray, and a box of wood and firestarter discs to use at campsites.  On top of the backseat bed, there are Erin’s camera, my smaller backpack, a gallon jug of water, a plastic bag full of snacks, and an empty cooler.  Every replenishment is within reach, and we still have enough room to stretch our legs and look out the rear windshield.

 

The spinning wheels kick up the dust in the parking lot and take me past the wooden cabins that used be my neighborhood, but currently this place resembles a village abandoned due to a forecast of war.  Winter is the enemy the people are fleeing.  Before the bears hibernate and the snow settles, there is more life to be found in the forests than in this place of commerce.  No more waiting on tourists who ask me where all the bears are hiding.  Gone are the nights I wake up shivering to rebuild a fire to make sleep possible once again.  But gone, too, is the privacy that comes with living in a remote wilderness and its accompanying dark sky that reveals its Milky Way dust. 

Where I am headed there won’t herds of bison grazing in the valleys.  Instead there will be rows and rows of houses blocking the view of the sunset.  There will be commuters driving from offices to houses where they can adjust thermostats to keep the outside from getting in.  Normalcy is a relative status.  In a matter of time, the body acclimatizes to meet the demands of the environment.  A man can grow used to breathing thinner air until he believes there’s none better to be had.

  

The Lamar River at sunset.

I turn left onto the loop road and head north toward Mammoth Hot Springs.  The road climbs up into the mountains and skirts the naked remnants of forest fires.  On the Blacktail Plateau several cars are parked on the side of the road.  Photographers aim their expensive lenses at a doglike creature panting in the high, yellow grasses.  I have seen every type of large predator Yellowstone has to offer with the exception of a wolf.  I pull over and step outside the car wondering if I could be lucky enough to spot a wolf on my last day. 

A short-haired, middle-aged woman stares through a pair of binoculars.  As I near her, she tells me there’s a wolf in that field about thirty yards away.  I can make out the animal’s shape, and it seems tall from this distance.  I can’t conclude what I am seeing until the animal turns around.  On the tip of its tail there is a patch of black fur. 

“That’s a coyote,” I tell the woman.

 

“No, it’s a wolf,” she says.  “I’m sure of it.  I’ve been watching it for fifteen minutes.” 

You’ve been staring at a coyote for fifteen minutes then, I think of saying, but instead I let her believe what she wants so as not to poison her memory with disappointment. The coyote turns away from the crowd and finds a more interesting diversion.  I press on toward the steaming thermophiles of Mammoth Hot Springs and beyond the band of elk grazing on hotel lawns. 

Upper terrace of Mammoth Hot Springs.

Around the bend is the border of Wyoming and Montana. We leave Yellowstone northward bound through the tiny town of Gardiner, where we used to go to the pharmacy to use Wi-Fi and drink Huckleberry milkshakes.  I play a John Mayer album as we dart through the vast ranches of Paradise Valley until we exit the highway and pull into the Walmart parking lot in Bozeman.  We need a loaf of bread, lunchmeat, a bag of ice, and a road atlas so we know which way to go when GoogleMaps can’t find us.