I had never been to Roosevelt before, only read about it in a crinkly mothball book by the area’s namesake: Theodore Roosevelt. I remember the book because it was the finest: first edition, first printing, gold rimmed, bound in leather, etchings of the brawn, hilly bear country faded yellow from years of sun. I bought the book at an auction, read it, then sold it for profit. I don’t regret selling it—now that I have seen the real Roosevelt I don’t need the sun-stained, gold-painted pictures, the real thing is too green-grassed, blue-skied, brown-barked, white-clouded to compare to any one copy, even the finest.
I stumbled into Rosy after a backcountry backpacking trip, shoulder-sore, sunburned, feet blister weary, and an hour too late for lunch. We were invited back for dinner in exchange for food coupons and were advised to take a hike in the meantime. Jim, the smiling chef, pointed us to Lost Lake trail.
We hiked from the cluster of employee housing down a rough road and past a bridge to a patchwork of switchbacks scaling the hillside. The trees burgeoned ragged; rustic like Roosevelt, trees hanging slack from the bone of earth like an old man’s dentures creaking and clacking. I could smell earth and green things sprouting up from the mold. Streams of sun escaped into the shade of trees creating ringlets of light in the shadow-path. This part of the trail was aesthetic the way an antique store is aesthetic.
Someone had hacked a second trail straight up from each switchback, this one was rough and strewn in sticks, all a-jumble. My friend Robert went straight up as I wobbled along the longer trail, tiptoe careful about my blisters gained from the backpacking trip. I stopped and leaned against tree, breathing hard. He waited for me at each turn, grinning, waiting in patches of sunlight.
After topping the hill and turning a few bends we hit Lost Lake, lily pads buried in blue sparkle, the trail alongside sprinkled heavily in mosquitoes and horse droppings. It had only taken us about 20 minutes to walk the .8 mile and so we went on, very slowly, waiting for the time to go and our meal to be ready.
There were rolling meadows liberally spotted in sunflowers, a snow run-off scar trickling down to the lake from the upper hills which encased our peaceful meadow. Though it’s been years since I have read or heard it, it brought to mind the 23rd Psalm, something Bible bound soft, not hard like Jeffers’ crags, cliffs, stones and hawks.
You lead me beside still waters, you nourish my soul. The classic love poem culled from nature, with all its woolly religious metaphors.
On the way back it was all downhill, a stern breeze snuffing at my hair. I ran the switchbacks, Robert slid down straight, on the heels of his boots.
Saturday, June 28, 2008
Backpacking Trip
My internet hasn't been working for awhile, which is why I haven't updated this as much as I want to. I write about my experiences in Word and then wait for a good internet day to email it to myself so I can run to the coffee house and post it online. I have pictures, and I can't wait to show them but that'll be awhile.
I.
Robert and I pack. I laugh at him when he packs his sewing kit. You never know, he tells me, with creased forehead. He places his Stetson sideways on his head, and binds his bags together onto his back. I tell him his back will hurt, and he disagrees. I’ve carried stuff before, he says importantly.
II.
The first mile on the Hellroaring Trail and a gray fox stands with pointed tail, looking at me as if I am about as interesting as a tree; as if he owns this forest, and I am nothing to him. He sniffs a prairie dog hole, puts a dainty fist out, and begins to dig. He sniffs some more. He has walked leisurely within touching distance of me. My camera is at the bottom of my bag, so I just grin at him like a big galoof.
III.
Robert’s back begins to ache and he concedes my baggage point. Next time, he says, I won’t bring the kitchen sink.
IV.
There is a plunking noise as we walk the trail, and I startle, back away. It’s a woodpecker. I see his tail wagging with each pound of beak against bark. I’m happy it’s not a bear.
V.
It is 4.2 miles to 2H8, these numbers are important. We count them, measure them on the map, circle in seconds the river with our swift fingers. Our backs and legs toddle after our fingers and minds, our lungs breathe hard, we sweat. We pause and use iodine with river water and a hot pink nalgene. I drink deep— my stomach gurgles and cramps. Walking and water doesn’t mix in large portions.
VI.
There are sunflowers everywhere and forget-me-nots hidden in the eddies of meadow soil. I remember bringing forget-me-nots to my dead grandmother and I think to myself that my grandmother’s blue eyes are sprouting from the ground, that she is watching me. I bend and touch the green leaves tenderly, swaying from weight of the pack and melancholy.
VII.
