Faithful Travelers

by James Dodson

  Old Faithful had just erupted when we got there, pulling into a space near the main reception lodge. A large clock in the reception center’s main lobby indicated the next eruption would be around 8:08. We had most of an hour to kill. Maggie wandered into a gift shop that was just opening while I chatted up a blue-haired uniformed park volunteer. I asked her if Old Faithful really was faithful and she explained that contrary to the broad popular notion Old Faithful did not erupt on the hour, every hour, but varied somewhat depending on how long or short the previous eruption was. Historically, she said, the geyser spouted anywhere from 150 to 175 feet in the air, lasting approximately five minutes. She admitted that in recent times the height of the eruption had been slightly less. The geyser was faithful only in the sense that of all the park’s geysers, Old Faithful is the one that never disappoints the visitor by refusing to perform. Theories varied as to why the spout was typically smaller than ever before. Some geologists believed it was due to overdevelopment in other parts of the West and a shrinking water table that was vulnerable to fluctuations; others maintained that subtle shifts in the earth’s geologic crust meant that hot water funneled off to nearby geysers.

  The volunteer’s name was Betty. Betty was a no-nonsense retired bank executive from Missouri and grandmother of six, a human geyser of useful geyser data. She told me most visitors had no clue that they were standing on a massive volcanic basin that could essentially “blow to high heaven at any moment,” and she pointed out, on a distinctly more encouraging note, that a fifth of the world’s geysers—totaling 140—lay within a mile of Old Faithful in the Upper Geyser Basin. There were only three other places in the world, she said, that even remotely compared with Yellowstone’s awesome geyser basins—and they were in Iceland, New Zealand, and someplace way out on the steppes of the old Soviet Union.

  I thanked her for this helpful information and she demanded to know, in a tone once reserved for discussion of a customer’s credit history, if I had the slightest idea who named Old Faithful. I admitted I was stumped. I guessed John Colter or maybe Jim Bridger, the famous mountain man who ventured through the region in the late 1800s.

  “Wrong,” she said triumphantly. “It was General Henry Washburn, surveyor general of the Montana Territory.” Washburn, she explained, was a former Union army general who came West to try and restore his health after the Civil War ruined it. I asked Betty if Washburn’s strategy had proved successful, thinking what a recurring theme this seemed to be. “I reckon so,” she fired at me with a brisk Mizzou smile. “They named a durned mountain range after him.”

  Outside, Old Faithful’s big show was about to commence. People were drifting toward the large platform amphitheater around the geyser and I was surprised, though probably shouldn’t have been, to see the handsome Italian family from Cody pass in the flow of the crowd, still immaculately dressed, the kids still beautifully behaved, all five of them, the papa smiling as ever, the mama still looking slightly mortified. She saw us and waved vigorously and I waved back. We found spots near them on one of the front benches—why come this far, I thought, not to have a view at least as good as General Washburn got. Maggie was eating a corn muffin and as the geyser began to make its first tentative rumbling and hissing sounds, a couple large striped squirrels showed up to beg food.

  “Aw, Dad. Look. Aren’t they cute?”

  “Yep. Adorable. Hey, check it out, babe. I think the old girl’s about to blow.”

  Maggie didn’t appear to hear me. She was over the platform onto the graveled ground in front, feeding the squirrels pieces of her muffin. A particularly portly one waddled right up to her hand and allowed her to feed him.

  An elderly woman seated next to me commented, “Your little girl is the adorable one.”

  “Thanks. We drove three thousand miles just so she could feed these squirrels. How far did you come?”

  “From Fresno,” she said. “My husband Orville and I came here on our honeymoon. That was in 1946. You could walk out there almost to the geyser itself back then.”

  “Life before lawyers, I guess.” I was busy getting my camera ready. “Has the geyser itself changed much?”

  “Not much. I find that rather comforting.” She explained that Orville had been dead two years. Her grandson David had brought her to Yellowstone to see Old Faithful, perhaps for the last time. He was sleeping in this morning at the inn. David was twenty and about to go into the marines. He hoped to be an officer. She hoped he wouldn’t get sent to Bosnia. Orville had been a navy cook. “Oh, look,” she said with gentle urgency.

