I should repeat what I've mentioned before, that court reporting ruined my life, not only making me antisocial but wrecking my memories. I calculated once that I had about 15,000 students in my college teaching years; add 25+ years of court reporting, sweeping up the shards of lives of thousands: Name? Birthdate? Where did you go to school? Are you married? How many children do you have? What do you do for a living? On and on into bitter family histories past incest and battles over children and property and dogs to brutal assaults, barroom brawls, rapes, murders. Consequently I can truthfully say that once I had encyclopedic knowledge of the family because we spent so much time together, and I do recall Aunt Paula's large salt-and-pepper-shaker collection and Darryl's silver belt buckle from Darryl Zanuck, Aunt Audree's rebus letters to me and Aunt Betty's cherry pies, Aunt Myrtle's Randolph apartment, Gramma's aprons, Grampa's South Dakota cousins. But a great deal has sunk under the accumulated layers of all these other people I've had to cope with occupationally, like geological sediments piling up, which is not an excuse but an explanation why, for instance, I can no longer remember Uncle Forrest's death. (I'm sure Gram and her other brother and sisters would've attended the funeral.)
I did find in Graeme Gibson's charming, informative The Bedside Book of Birds: An Avian Miscellany, this poem's ending from James Reaney's "The Chough": When I grew older I learned/That the chough, the raven and the crow/That rise like a key signature of black sharps/In the staves and music of a scarlet sunset/Are not to be feared so much/As that carrion bird, within the brain,/Whose name is Devouring Years,/Who gobbles up and rends/All odds and ends/Of memory, good thoughts and recollections/That one has stored up between one's ears/And whose feet come out round either eye."
Yellowstone set a world precedent, one of those gifts of the United States to the rest of the globe we can be proud of (handy when we have an administration of shame), the first of our national parks, also the largest thermal area with the most geysers in the world over one of the world's most colossal supervolcanoes. Explosions millions of years ago were, apparently, the largest in earth's history, hurling ash from Iowa to California; and the area is still earthquake-prone with mudpots, hot springs, fumaroles (steam vents), and geysers signalling steady activity. One of the largest calderas on earth is under a great portion of the park, a caldera being the collapsed bowl of a volcano. (Crater Lake is an extraordinarily beautiful example.) Americans tend to forget that they breed and live carelessly among and over some of the globe's most volatile geology, whether we're talking of the Cascades with Mt. St. Helens, Mt. Hood, Mt. Shasta, Mt. Ranier, the remains of Mt. Lassen, or Yellowstone, not to mention earthquake fault zones like those making Californians--and people around Yellowstone--occasionally nervous. In the last several years I've watched a number of documentaries about the worrisome bulging of Yellowstone, as magma presses upward and the park's variety of escape valves isn't sufficient. (Since I know what a mere pressure cooker can do to a kitchen ceiling and I've been to Mt. St. Helens and Mt. Lassen, that sort of ominous threat of geological havoc, however carefully monitored, means much more than manmade weapons.) Some websites claim that Yellowstone Lake and the Norris Geyser Basin are closed to the public now, that the areas are hazardous with dying plant life and the fishkill has rendered the lake empty; other sites mention only areas closed for road construction, the park being one of the most heavily trafficked, so much so that it was going to institute a quota system several years ago.
Yellowstone, incidentally, familiar to our Native Americans, was first seen by mountain man John Colter, a geyser area near Cody called "Colter's Hell." I mention him not because people didn't believe his descriptions of the Yellowstone area nor because he told Captain Clark about several new areas but because his thrilling escape from the Blackfeet, the most ferocious tribe in the western Montana area, was one of my favorite childhood stories. After killing his trapping companion, who foolishly tried to escape and shot a warrior dead, the Blackfeet debated how to torture Colter to death and finally stripped him utterly and sent him barefooted on a race for his life across miles of prickly pear cactus and other obstacles until he had to confront and kill his closest pursuer and finally hid under a pile-up of driftwood logs in the Madison River. It then took him 11 days to cover the 250 miles to Manuel Lisa's fort at the mouth of the Big Horn, with no weapons, surviving on Indian/prairie turnips. What a story to thrill a little boy who grew up with the racist game of Cowboys and Indians!
In one of those memory quirks, because I haven't ever been back but all around Yellowstone on western trips since, and because I had a black-and-white Yellowstone photo album I cherished that I should still have stuck somewhere, I remember well enough our circle tour. Can't say whether we came in at West Yellowstone or Gardiner, but we stayed overnight at Old Faithful in a little cabin near the great lodge. Prices were stiff enough that we prepared our own food; that I know because the warnings about the bears getting into the garbage cans was a bit of a thrill.
I know that we saw as many geysers as I could talk them into, not only those along the main road but off a ways on side roads. I specifically remember Steamboat, Castle, Grand, Grotto, Old Faithful, Beehive among the geysers; the cascading terraces of Mammoth Hot Springs. Punch Bowl Spring, the popular (coins thrown in) and beautiful Morning Glory Pool (we had after all morning glories at home on the porch and clothesline), the colorful Grand Prismatic Spring, Emerald Pool; the plopping mudpots like the Artist Paint Pots that for some reason amused me, burping up colored hot muds in a kind of cartoon fantasy. I recall walking along the boardwalks through the sulfurous fumes that reminded me of the rotten-egg smell of liver of sulphur powder I used for antiquing my tooled copper pictures, and the adults being alarmed if I got too close to the edge of the scalding waters. I knew nothing then about thermal zones or a supervolcano beneath my wandering among these wonders.
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