There are blood bones, stripped of skin, knobby on the jointed ends, just seconds from our camp site. I turn my head. I hate this part of nature. I prefer the pretty things. Robert digs in my bag and takes a picture of the skeleton. I look again, not able to close my eyes forever, drawn to the blood bones which sink to bleach and rock before me.
VIII.
Coyote Creek is glacier cold and fast like a buffalo on charge. I pour nalgenes of Coyote Creek over my head and scream so loudly from the cold I wake Robert who comes running. I stand barefooted in the dirt and rock with river in my hair, laughing my heart out. I scrub myself raw, then wrap myself into a sleeping bag, shivering.
IX.
In the morning I walk outdoors, still in my flower pajamas, and run right into two deer eating breakfast underneath my suspended backpack. I walk the stretch of the quiet meadow, enjoying the peace before I break camp and head back to civilization. I eat cranberries and listen to the birds. I wait for the sunrise.
I.
Robert and I pack. I laugh at him when he packs his sewing kit. You never know, he tells me, with creased forehead. He places his Stetson sideways on his head, and binds his bags together onto his back. I tell him his back will hurt, and he disagrees. I’ve carried stuff before, he says importantly.
II.
The first mile on the Hellroaring Trail and a gray fox stands with pointed tail, looking at me as if I am about as interesting as a tree; as if he owns this forest, and I am nothing to him. He sniffs a prairie dog hole, puts a dainty fist out, and begins to dig. He sniffs some more. He has walked leisurely within touching distance of me. My camera is at the bottom of my bag, so I just grin at him like a big galoof.
III.
Robert’s back begins to ache and he concedes my baggage point. Next time, he says, I won’t bring the kitchen sink.
IV.
There is a plunking noise as we walk the trail, and I startle, back away. It’s a woodpecker. I see his tail wagging with each pound of beak against bark. I’m happy it’s not a bear.
V.
It is 4.2 miles to 2H8, these numbers are important. We count them, measure them on the map, circle in seconds the river with our swift fingers. Our backs and legs toddle after our fingers and minds, our lungs breathe hard, we sweat. We pause and use iodine with river water and a hot pink nalgene. I drink deep— my stomach gurgles and cramps. Walking and water doesn’t mix in large portions.
VI.
There are sunflowers everywhere and forget-me-nots hidden in the eddies of meadow soil. I remember bringing forget-me-nots to my dead grandmother and I think to myself that my grandmother’s blue eyes are sprouting from the ground, that she is watching me. I bend and touch the green leaves tenderly, swaying from weight of the pack and melancholy.
VII.
There are blood bones, stripped of skin, knobby on the jointed ends, just seconds from our camp site. I turn my head. I hate this part of nature. I prefer the pretty things. Robert digs in my bag and takes a picture of the skeleton. I look again, not able to close my eyes forever, drawn to the blood bones which sink to bleach and rock before me.
VIII.
Coyote Creek is glacier cold and fast like a buffalo on charge. I pour nalgenes of Coyote Creek over my head and scream so loudly from the cold I wake Robert who comes running. I stand barefooted in the dirt and rock with river in my hair, laughing my heart out. I scrub myself raw, then wrap myself into a sleeping bag, shivering.
IX.
In the morning I walk outdoors, still in my flower pajamas, and run right into two deer eating breakfast underneath my suspended backpack. I walk the stretch of the quiet meadow, enjoying the peace before I break camp and head back to civilization. I eat cranberries and listen to the birds. I wait for the sunrise.
Saturday, June 14, 2008
God, or someone else.
There is a boy outside my window who says he is Jesus. I am bigger than this, he proclaims, and knocks on the wooden stairs of the bunkhouse. I create. I am Jesus. I died on the cross.
He seemed so normal at first, your average run of the mill hippie from Nevada who had overdone on the acid hits. Now he is God, and he knocks on wood.
He sits in his bed and reads the Bible. He rocks back and forth. Sweet, he says, sweet. He goes out on the stairs to smoke his Marlboro Reds and talk about what he’s learned. The birds sing around him. There are jackrabbits.
If you do not have a body, Alan counters, you are dead.
I am alive, the boy says, always alive. It’s spirit.
It disturbs me, Robert says. He said: I am a judge. A judge of what? Robert asks. All mankind, the boy says.
How will you judge them?
By their hearts.
What if we are lacking?
Destroy them.
He seemed so normal at first, your average run of the mill hippie from Nevada who had overdone on the acid hits. Now he is God, and he knocks on wood.
He sits in his bed and reads the Bible. He rocks back and forth. Sweet, he says, sweet. He goes out on the stairs to smoke his Marlboro Reds and talk about what he’s learned. The birds sing around him. There are jackrabbits.
