Faithful Travelers

by James Dodson

  “Let’s green light that one,” I heard him drawl as we filtered slowly above him. “That’s right. Sell when she reaches twenty-nine.”

  —

  The Shoshone, at dawn, was surprisingly cold, the current strong in the lee of the rock island. I waded in to about my waist and was glad I’d bothered with the neoprene waders—it was cold. Maggie was still sleeping and the sun was not yet up. Amos had followed me to the river, peed on a bush, then stretched out to sleep for a while longer on the rocky bank. I made my first cast, using a #12 Sparkle Dun. Tyson Probst had said wet flies with a sinking line worked best, but a trout’s diet is much more varied in rushing water than still and I hadn’t packed any sinking line precisely to avoid the temptation to use it and was determined to stick to my declared objective of luring trout to the surface on a dry fly—I wanted to see the critters take the bait.

  The allure of trout fishing is not about catching and eating fish; it’s about seducing and fooling them, making them rise to your imitation of life. I made a couple overhead casts and then shot my line into the gray-tinted darkness. I felt the swift current take the line; I lifted the rod tip and made another backcast, sending an even longer cast upstream. It was maybe my best one of the trip. Either I was growing more adept at fly casting, I thought, or I should always practice my technique in the half-light, when casting becomes more a function of trusted body rhythm than the eyes. My eyes drifted up the canyon walls. Huge limestone cliffs rose around me and the sky was turning lighter above them by the minute. Beautiful, I thought. If only Silent Sam could see this. Just might cure whatever ailed him.

  I felt a strong pull and thought it was the current, then realized I’d hooked a large fish. I pinched the line and held the fish against the current, slowly reeling in my excess line and trying to restrain my excitement. In the half-light, the fish felt immense—but then, they always do to me. I felt the line shift toward the center currents, then move back to the shore. I reeled slowly, watching the Scott rod double over.

  It was a handsome cutthroat trout, maybe thirteen inches in length. I got him in the net, wet my hands, and lightly touched his side, the muddy orange flash on his side. Perhaps catching a trout helps. The sun was coming up and I suddenly felt an almost illicit pleasure at what we’d done and where we were and I saw the same star George Custer saw a hundred years before, a few mornings before he met his death at the Little Bighorn. The morning star was low on the rim of the Shoshone’s canyon, glittering like a frozen tear. I let the trout go and went back to camp to wake my daughter, shivering with either excitement or cold, thirsty for coffee, and hoping to make Yellowstone Park by eight.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Oh, Yellowstone

  THE FIRST WHITE men to set foot in Yellowstone, probably early French trappers searching for a mythical river cutting through towering golden bluffs they’d heard the Mandan Indians of the Dakotas speak of in the late 1700s, were undoubtedly astonished by the wonders they met.

  Thermal geysers, hot springs and boiling fumaroles, towering lodgepole pines, a beautiful golden-bluffed river teeming with trout, forests thick with elk—a real American Eden. But it wasn’t until Lewis and Clark passed this way in 1805 that anyone east of the Missouri knew this place of wonders even existed. Passing through the northern fringes of the present-day park, they encountered the river with towering bluffs and named it the Yellowstone, a name that stuck. On the return trip, the party split up and a member of the expedition named John Colter became the first white to cross the heart of the wilderness. His account of seething cauldrons and exploding geysers was widely ridiculed back East, but as more prospectors and trappers moved into the region over the next sixty years, confirming stories of an American Eden, Congress finally dispatched the first survey teams to the region in 1870. Two years later, after a rancorous debate on the Senate floor during which several participants allegedly traded punches, America’s first national park came into creation.

  The idea—virtually without precedent in human history—was to set aside an entire region for legal protection from development and business interests, a managed-care system aimed at preserving the pristine quality of the wilderness. But the park’s first years proved a management nightmare. Congress provided lip service but no real funding for preserving Yellowstone and irresponsible tourists soon dumped laundry soap down geysers, ruining their intricate plumbing, and washed their clothes in hot springs. Bandits routinely preyed on stagecoaches bearing wealthy excursionists into the park, and the same peaceful Nez Percé Indians who’d saved the exhausted and disease-riddled Lewis and Clark expedition from certain death in 1805 killed two tourists during the uprising that resulted when the gold fever once again caused the U.S. government to renege on a signed treaty and the army was sent to round up the Nez Percé and move them to a reservation.

