Ho! Land!

Thursday, for the first time in my life, I stepped foot in our nation’s oldest and second largest national park. It was a small footprint - relatively microscopic - but it was the first step towards what I’m sure will be the most memorable summer I’ve yet had.

I’ve been assigned to the Old Faithful Snow Lodge, working at a short-order joint aptly named The Geyser Grill. It’s not a glamorous occupation, and in fact it's a job that I had vowed to avoid for my entire life at any cost... But I suppose given the circumstances, I can peacefully shut up and let yet another occupational vow quietly perish. On the bright side, just think about how awesome our apartment burgers will be next year now that I know how not to make them!

Yesterday I got something of a ‘grasp’ on my immediate surroundings by taking a 4-hour hike around the geothermal features near Old Faithful, starting with a trail called Overlook Pass, and ending with a circuit through the geyser basin. As you may know, the entirety of Yellowstone is essentially a giant freaking volcano - a "supervolcano" in sciencey speak. They say it last erupted about 640,000 years ago, and don't worry because they don't expect it to erupt again for at least another 15,000 years. I'll have to admit, they're doing a pretty good job at not letting on to the fact that they have literally no idea what the heck is going on. They don't. Nobody does... I mean, sure, they can speculate, but when it comes down to it, Old Mother Yellowstone is just gonna get bored one day and blow up the entire western hemisphere. "So why? Why, Paul, are you living on top of a dormant supervolcano?" The answer is simple, really. If and when she goes ballistic, I will be incinerated immediately, whereas everyone else in North America will choke to death slowly on 2,500 times more ash than Mount Saint Helens spat out... But anyway, moving away from the morbid and depressing... I say all that to say this: there are geysers where I live. Notably this one. Old Faithful.

 There are also pools of water - called hotsprings - that are literally just boiling puddles. And they're gorgeous. Sidestepping the boring (interesting?) science, they become colored like this because of bacteria that live in them in such force that, in terms of diversity, they rival tropical rainforests.

Cool, eh? ... Anyway, I'm walking and trying to avoid falling in and boiling my skin off at the same time, which occupied roughly 95% of my brainpower - enough to effectively render me completely oblivious to this, which, in true Yellowstone form, had crept up in the blink of an eye:

Armed only with a University of Cincinnati Rowing jacket... I kept walking towards it. I actually completed the trail (my camera died tragically at the end before I could snap a darn good picture), before it started raining too hard. But I still had to trek the mile back to the lodge, and about halfway back, all hail broke loose. "Aw, hail," I exclaimed bitterly before chuckling at my own cleverness. Yeah, a hailstorm. It was actually pretty sweet because it piled up a lot like snow... Really painful snow that really shouldn't be caught on the tips of tongues. There were drifts of it on the sides of the path, and I wondered if Israelite manna hurt this much.

Eventually I made it back to the dining hall, where I was arrested by a man who must have seen straight through my bandana-wearing, tough-guy exterior and identified the drenched, helpless puppy dog that I really was. He invited me to sit with him, and reluctantly I did. He noted my Cincinnati jacket and asked where I was from, then pretended to know where Troy was. He spoke quickly and tirelessly, but seemed genuinely interested in the seven words I managed to squeeze in. He patted me on the shoulder a lot... It was something of an awkward encounter, but it made me realize that every single person living and working here in Yellowstone, without excuse, has a screw or two loose. It made me wonder why I had come here. To make some money while becoming one with nature? That's what I've been telling myself, and perhaps it's true. If it is true, then I'm just as crazy as the talking guy - probably crazier... But I think the real reason I came to Yellowstone is that I just wanted to escape. I wanted to break away from what was expected, and I wanted to do something seriously abnormal. I guess you could say that the reason I came here was to "find myself"; and as unbearably cheesy as that sounds, I think I'll stick with it. There's something special about going to a new place where literally nobody knows - or cares - who you are, because they end up telling you who you are. The challenge, then, is to align the person who you know to be yourself with the person the social mirror is showing you... Perhaps this is a struggle we all face throughout our lives, regardless of surroundings.

After talking for a while with my new friend (I'll call him that), we parted ways and I retired for the evening, praying that my roommate wasn't already asleep. Were my roommate already asleep, I would be doomed to listen to his thunderous snoring for at least an hour before I forced myself to sleep. Luckily he was asleep.