Sunday, September 18
I collected our coffee from the KOA office and we went back into town. Dad popped into a mineral shop, looking for a few of his favorite specimen types. I enjoyed the fossils and mineral maps, as well as a display of a collection of nearly every Remington rifle and shotgun manufactured until the 1970s mounted high on both walls. A sign read, “Remington questions answered after $100 mineral purchase.” Another shop offered a great antique collection and a room full of historic arms worthy of a roadside museum. I bought Dad a little present for his birthday coming up on Tuesday.
We drove off toward Cody, Wyoming. After a short way across some hills, the landscape again underwent a dramatic change, switching to a desert theme. We stopped at what looked like an old mining town. We weren’t wrong, but we had also come across some sad history. A sign by the highway told us the story of the Smith Mine Disaster. In 1943 an underground explosion killed dozens of miners. Three escaped and a rescue effort with assistance from all over the region was mustered, but no one else was recovered alive. Those who had survived the explosion were poisoned by the methane gas that had caused it.
Miners are among divers, astronauts, and submariners in that it’s some technical system that keeps them alive. When that fails, one wonders about the experience of looking upon the certainty of death from within a mask or capsule as opposed to on a bed in an old body. We’re told two of the miners left us with words that might give us some response, writing;
“Walter & Johnny. Good-bye. Wives and daughters. We died an easy death. Love from us both. Be good.”
The mine’s little surrounding town is since abandoned and falling apart. It’s a tragic shipwreck poking up from among hills in a grassland.
Highways crossing deserts tend to be long and straight, merely connecting the few cities between them in the most efficient liens. Driving becomes an exercise in tiny steering changes, measuring their effect in the coming quarter mile, and making minute revision again. Concentration is difficult with little for the eyes to affix themselves to. I noted minor patches and tar repairs in the road as I drove. Maybe forty or fifty miles later we arrived beneath some low mountains again and I was happy to negotiate curves again. Not long after, we arrived in Cody.
Cody is a small city and would be mostly unremarkable except as a place where one can find a few of the big national chain stores, except for its history. Cody was founded by the famed Buffalo Bill Cody, one of the heroes of western lore, whose story I’ll visit later on. We stopped at the Museum of the American West, which I was surprised to see was a Smithsonian site, but didn’t go in, as my dad generally dislikes museums and the admission price for the two of us felt high. I would… come to regret this later.
We collected a few camping supplies at another store and went west, back toward Yellowstone, with the intention of finding a campsite in the National Forest cocooning it. We passed through a tunnel beneath one of the mountains and found the Buffalo Bill Dam on the other side, which provided a brief stop. I was pleased to see a huge Mann truck with Swiss license plates and took in a few of the interpretive signs posted around us. Moving on, we entered Buffalo Bill State Park and the landscape underwent another radical transformation. The desert texture hadn’t changed, but a huge lake feeding the river that feeds the dam appeared on our left. The mountains along the route preceding Yellowstone took on tired, weathered sedimentary layers, topped with chimney rocks and terraced caps like Mesoamerican pyramids. This is the west of the movies.
We selected a campsite and the host camper warned us of bears in the area. Host campers are usually retired couples with RVs who are given a season of free camping in exchange for managing the site. Ours were the busybody sort, patrolling for shopping bags, conducting investigations over coffee cups, and providing unprovoked warnings that leaving paper in a firepit was technically littering – while taking pleasure in the knowledge. I was a bit irked at this. If, as a ranger, I ran a campground like that, I would expect to be gently reprimanded. Or if one of my colleagues acted like that, I’d tell them to cool it. It’s a campsite, not an HOA. We made a short hike on a trail across the river by bridge and were caught in a shower. Awesome.
We went back down the road for dinner. On the way, we saw a cluster of cars by the side of the road, some people had gotten out and had cameras in hand. It looked like the familiar scene of a bison crossing, but the foliage was too close to the road for buffalo to be likely. We stopped and saw what it was. To my heart’s rapture, a brown bear was seated on its butt and nibbling something among the shrubs, completely ignoring its crowd of fans. I snapped a few photos (with a telephoto lens – from a lot of distance), none of which were great, and we left quickly for safety.
At dinner, I was served a far too large piece of meat. A few tourists shared the dining room with us, including another German couple. The man asked for “a good American beer” and, to my shock and horror, he was served a Bud Lite. The food was great, but the wait staff could have been better sommeliers.
We returned. My father and I walked some circles around the road in the dark, watching the occasional lightening strike off in the park as the Moon came up. The humidity from the prior rain was still in the air and for our incredulous eyes, a rainbow by moonlight had formed – a moonbow. This is the sort of thing I’ve read about but never hoped to see maybe more than a couple of times in my life. And you know what? I got the photo!
We went to bed. Our tents were blasted with wind and rain, but our crappy Wal-Mart tents kept us dry.