  Under the leadership of Chief Joseph, a band of 250 warriors, protecting twice as many women, children, and elderly people, outmaneuvered an army many times its size for nearly four months, launching brilliant guerrilla attacks and eluding captors for nearly 1,700 miles before the insurrection ran out of steam and, just thirty miles from relative safety over the Canadian border, Chief Joseph gave his famous speech of surrender: I am tired. My heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever. The Nez Percé had been promised they would be sent to new lands in Idaho. They were shipped instead to a cramped and marshy reservation in Oklahoma, where an outbreak of malaria killed nearly a third of the tribe.

  I was telling Maggie these tales, gleaned from a handy pocket guide on the park, as we sat in gridlocked traffic outside Yellowstone’s eastern gate. Having gotten an earlier-than-expected jump from Cody, we’d arrived at the park’s eastern entry gate shortly after seven, only to find fifty or so cars, motor homes, and recreational vehicles parked in the middle of the road waiting for the park to officially open. The delay was due to a repaving project up ahead, we were informed, and a woman in the trading post at Pashuka, where we rolled to a stop and got out to go try and scout up pancakes, said it would probably be eleven before we reached West Thumb and the Bay Bridge campground.

  “Won’t be a problem,” she assured us with a big western smile, “if you’ve got a camping reservation.” I smiled back, wondering if we were dead meat because when I’d phoned from Minnesota a week or so ago, the Yellowstone reservation person had politely informed me all of the park’s campgrounds were now operated on a “first-come, first served” basis, due to heavy demand. She’d advised us to simply get there early, “preferably on a weekday,” but apparently spoke with forked tongue because by the time I found myself standing in line at the Bay Bridge ranger station two hours after pancakes, it was clear that everybody ahead of me in line had a reservation of some sort.

  The ranger smiled sympathetically and suggested we try driving up to Mammoth Hot Springs; she heard there were still a few campsites available there but we’d better hurry. We could also try below Grant Village at Lewis Lake, she added, though that park often filled up first with people coming from the Tetons. I pointed out we were fly anglers and asked which direction she, an expert on such matters, would go, given such limited time and choices, and she smiled again. “I’d go north to Mammoth Hot Springs. That way, if it’s full up, you can follow the Yellowstone up into Montana. There’s a nice fish camp near Pine Creek you could probably get into. The crowds don’t usually go that far.” She wrote the name on a piece of paper and handed it to me, then apologized again that there was no room at Bay Bridge. “This is the crazy season.”

  I thanked her, put the paper in my breast pocket, and walked back to where Amos had attracted a small crowd of children. Maggie was holding court, as usual, and asked me where we were headed. “South to Lewis Lake,” I said.

  Clever me. Like Chief Joseph and his band, we would do what they least expected. We passed miles of blackened forest from the park’s recent devastating wildfires and procured the last campsite at Lewis Lake. The campgr
ound was crammed full of tents and campers. Our campsite number was B-1, which Maggie optimistically insisted stood for “Best One,” which might well have been true if not for the fact that it stood on a small dusty rise beneath some overhanging pines just behind one of the campground’s main toilet facilities.

  As I began unloading the gear and spreading out the ground tarp for the large Bean tent, Maggie, world-renowned expert on public bathrooms, went to inspect the facilities. She came back as I was pegging down the last corner pin and announced, “The toilets don’t flush.”

  “Of course not. They’re privies,” I said with a ridiculously transparent enthusiasm, “just like the park’s original explorers used. I wouldn’t be surprised if Meriwether Lewis didn’t use this very one.”

  “Yeah, well, he pooped on the seat.”

  I asked if she was joking.

  “Come on, I’ll show you.” She sounded delighted to reveal the horror to me. “I mean, it’s like, totally gross.”

  I thanked her and said I would take her word on it and that we could use the facilities up at Grant Village. That way, I said, we could have a shower as well.

