Yellowstone

Yellowstone was more like it. Although, I did have a run in with an idiot the minute I got there that threatened to ruin my entire day. I was standing at Mammoth Hot Springs in the northwest corner of the park. The spring is a natural sculpture made from heat, water and limestone. The formation grows in perfect little terraces that reach up over a hundred feet. Imagine The Spanish Steps, but geothermal.

Or, you could go ahead and think of it as the protohuman standing next to me described it to her fat kids and her fat husband. “Look, they’re like stair-steps.” She wheezed. Not like stairs. Or steps. Stair-steps. The very next words out of her mouth were, “I’m starting to get hungry.” Yeah, no shit lady. No shit.

Just as I was beginning to calm down after, what I’ll forever refer to as, The Incident at Mammoth Springs, Lasky got into his fourth car accident of trip.

There are only a few places in Yellowstone where you can’t be killed in a matter of seconds. Everywhere else in that place and you’re dealing with, One False Move and You’re Being Airlifted to the Nearest Hospital level stakes. The roads are too narrow and there’s always a sheer drop of 500 feet on at least one side of you. Even regular cars shouldn’t be allowed on those roads, let alone our 16 foot truck/apartment. We weren’t driving for more than half a mile when our side view mirror connected with the side view mirror of a passing RV.

Now veterans of minor traffic accidents, we just kept driving. Lasky pulled off and we tried to hide the truck as best we could. If the RV came back, we didn’t see it. Down a mirror, we kept on going.

That night we stayed in the town of Gardiner, just outside the park on the Montana side. We had dinner in a bar and then played pool for drinks against two locals. We won two out of three. Lasky played well. Lucky for him.

One of the guys we were playing, Bill, said he could tell I was a “player” (little did he know I’ve probably only played ten times in the last ten years) and he gestured toward a kid sitting at the bar. If I wanted a game, he was the “big stick” in town, Bill said. Bill's IQ couldn't have been over 80.

The "big stick" was a white kid with dreadlocks down to the middle of is back. He had moved out to Yellowstone from Maine to work as a whitewater rafting guide. Every indication pointed toward him being a good natured hippie kid. He didn’t turn out to be.

I beat him the first game pretty easily, and was already disliking him, when he said I had gotten lucky. I told him he was probably right and we should play again. I beat him again. This time talking a little bit of shit as I sank the eight ball. What constitutes a good pool player in Montana is apparently different than in New Jersey.

He was looking up at the TV, watching a report on wide receiver Plaxico Burress who accidentally shot himself at a nightclub this season. Being from Manie he was a New England Patriots fan. Burress helped the Giants beat the Patriots in the Super bowl two years ago. The kid said something I couldn’t hear and I asked him repeat it. He nodded up to the television and said, “For a Patriots fan, that’s one nigger who shot himself a year too late.” I didn’t say anything. He asked if I wanted to play again. I said no thanks and left.

I guess dreads don't mean what they used to.

The Next morning we found a campsite for that night and then spent the day wandering around the park. We hiked up to a place called Riddle Lake. A ranger told us grizzly tracks had been spotted there recently. We went swimming. Lasky took 9,000 pictures.

Later that afternoon we went to old faithful, which is genuinely amazing but has a distinct Mt. Rushmore feel. Hundreds of people standing around looking up, waiting for it to erupt. There’s something depressing about being in “nature” and having to think about beating the traffic out of a place. But, it is what it is.

That night we built a fire and cooked steaks and elk burgers in a cast iron skillet. It was dark and hard to tell if the meat was cooked. If we were both dead from botulism in a few days, it would have be no ones fault but Lasky’s.

There were a lot of rules about getting rid of the food waste properly to avoid attracting bears. I set aside a few of the steak wrappers, planning to stick them in Lasky’s pockets as he slept. It could buy me enough time to get away if a bear stuck his head in our tent. But then I got too drunk and forgot about the whole thing.

I was expecting to see more wildlife at Yellowstone. But, I was picturing something like Jurassic Park. It wasn’t like that at all.

The animals weren’t a complete disappointment, though. In two days we saw a black bear, a moose, pronghorn antelope, coyotes, mule deer, and the stair-step lady.

We drove out the next morning through the Grand Tetons. If I had a knack for metaphors, I’d use one to describe them.

We were fourteen hours from San Francisco. I fell asleep. Lasky drove.