  I turned my head and looked. Old Faithful was spouting hot water, slow gurgles that quickly became pulses and grew rapidly in strength and intensity. I nearly couldn’t believe what I was seeing, a sight millions of people have witnessed over the past century but that still felt, unaccountably, almost intimately personal. The veil of water made a hissing noise as it rose, like silk rustling in the wind.

  “Maggie, look,” I said. “Isn’t that fantastic?”

  My daughter turned her head casually, still feeding the portly squirrel from the palm of her hand.

  “Yeah. Cool.”

  “Move out a bit,” I said, opening my camera lens. “I want to get a photo of you both. You and Old Faithful, I mean. Not the squirrel.”

  She gave me an embarrassed look, as if to say I must be kidding; like, what a totally tourist thing to do. I was reduced to shamelessly begging her and she finally obliged me by moving out a few feet more into the lens of my camera where the geyser was erupting. The squirrels followed her. She was much more interested in them.

  I snapped a photograph of her kneeling on the gravel, with the geyser fully erupting in the background. Her back was arched, her palm lifted, her eyes shut. She was making an exaggerated pose, perhaps even a gentle mockery of her father’s embarrassing excitement. I’ll never know for sure and that’s really fine with me. The camera caught something extraordinary. She looked like a smiling girl of the Golden West. A girl laughing in prayer. When I turned back to the old woman beside me on the bench, she was smiling, too. Dabbing her eyes with a Kleenex.

  —

  Later that day we followed the Firehole River to the Madison, then followed the Madison River through the commercial clutter of West Yellowstone to the Gallatin, then moseyed up the Gallatin River into breathtaking open country, angling toward Big Sky, where we found a place to camp for two more nights.

  The campsite was yards from the rushing river’s edge, set in a place that resembled a postcard of the great pioneer West. Framed by small rugged mountains where the evergreens abruptly gave way to rock and grasslands at the higher timberline elevations, the sky was blue and the water was clean and fast with plenty of shallows that were easy to navigate on foot and had plenty of pools to investigate. We were listening to beautiful Trout Music and soon catching beautiful trout, too. Maggie caught a couple nice-sized rainbows and I took her picture with them before we released them back into the river. Then she asked if she could swim for a while. I said I didn’t mind, and I really didn’t. We’d pretty much accomplished what I’d hoped we would—found our way to Yellowstone, then found a place that was maybe even a little more like Heaven. Whatever she wanted to do from this point on was fine by me. I was going to relax and let the river of life just take us.

  I sensed a subtle shift in my fishergirl’s interests. She wasn’t fishing with the same avid curiosity as she had been at the start. She would fish for a half hour, catch a trout, then start to lose interest, tangle her line or hook it on a log. It occurred to me that perhaps she was tired of fishing and maybe even a little homesick. When I asked her about this, though, she merely smiled and shook her head and wondered if we might take a hike or drive in to see what Big Sky was like.

  “You know,” I said, “I was wondering that very same thing.”

  We drove into Big Sky, which turned out to be an attractive ski resort town where everybody looked like a model from the L. L. Bean catalog. We ate
dinner at a nice cafe and took in a movie, which happened to be Forrest Gump. Maggie loved the movie and I liked it well enough, though thanks to Darrell Sablonski I knew the plot inside out.

  The two men in the adjoining camp were serious fishermen, a father-and-son tandem named Bill and Greg Greer. They were from Chicago. Bill, an airline executive, knew a great deal about Yellowstone region trout. It was surprising to learn that none of the trout we’d caught were native to the region but had been introduced to local waters by Europeans at the end of the last century. Like other newcomers, browns and rainbows thrived in western waters, Bill explained, and generally stood up better than some of the native species like west slope cutthroats and golden trout to changing environmental conditions and, of more recent threat, invasive parasitic tapeworms and infectious metabolic disorders like whirling disease, a protozoan parasite infection that disrupted a fish’s central nervous system by damaging cartilage tissues surrounding the brain, causing skeletal deformities that made the fish twist, or “whirl,” in the water. The disease, an accidental European import, was already present in twenty-two states and had decimated many trout species. Fearing the massive economic consequences, he said, state fish and game departments were hesitant to come out and say it but whirling disease was running like a medieval plague through western trout and if it wasn’t checked soon it would wipe out most of the region’s native species—nothing short of a trout apocalypse.