  The ranger came by in his truck to collect our six bucks per diem. I explained we might be staying two or three nights, thinking as I said it, given the sudden shift of the breeze, what a wildly optimistic scenario that was. The ranger looked as if he’d just graduated from the Explorer Scouts but I didn’t fail to notice the .38 on his hip and the pump-action Remington bolted to his dash. His name was stitched on his shirt. Karl. Karl said we could just pay for the weekend and asked for $18. I handed him the money and asked if it was okay for us to move campsites if another site opened up, someplace a bit farther upwind of the johnny. Karl said that was fine but to please notify him if we made the switch. I said we would do that and, speaking of the johnny, wondered if he knew that someone had missed the designated drop zone in there.

  “It’s a problem, sir,” he said, looking solemnly at the offending structure. “I’ll report it.” He looked at Amos and asked me if he was my dog. I didn’t deny it.

  “We ask that you keep him on a lead at all times, for his sake as well as that of the wildlife.” Ranger Karl explained that there’d been reports of an active grizzly in the area and said we should also be sure and lock up our food materials in the truck each night.

  “Will do,” I assured him, then pointed at his Remington and asked if the shotgun was for any wildlife that got out of hand.

  Ranger Karl smiled. He looked like a nice kid.

  “The human wildlife, mostly,” he said.

  I felt my mood sinking fast. By the time I finished putting up the tent and arranging the camp, I was tired and hot and filthy and wanted a cold stream to fish in and a cold beer to drink and realized I should have taken the nice lady ranger’s advice and driven us up the Yellowstone to a swell uncrowded fish camp in Montana. Then I told myself to snap the hell out of it because (a) we were finally in the heart of Yellowstone Park, the world’s first national park and the place I’d dreamed of going as a kid, and (b) tomorrow we were actually going to see Old Faithful and maybe fish the Yellowstone or Madison. So what if some cretin had dumped on the seat and we were camped on the sorriest patch of campground in all of Yellowstone and possibly the entire continental United States. How much worse could it get than that?

  Then, a few yards to starboard, Maggie casually remarked, “Gosh, Dad. Check out these red ants.”

  Actually, “these red ants” didn’t quite cover it. Within minutes it became clear I’d pitched our camp on one of Yellowstone’s legendary ant colonies, inciting the collective fury of a couple million ants who dutifully poured out of their holes to protest our arrival. To be honest, I couldn’t tell if they were red ants or black ants, but I wasn’t in any mood to whip out my Complete Field Guide to American Wildlife and properly identify them. If I’d had Ranger Karl’s pump Remington, I probably would have emptied the chamber on them. Instead, I marched to the truck and fetched a jumbo can of wasp spray and spent the next quarter hour rendering the site biologically sterile until the year 2050. As the smoke settled and their little bodies twitched pathetically in the dust, I felt sort of bad about murdering so many bugs in cold blood and remembered reading about a sect of Buddhist monks who were so determined to avoid causing any suffering to the living world that they went to their evening prayers sweeping the path before them. Obviously they’d never tried to camp behind a privy in Yellowstone Park, though.

  “I really wish you hadn’t done that,” a testy voice said. I looked around and saw a young woman glaring at me from the adjacent campsite. She and another young woman had been hanging wash on a line in their campsite, and I’d noticed them at one point pause and exchange a sisterly kiss over drying apparel that probably would have caused emotional distress to their pioneer grandmothers.

  Maggie saw it, too, and I realized we’d never had any kind of discussion about lifestyle choices and gay people. I didn’t have a clue if she even knew what it meant to be gay but it followed that she didn’t because, as I say, we’d never had the Big Talk about sex. The Indians called gay people “two-spirited.” “I’m sorry,” I called over to the angry two-spirited woman, “but they had us outnumbered a million to one.”

  “That stuff is deadly poison. You should know better.”

