Hey Boo Boo! I Think I See A Pickunick Basket!

Yesterday at the gym the scale said 155. I was so excited about this, I ran sprints on the treadmill. SPRINTS!! It’s been almost a year since I ran a sprint! And boy could I tell. Wheeze pant wheeze pant wheeze pant. My legs hurt today, but it’s a good hurt. I’m getting there. I’m getting there.

E&J

I wake early – of course I wake early, will I ever sleep late again? – and Patrick is still sleeping. I do try to give him as much sleep as possible so he can be in fine form to support my sleepless self, which he does admirably. So anyway, in order to give him some quiet sleep time, I strap the baby into the sling and take a short hike. Grizzly bears are never far from my mind – a foolish fear, since grizz spotting is a hard thing to do, let alone grizz ATTACKS – but nevertheless I stick close to the cabin area and try to grow eyes in the back of my head. Jack and I take a walk down by the stream, and I tell him about fish, and water, and mountain snow melting into streams that eventually flow to the big wide ocean, and how we need to care for all of it, all the way from beginning to end. This is the most fun thing about parenting – helping to write a new mind. He is a blank slate. One day he’ll have his own ideas, but they will be borne out of the way that we teach him to think in these early days. It’s a huge responsibility, and a fun one. I think I am a good thinker and a good teacher. I think Patrick is, too.

We have arranged to meet our friends Erin and Jason at around midday, near the geyser. We pack everything out of the cabin and into the car, and then I get the phone call that says they have arrived. Wheeeee!!!! Erin reads my blog, and it’s awkward to praise somebody in a blog without acknowledging that you know she’s going to read it and saying hi. So – Hi Erin! Squeeze Jason and the kitty for me! And you know how dearly I love you. I never stop laughing when we are all together. You have frequently nearly killed my husband (from laughing himself into a heart attack), who finds you THE FUNNIEST person ever, and I mean ever. I love how we all get along, I love how we can all meet up after a year or more and just carry on as normal, I love how loyal and generous and whip smart you both are, and I always get excited on the rare occasions when we actually get to hang out these days.

So I am super excited as I circle the geyser and scan the crowds for Jason (he’s tall. Easy to spot. Erin’s wee. Harder to find in a crowd.) And suddenly there they are, walking towards me, giving me hugs and exclaiming over the baby. I glow. Patrick joins us from the parking lot, and we begin our adventuring around Yellowstone by taking a chatty walk to the Old Faithful Inn, which is a humongous old historic log cabin. We check out the lobby, and then turn right around and head back to the cars, watching the geyser go off as we walk. We have made the executive decision to picnic instead of restaurant it for lunch – E & J had bought a ton of groceries before arriving so we could cook at their campsites for our meals. We drive up a few feet in elevation, and find ourselves picnicking at a table that is in a snowbank. It’s not cold, but the snow hasn’t melted all the way, and we have a laugh about snow in June. After lunch, we take a leisurely drive in the general direction of our night’s lodgings, stopping to gasp over vast lakes, hillsides dotted with buffalo, and various other gorgeous vistas – though never a grizz, alas. At this time, I become wrapped up in chatting with our friends, and my notes in the little notebook I take with me everywhere are spotty and out of order, so I’ll list some of the things we see over the next few days:

The Mud Volcano, which reminds us all of The Bog of Eternal Stench from the movie Labyrinth. It does indeed smell, like eggs or farts, depending on your mood. Pools of mud bubble and spurt, and large ponds of water boil and froth, some due to overall heat and some due to underlying geysers that act like hot tub jets. The whole landscape is pretty fantastical, and Erin and Jason and I take the full circuit walk around on an elevated boardwalk (feet safe from the hot bubbling mud!), while Patrick takes the kid back to the car to change his diaper. One feature we see is called the Dragon’s Tongue Cave – water rushes and roars out of it, and steam billows from the mouth. Hot springs, Schmott Schprings – a dragon totally lives in there.
The petrified tree. I didn’t see this and neither did Erin, because I stayed in the car nursing the baby, but Patrick and Jason saw it and took some photos. It looked like a tree. Basically.
Buffalo, buffalo, everywhere. They seem to have favorite spots to lounge in, as they each seem to be sitting in a buffalo sized patch of worn down dirt. Erin makes a joke that they take shifts being glamorous and posing for the crowds of visitors. It’s funny when she tells it. We see one buffalo scratching his back on a huge tree root, just like Baloo the Bear does in Jungle Book. They are all pretty tattered looking – losing their winter coats, and itching like hell, it would seem.
Hillsides full of dead lodgepole pines, that topple over one another and lay, white and smooth, like bleached bones.
Artist’s Point, which is an area of the Yellostone canyon that has lots of colored rock and sand layers. A huge waterfall carves its way through the steep canyon walls, and I have a mini panic attack and squeeze the baby so close to me that he probably can’t breathe. I am transfixed by the image of him falling over the side, and then bobbing on the surface of the roiling water before being crushed beneath the weight of water at the base of the falls. So far, this is the last time I have one of these attacks, and I hope they’re gone for good.
Some fabulous dinners, cooked at Chez Jason – in other words, on a portable grill at their campsite. We have steak, grilled asparagus, and Montana beer one night, and barbecued chicken, grilled zucchini, and a really good mustardy pasta salad the second night. Our hosts are generous, and also total gourmets with a portable grill, and I tell them more than once that we MUST continue meeting like this – camping in national parks with Jason as the chef, Erin in charge of desserts, and next time Patrick and I will be the sommeliers and bring some North Carolina wine.
A herd of mule deer cross the road in front of us, the babies skipping (if a four legged creature can be said to skip.) Buffalo do the same, and Erin gets lots of shots of buffalo snorting through the open car window into Jason’s ear as he grips the steering wheel and smiles nervously.
A pair of elk lounge elegantly by the side of the road, and we stop and take pictures of them.
Jack does indeed ride a buffalo, and Patrick snaps a picture with his camera. It’s a pretty huge stuffed animal that we see at the gift shop. Jack isn’t really amused, but I am, and that’s all that matters.
A mama grizz and her cub! We’re, uh, pretty sure. They were a zillion miles away. We zoomed in on them using our video camera to try to see better, and Patrick took some footage. And we’re almost certain it was a grizzly pair. There were tons of other people stopped and staring, too, so we weren’t alone in our assessment.

Erin and Jason say good-bye to us at Yellowstone Canyon, and drive north (north?) to Montana, while we turn our PT Cruiser south for Utah. My melancholy mood (we aren’t sure when we’ll see them again) is lifted almost immediately by a phone call from Patrick’s sister, who tells us that she is giving us a niece in November. Our long drive back to Utah (with frequent stops for lunch and photographs and baby care) sees me daydreaming about pink accessories, and little dresses, and tiny Mary Janes. Until Jack decides that he is all done with the carseat, at the same time as we hit a huge traffic jam, and suddenly I am singing lullabies as if my life depended on it. As soon as we get to the hotel approximately a million hours later, he ceases his screaming and laughs up a storm on the bed, and I bathe him and put him in his jammies and we all sack out instantly. The next day, we drive to the airport, turn in the car, and have a flight home that is slightly more stressful than the one out was – I pretty much nurse our fussing baby for about six hours straight to keep him from crying, and then I’m crying because it hurts so much. But we eventually make it home, and Patrick and I look at each other and without saying a word, he is on the phone ordering a pizza while I crack a couple of Miller Lites and put on a Seinfeld DVD.

And that’s our trip! We came home on a Saturday, which was, like, so ingenious. Sunday we did laundry until our washing machine said UNCLE, and unpacked, and went grocery shopping, etc. etc. I had a fabulous trip, but it was good to be home. Great to be home.