If you do not have a body, Alan counters, you are dead.
I am alive, the boy says, always alive. It’s spirit.
It disturbs me, Robert says. He said: I am a judge. A judge of what? Robert asks. All mankind, the boy says.
How will you judge them?
By their hearts.
What if we are lacking?
Destroy them.
Vignettes
I.
There is only now so I see everything in present tense. (Had is such a sad word; will have is greedy.)
Stacy, who is my housemate, drives to Old Faithful with Robert and I. I cram my bunny in the trunk of her car, and when we get there she kisses her boyfriend hard and sends us away. She is wearing a cowboy hat the last I see her, and smiling.
Robert and I rent a heritage cabin—the cheapest with discount. We laugh at the linens. I say I will dip them in mud and then send them to ourselves to receive and count with all the hundreds of other linens.
We plod in the snow, sinking to the waist, laughing. There is a phone booth in the middle of the snow and we sink down to it, to see if there is a dial tone. There is. I call my bank, I talk to the operator, I think of all the 1-800 numbers I could call on a whim.
II.
It is shadow dark and a coyote slinks past Old Faithful’s cone moments before she blows. I take ten pictures. They all come out black, like someone ran over it with a charcoal paintbrush shaped like a Rent an RV.
III.
The cabin is warm. We eat pop tarts and write. He sleeps in his sleeping bag, I take the bed and sleep medication.
IV.
We talk about Joseph Heller and bears in the morning. We see bear tracks and 3 geysers erupt. At Daisy we scream at tourists to walk on the board walk. I’m terrified I will see boiled tourist, camera melded to their blistered fists. “Natural selection,” Robert mumbles and grins at the ground.
On the way an old man with a polished cane nods his head at us. He flings his cane around like it’s an accessory, not a tool. I think about Thornstein Veblen and laugh, I wonder what Veblen would say about geysers and National Parks and tourists.
V.
Stacy gets glared at by tourists as she gases around a bison. “It’s a bison, idiots, you’re in Yellowstone, move along.” Stacy used to be a taxi cab driver from Brooklyn. She tells about it. “You’d have to be dead, not to have stories as a cab driver.” She thinks a little to herself and laughs.
I tell my hitching stories. Stacy tells her story about the drunk guy who jacked off in her car. “I stabbed him in the stomach with a carpenter’s hole punch, shoved him out, and laughed as he stood there, holding his stomach in one hand, dick in the other. Now every time he tries to take care of himself he’ll get a pain in his belly and he’ll remember me. That’s right, remember me.”
VI.
I walk with a friend up a hill and roll down. We stand at the bottom, heaving for breath and smiling.
VII.
I wear my ski mask out hitching, to see how long it will take someone to pick me up. It takes two SUV’s, two minutes.
“Now young lady, try that in summer,” someone dares me.
VIII.
I walk to a graveyard with Robert, and he steals a flower for me. I won’t take it.
It’s his, I say, and point at the slab of granite.
He’s giving it to you, Robert says. It came up out of the rocks. It wasn’t planted there on purpose. You’re not stealing.
I melt, put the flower in my hair.
IX.
At four in the morning the birds are singing and flapping their wings against the trailer full of laundry. Robert and I sit on the steps for break, breathing in sunrise. All we do, we tell each other bitterly, is work, work, work.
We want to go explore, we hate the laundry.
Robert puts in 82.55 hours. I do his time sheet and stare, and call his supervisor up to verify. Yeah, yeah. 82.55 hours. He hardly slept.
X.
When everything else is fluid and flexible I cling to the sturdy books, I can always rely on books. I get a job at the video store to get away from my head, and the things I can’t face. I don’t want to think, I tell a friend. Leave me alone.
I work from 4 in the morning to 2 in the afternoon at the laundry as a secretary. Then I work at the video store until 9. I read about wolves at the video store and wait for something to grab me up, and drag me into what passes for heaven.
I read. I keep waiting. Sometimes I think I’m not being dragged to paradise, but out of my own skin.
In the Arctic Eskimos will kill a wolf by hiding a knife under snow with a dab of seal or elk blood. The wolf, frenzied, will lick himself to shreds. In books about the Wolf Project the writers ponder why wolves are so hated. Maybe because they’re so much like humans, they theorize.
The scientists reintroducing wolves name with numbers, all the wolves are consecutive to each other, one and two and three and four, captured in Canada, let loose in Yellowstone. The higher numbers are more recent. They’re Yellowstone born.
