I am tired of traveling past Yellowstone without stopping on my trips. So, although I need to get home, yesterday I visited this first national park in the world for the second time in my life. My daughters and I spent 2-3 days here in 1993. This kind of time in Yellowstone is so inadequate but I’ll take it over never visiting.
So, I went out sightseeing and hiking about. Oddly, I was standing on a path in the middle of the afternoon when the sound of the wind blowing in the firs caught me and there I was, standing in Yellowstone, but mentally back at the Girl Scout camp on the Menominee River for a moment. For 9-10 years, my daughters and I volunteered to help open the camp each spring – setting up tents and helping to put in the dock. We’d reverse it all again in the fall. But in the spring, the wind rushed through the pines sounding just as it did yesterday while I was standing on that path. I hadn’t realized how I’d missed hearing that sound once a year until then.
Yesterday, I saw a pronghorn doe and her fawn, mule deer, several elk does and their fawns, bison, some turns in rivers so beautiful it made my throat hurt when I looked at them and lots of the amazing landscape that is Yellowstone. I don’t think I’d made it halfway through the park when some change in the air made me check the time and I realized I’d better head back to the motel.
On leaving the park at the north end sometime near 8 and with about 50 miles still to drive, I stopped for supper in the little town just outside the park gates. I was seated facing a group of eight people, seven of whom appeared to be 5-10 years older than I. When they left the restaurant, they paused out front, still talking. Just as I was wrapping up, one of the men fell. And he was dead. A bystander began CPR and the restaurant hostess called for help. Park Rangers and some EMT’s responded quickly but it was a while before the ambulance got there with a defibrillator. I noted that my car was parked where further emergency vehicles should be parked and, since my role there was ‘gawker’, I left just after the first shock treatment failed. I drove up the valley thinking about that man. I’m sure he was a loss to family and friends but I thought that for him, perhaps, this was a good end; a congenial evening among people he apparently cared about and none of the rigors of a future in hospitals. Even so, I doubt he was ready yet. I recalled chatting yesterday morning with a woman at the motel. During our conversation, I had commented that I had gotten up late. She said, “But you got up. That’s the important thing.” One hundred percent right.
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