  We were sitting around the Greers’ campfire on the second evening when Bill Greer told me this. Maggie was very still, holding a marshmallow over the flame. I asked Bill where he got his trout knowledge.

  “My father used to bring me out here when I was a kid.” He glanced at his son Greg, a lanky youth sprawled in a beach chair. “I did the same with Greg but I’m about to lose my fishing buddy.” Bill smiled a little bit. “Ole Greg just graduated from college and is about to get married.”

  This caught Maggie’s attention. She looked at Greg with new interest.

  “Naw,” mumbled Greg beneath his Ohio State cap. “We’ll still fish.”

  “When’s the date?” I asked. The groom seemed almost too relaxed.

  “Next week,” his father answered for him, winking at me. “I’m giving them two weeks on the Williamson for a wedding present.”

  “Yeah, right,” Greg grunted. “Not unless Martha says so.”

  The groom explained, with a laugh I feared he might someday come to rue, that the bride did nothing without first consulting her Martha Stewart wedding book.

  I’d heard of the Williamson, though I couldn’t place it. I asked Bill and he explained that the Williamson was a fabulous trout river in southeast Idaho. This got us talking about great trout streams they’d fished and I hadn’t. The conversation reminded me of golfers talking about the world’s best golf courses, places they intended to make sacred pilgrimages to someday. Bill and Greg, it turned out, had fished many great rivers together, from the Williamson to New York’s Beaver Kill.

  Bill wanted to know if being from Maine meant I’d fished Grand Lake Stream, which was supposed to have the best rainbow and landlocked salmon fishing in eastern America. I admitted I hadn’t but knew another Bill—my accountant, the guy whose wife calculated his trout cost $375 a pound to catch—who had, and that Bill verified everything I’d heard about the place. I said it was my ambition to get up to Grand Lake Stream soon, possibly in the early autumn.

  The trout talk was losing Maggie. She finished a roasted marshmallow and then asked to go back to our camp to bed. Our camp was only a few yards through woods. I asked if she would mind feeding Amos his cheese and aspirin and she nodded, politely said good night, then led her dog off to bed.

  “How old is she?” Bill asked after she’d gone.

  “Seven.” I decided to skip the rest of the weary joke and to keep the divorce business under my hat as well.

  “Amazing girl. Bet you’re proud.”

  I said I was and explained to the Greers that Maggie had been a real trouper on this trip but I feared her interest in fly angling was beginning to wane a bit. We’d been away from home over three weeks; she’d never before been away from home more than five days.

  “That’s okay,” Bill said, waving his hand. “It’ll come back—her fishing interest, I mean. Maybe she just needs to do a few other kinds of things, like riding a horse or something. Does she ride?”

  I said no; she’d never ridden a horse.

  “You ought to take her to a dude ranch we know up near Great Falls. It’s in the Lewis and Clark National Forest. Incredible place. Very low-key. Great trout streams. Beautiful scenery. They also have a terrific riding program for kids. If they’re not booked up you could let her do her thing on a horse while you go off and fish till you fall over.”

  I told him that sounded good, perhaps just what we needed. We agreed that in the morning he would give me the ranch’s phone number.

  “If they can’t take you,” Bill added, tossing another log on the fire, “I know another place down in Durango, Colorado, that’s even better with kids. Their riding program is actually famous. Are you thinking of heading south?”

  I said I wasn’t sure which way we’d planned to go, but since I’d heard on the radio that afternoon that there were thirty-eight separate wildfires blazing in Oregon and Idaho, going farther west seemed pointless and we would indeed probably go south a bit before turning for home. Jack’s birthday was in exactly two weeks.

  “Good. I’ll give you the number of Colorado Trails Ranch. Maggie’ll love it. And you’ll love the San Juan.”

  “The San Juan, eh?”