A man with a red beard comes into the video store and says he’s with the Wolf Project. He rubs his hands together. I can’t wait to get back to work, he tells me. He rents the First season of Alias for his wife. I get back to my reading, the reading howls.
There is only now so I see everything in present tense. (Had is such a sad word; will have is greedy.)
Stacy, who is my housemate, drives to Old Faithful with Robert and I. I cram my bunny in the trunk of her car, and when we get there she kisses her boyfriend hard and sends us away. She is wearing a cowboy hat the last I see her, and smiling.
Robert and I rent a heritage cabin—the cheapest with discount. We laugh at the linens. I say I will dip them in mud and then send them to ourselves to receive and count with all the hundreds of other linens.
We plod in the snow, sinking to the waist, laughing. There is a phone booth in the middle of the snow and we sink down to it, to see if there is a dial tone. There is. I call my bank, I talk to the operator, I think of all the 1-800 numbers I could call on a whim.
II.
It is shadow dark and a coyote slinks past Old Faithful’s cone moments before she blows. I take ten pictures. They all come out black, like someone ran over it with a charcoal paintbrush shaped like a Rent an RV.
III.
The cabin is warm. We eat pop tarts and write. He sleeps in his sleeping bag, I take the bed and sleep medication.
IV.
We talk about Joseph Heller and bears in the morning. We see bear tracks and 3 geysers erupt. At Daisy we scream at tourists to walk on the board walk. I’m terrified I will see boiled tourist, camera melded to their blistered fists. “Natural selection,” Robert mumbles and grins at the ground.
On the way an old man with a polished cane nods his head at us. He flings his cane around like it’s an accessory, not a tool. I think about Thornstein Veblen and laugh, I wonder what Veblen would say about geysers and National Parks and tourists.
V.
Stacy gets glared at by tourists as she gases around a bison. “It’s a bison, idiots, you’re in Yellowstone, move along.” Stacy used to be a taxi cab driver from Brooklyn. She tells about it. “You’d have to be dead, not to have stories as a cab driver.” She thinks a little to herself and laughs.
I tell my hitching stories. Stacy tells her story about the drunk guy who jacked off in her car. “I stabbed him in the stomach with a carpenter’s hole punch, shoved him out, and laughed as he stood there, holding his stomach in one hand, dick in the other. Now every time he tries to take care of himself he’ll get a pain in his belly and he’ll remember me. That’s right, remember me.”
VI.
I walk with a friend up a hill and roll down. We stand at the bottom, heaving for breath and smiling.
VII.
I wear my ski mask out hitching, to see how long it will take someone to pick me up. It takes two SUV’s, two minutes.
“Now young lady, try that in summer,” someone dares me.
VIII.
I walk to a graveyard with Robert, and he steals a flower for me. I won’t take it.
It’s his, I say, and point at the slab of granite.
He’s giving it to you, Robert says. It came up out of the rocks. It wasn’t planted there on purpose. You’re not stealing.
I melt, put the flower in my hair.
IX.
At four in the morning the birds are singing and flapping their wings against the trailer full of laundry. Robert and I sit on the steps for break, breathing in sunrise. All we do, we tell each other bitterly, is work, work, work.
We want to go explore, we hate the laundry.
Robert puts in 82.55 hours. I do his time sheet and stare, and call his supervisor up to verify. Yeah, yeah. 82.55 hours. He hardly slept.
X.
When everything else is fluid and flexible I cling to the sturdy books, I can always rely on books. I get a job at the video store to get away from my head, and the things I can’t face. I don’t want to think, I tell a friend. Leave me alone.
I work from 4 in the morning to 2 in the afternoon at the laundry as a secretary. Then I work at the video store until 9. I read about wolves at the video store and wait for something to grab me up, and drag me into what passes for heaven.
I read. I keep waiting. Sometimes I think I’m not being dragged to paradise, but out of my own skin.
In the Arctic Eskimos will kill a wolf by hiding a knife under snow with a dab of seal or elk blood. The wolf, frenzied, will lick himself to shreds. In books about the Wolf Project the writers ponder why wolves are so hated. Maybe because they’re so much like humans, they theorize.
The scientists reintroducing wolves name with numbers, all the wolves are consecutive to each other, one and two and three and four, captured in Canada, let loose in Yellowstone. The higher numbers are more recent. They’re Yellowstone born.
A man with a red beard comes into the video store and says he’s with the Wolf Project. He rubs his hands together. I can’t wait to get back to work, he tells me. He rents the First season of Alias for his wife. I get back to my reading, the reading howls.
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