Don and I drove across quite a bit of the high plains, and spent days canvassing the back wrinkles of the Rockies. It was time to get back to real life, and Yellowstone National Park was the most natural contact point. West Yellowstone was mobbed with people from all over, and I was soon running around with my wallet in my hand like everybody else. Tourists so far were comparatively few on this trip, except for the spectacular Museum of the Rockies. When we entered the park, in a plague year, and with the sky dulled by the flames of California, we wondered how many people we ought to expect to see. But 2021 was apparently the year everybody went to Yellowstone, breaking all records for visitation. Sick and tired of public disease and desperate to get away from privacy. We asked: do we imagine the park as a reservoir of wildness surrounded by property and development? Or imagine it as the exposed tip of a greater wildness beyond and outside the park? Is that right? What do I think? I think it’s a great thing to be here at all.
Yellowstone is the massive caldera of an incredible supervolcano and a relic of the formation of the Rockies, leaving a trail of previous calderas behind it all the way to Utah. The caldera answers a lot of questions, such as the geologic-sized Idaho ashfall that provided much of the physical material the upper Great Plains are made of. The instability of the earth seems somehow akin to what we call art.
Yellowstone is the massive caldera of an incredible supervolcano and a relic of the formation of the Rockies, leaving a trail of previous calderas behind it all the way to Utah. The caldera answers a lot of questions, such as the geologic-sized Idaho ashfall that provided much of the physical material the upper Great Plains are made of. The instability of the earth seems somehow akin to what we call art.
Ragnarok's Thumbprint—one of the many geyser fields in the caldera.
Phantasmagoria in the forest.
The Soap Pit.
Traversing the Paint Pots.
The ghostly blue of the sapphire geyser pools seems like an exhalation from some other dimension—but it’s our dimension.
Yellowstone is well over 6,000 feet above current sea level. It is entered through mountain passes. Lewis and Clark did not find it, which seems strangely un-iconic of them in this part of the world. In the end I don’t know exactly what to say about Yellowstone. It’s a civilizational monument. It would still be there without the NPS, but in what form?
Northern rim of the Yellowstone Caldera on the way to Gardiner, Montana.
Thinking back to the beginning of our trip, with reference to Roadside Geology of Montana (why set foot in Montana without having that book open?), the badlands-dominated stretch of territory between Glendive and Dickerson is a mere sample or slice though a huge belt of similarly-formed terrain extending southward until the end of it and northward into Canada as far it goes. Paleocene petrified wood tells us this land was just as lush and wet after the last big comet as it was before, from Hell Creek to Fort Union so to speak.
Some Hell Creek clams from the long-lost Interior Seaway.
The region is so vast that even the Ice Ages didn’t generate enough ice to scour all of it. It’s been grasslands ever since, long enough that the brontotheres and hyracodons who once roamed it have been replaced over and over. The horse was invented here, leaving a famous trail of equine evolution, but did not survive here, and had to be reintroduced by Europeans. The ancestral camel, llama, and rhinoceros poked around for many millions of years, pursued by inconceivably terrible hyenas, hideously-fanged tigers and dire wolves. There were mammoths. There were mastodons. But it’s been dry for a long time thanks to the Rockies, and there’s nothing left but small game; the bison, the lowly elk, the humble grizzly.
The region is so vast that even the Ice Ages didn’t generate enough ice to scour all of it. It’s been grasslands ever since, long enough that the brontotheres and hyracodons who once roamed it have been replaced over and over. The horse was invented here, leaving a famous trail of equine evolution, but did not survive here, and had to be reintroduced by Europeans. The ancestral camel, llama, and rhinoceros poked around for many millions of years, pursued by inconceivably terrible hyenas, hideously-fanged tigers and dire wolves. There were mammoths. There were mastodons. But it’s been dry for a long time thanks to the Rockies, and there’s nothing left but small game; the bison, the lowly elk, the humble grizzly.
Paleocene petrified wood, silicified into agate after repeated massive falls of volcanic ash.
Travel sets you up to spot interesting people, if you like that. I have mixed feelings. Donnie is a people-person—a fishing guide would have to be. He lived in various parts of Montana for years, has many friends in the state, and they stay in touch. In his opinion not much was changed in the places he knew, except for the obvious expansion of Billings into a wider town. Donnie sees the landscape in terms of game animals, defined by its rivers; game was scarcer and the land was dryer.
When we travel we take our questions with us, and sometimes get parts of answers. Was there a feeling that we traveled in a sort of end moment, seeing the last of a particular America? We’re prisoners of history whether we know it or not. The philosopher Elias Canetti referred to the “crowd of the dead” in Crowds and Power. William Faulkner expressed it well in Requiem for a Nun: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Everywhere the model of life for family, folk and nation is the unfathomably heavy hand of the crowd of the past. But people regionally do not have exactly the same dead hand weighing on them. The United States is a cold collation of fairly distinct regions held together by shared cultural concepts. Some of the sharing is involuntary. The culture of what we call democracy has no physical location. As historian Jacob Burckhardt noted (about the Italian Renaissance, in all its artistic instability), powers can be too weak to unify a people but still strong enough to block any other unifying force. Serious academic observations on sovereignty note, in a truly common sense observation, that challenging and being challenged are integral features of sovereignty, or put another way, sovereign claims are always in a state of crisis. Of course, as Michael J. Nelson said in the preliminary skit for Last of the Wild Horses, “There’s a difference between regionalism and just plain stupidity.”
Can we have the brontotheres, ghastly giant hyaenas, running rhinoceros and dire wolves back?
In no way were we in charge of our own destiny. In the end we turned into tumbleweeds. We saw Lusk, Wyoming, dangling from its long highways. On the side of a windy back road in northwest Nebraska, staring at tufa left behind by an ancient volcanic ashfall, I began to wonder where our home is, not so much in terms of myself as a domesticated monkey, but asking where the life of the body leaves us in relation to the earth. You wouldn’t happen to know, would you? Apparently the literal answer to this seemingly abstract question is “A roadcut in upper west Nebraska.” It feels great to get that answered.
Natural home of Moose Drool, possibly the one best beer in the world.
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