  I couldn’t believe he’d said the San Juan. That was the place Saint Cecil had described as a cathedral of trout. I told the Greers about Saint Cecil and described how he described the San Juan River near the dam.

  “He’s right,” Bill said. “Wait till you see it.”

  “Awesome,” Greg Greer agreed with an amiable grunt from beneath his ballcap.

  —

  Later that night, I called my friend Silent Sam from Old Blue.

  It had been five days since we last spoke. He was still in the grass-cloth room and wanted to know where we were.

  “Montana. Some God-ugly river.” I held the cell phone out the window, hoping he could hear the Gallatin gurgling in the darkness.

  I asked him how he was feeling.

  “Not as bad as yesterday. Yesterday I was climbing the walls of this place. They’re going to let me go home tomorrow. I’ve been talking to a shrink.” He gave a bitter little laugh.

  “What’s he say?”

  “Not much. Getting a shrink to open up is damn hard.”

  This was a good sign, I thought; Silent Sam was getting his sense of humor back.

  “Let me ask you something,” he said before I could ask him if he still felt the sky was falling.

  “No. I won’t come kill ducks with you this fall.”

  “You’ve always been religious….”

  “I guess so. Religions start wars, though. The older I get, the more I think I’m just plain old spiritual. A no-name brand at that.”

  “Well, what I mean is, you believe in God.”

  I didn’t deny the charge, but I pointed out that it often felt more like God believed in me, though I probably didn’t deserve such good luck.

  He chose his words carefully. “The thing is, I keep thinking none of this would have happened if I believed in God. We quit going to church ten years ago.”

  I said I didn’t think God zapped people for not going to church, otherwise most of England would be toast. Recently I’d seen a poll that showed there were more psychologists than priests in Great Britain and that less than 10 percent of the population fessed up to going to church on a regular basis. I said that a life of faith had nothing to do with going to church.

  “Why do you believe in God?” he asked, sounding every bit like the skilled cross-examiner I knew he was in the courtroom.

  I replied that I
believed because I’d spent years trying not to believe but hadn’t quite managed to pull off the feat. He thought I was joking. I assured him I wasn’t.

  “Who do you think God is?” he tried next.

  I admitted I didn’t have a clue as to who or what God really was; I simply felt God. I couldn’t prove He was there—I couldn’t even prove “He” was a he. For all I knew, God might be a woman, because God was different things to different people. There was the God of wrath and the God of love, the brimstone-chucking God of the Old Testament and the error-forgiving God of the Gospels. One was the bearer of a sword, the other an olive branch. But that was just our choices of a creator. The Hopi Indians believed God was music. The Shakers found divine presence in the workings of a simple well-made table. A Sufi Muslim said God was “breath within the breath.” Personally, I added, if God was a woman I sure hoped like hell She didn’t turn out to be my long-lost fourth-grade teacher Miss Wettington or else we would all wind up getting grilled in the janitor’s closet someday.

  Bobby laughed a little bit. It still wasn’t a real laugh. He asked me to suggest something he could read on the subject, and I warned him that religious faith wasn’t like auto maintenance—you couldn’t just pick up a manual and “learn” it. I gave him a couple titles, books of essays he might wish to browse through, but nothing too deep. I also suggested the writings of a couple poets I fancied.

  “I forgot how you dig poetry,” he said. “Personally I hate the stuff.”

  “Maybe you’re not crazy enough.”

  —

  I pushed the off button on the phone and was somewhat startled to discover Maggie standing beside the truck in her sleep shirt.

  “I thought you were asleep, Mugs.”

  “Can we call Jack and Mommy?” she asked. “I want to say good night to them.”

  “Of course.”

  She climbed onto my lap and I dialed the house by the salt marsh three thousand miles away, figuring they would be home by now. Her mother picked up on the second ring. We chatted pleasantly for a moment and then I put Maggie on. She filled her mother in on seeing a wolf and Old Faithful and the cute fat squirrels who ate crumbs from her hand. She made no mention of the great trout fishing we’d finally encountered but repeated the stories for her brother’s benefit, then handed the phone to me.