  I gathered from her tone that we probably wouldn’t be roasting marshmallows together and singing Woody Guthrie songs by the fire later on. The women slipped into their tent, where they probably meant to have a nice refreshing afternoon nap, and I suggested to Mugs that she give our traveling elder statesman a proper walk. A few minutes later, she and Amos disappeared down the road, and when they came back half an hour later they brought two new pals in the persons of an eleven-year-old boy and his little sister who were camping with their grandparents somewhere beyond the two-spirited ladies.

  “That’s a cool tent,” said the boy, who said his name was Darrell Sablonski. Darrell was wearing a New Jersey Devils hockey shirt and a Packers cap and immediately began talking as if someone had pulled a string. “We only have my grandpa’s trailer. It kinda smells. We’re from Wisconsin. My grandpa works at the sausage factory in Sheboygan. I’m going into the sixth grade. Have you ever been whitewater rafting? We’re supposed to go whitewater rafting on Monday. I just took my hunter’s safety test back home. I’ll be twelve in October. Back home I have an iguana, three cats, four hamsters, four dogs, one shitzapoo, and twelve fish. Have you seen the movie Forrest Gump? I did. It was really cool. I really like your tent.”

  I invited him to go in and have a look around, hoping to shut him up. Maggie showed our new neighbors around the tent like Ivana Trump squiring Barbara Walters through her penthouse suite and I heard her cooing, “My father will sleep here, you see, on this cot, and I’ll sleep there, on that one. That’s my bear Susie….” Darrell’s little sister wandered out of the tent and asked me for something to drink. She looked parched and I started to offer her a cold beer like the one I’d just opened but offered her a Pepsi instead. She thanked me. I smiled down at her and asked her name. Her name was Kelly Sablonski and she was five. “My grandpa drinks beer, too,” she revealed sweetly. “He farts a lot at night.”

  “Ah, well. The winds of change come to every man.”

  “Dad,” asked Maggie, “can Darrell and Kelly roast marshmallows with us later?”

  “Of course,” I said, not thinking of what that might lead to, thinking instead how Grandpa the Sheboygan sausage man might feel right at home in our smelly but ant-safe campsite.

  We put the canoe in and fished Lewis Lake, catching absolutely nothing, paddling downwind for a while and trying our apparent lack of luck in a nice evergreen-embowered cove where black logs lay just beneath the crystal-clear surface. It looked like a can’t-miss trout or bass hole but missed its objective of improving my sinking mood; then the wind came up strongly and I realized we had a real fight on our hands just paddling back to the boat landing. Norumb
ega Girl’s bow kept turning in the wind and we would drift that way for a while until the deranged paddler at the rear of the canoe managed to flail the craft back on course. Maggie, bless her, heroically tried to help, slapping at the water with her junior-sized paddle, displacing a large percentage of the lake directly onto her father. It had taken us fifteen minutes to smoothly glide down the lake—and almost an hour to crazily paddle back. By the time we hauled the canoe out, I was soaked with sweat and Lewis Lake water and felt as if I’d gone three rounds with a Yellowstone grizzly. My aching shoulder muscles were ready for a hot shower, my stomach for a decent meal, my mind for a nice big friendly Highland Scotch.

  “That was kinda fun,” Maggie chirped, prompting me to give my beloved firstborn the kind of look Meriwether Lewis must have given his old Charlottesville buddy Tom Jefferson when Jefferson asked him to name the neatest part of the trip that had nearly killed him.

  We chained the canoe to a tree and drove to the park store at Grant Village to buy groceries for our stay. The store was full of sunburned shoppers buying movie magazines and Yellowstone souvenirs. The grocery section was small but the souvenir department vast and full of German and Japanese tourists buying T-shirts with the Old Faithful and Yellowstone logos. I looked around, hoping to catch a glimpse of the Ten Sleep cyclists, but they weren’t there. We bought a few groceries—two rib-eye steaks, a fresh tomato, a box of Kraft macaroni and cheese, a pint of fruit yogurt for dessert—then beat a retreat to the village showers, where a couple dozen equally beaten-looking vacationers waited in two lines with towels and little soap containers like the ones city kids carry to summer camp. I got in line behind a man who looked as if he had the weight of the world on his broad, hairy back. “The last time I did this,” he groaned, without looking at me, “was in the army. At least I got paid.”