Author Charles Jones was reflecting on our connections with the natural world when he wrote: "
Places circle in my mind like gifting birds…Small, quick perceptions the gifting birds leave me…Some I can put together, not as a story or theory, but a sense of life, of place…Puzzle pieces without jigsaw cuts to define them."
So it is with me. Yellowstone National Park is both a real place, and a state of mind. It is a powerful physical and mental elixir for me—the kind of place where writer Barry Lopez has suggested that I can renegotiate my contracts with Nature. Because I have lived and worked in national parks my entire life, I feel a special kinship with Yellowstone. It is the headwater stream of the national park idea.
In a way, Yellowstone is both the beginning and end of a long personal odyssey—the culmination of a tradition. My journey to Yellowstone began many years ago when my father accepted a job in Lassen Volcanic National Park in Northern California. It foreshadowed a time when I too would work in a geological wonderland.
As a child, I had heard about Yellowstone. I was enchanted by the idea of its wonders. I had seen photographs of Old Faithful, Yellowstone Falls and grizzly bears in books and magazines. My teacher had talked about it in school. I formed a mental picture of what it must be like. In Lassen, I had seen fumaroles, hot springs and mud pots. I had watched steam venting from the snow-covered summit of Lassen Peak. My father had told me how ancient Mount Tehama had collapsed inward forming a huge crater called a caldera. Often, I had seen bears and other wild animals. Surely, I thought, Yellowstone must be similar.
I first briefly visited Yellowstone with my father when I was a few years older, but I only remembered seeing some of its popular icons—Old Faithful, Yellowstone Lake, Mammoth Hot Springs, some bears. Like many folks, my visit was brief and superficial. I did not return to Yellowstone until the last few years of my career, and it was only then that I began to see that there was so much more to this wonderland than the things that I had dreamed about and seen in my youth. Each day for ten years in Yellowstone, "gifting birds" brought me new and precious fragments of thought and feeling that began to coalesce into a deeper understanding of meaning and place.
I am not a photographer, yet everywhere in Yellowstone my eyes took hundreds of pictures, all perfectly focused and composed. I keep those images in my mind's album where I can recall them whenever I long to return. Opening the album I find hillsides carpeted with Spring wildflowers exploding with colors like a van Gogh landscape. On another page I see an infant stream rising in an alpine meadow more than two miles above the distant ocean that will eventually claim it. As the pages turn, I see fluted colonnades of volcanic rock, trout struggling upstream to spawn, a marmot draped over a sun-warmed rock on a talus slope. On still other pages I see iridescent dragonfly wings, colorful algal mats tended by tiny Ephydrid flies, a fawn standing for the first time on wobbly legs, a waterfall concealed by a winter shroud of ice. Thumbing through my mental book of memories I can watch Old Faithful erupt again, recall the spectacle of the great wildfires of 1988, and see a dipper walk under water in search of food.
Each time I open the album I am enchanted once more by Yellowstone and what it means. I am reminded that only as a manifestation of an idea, a dream realized, have people shaped this place. No human actions have sculpted it features, or filled its ecological niches with abundant and diverse life forms. Again I sense that there is a rhythm to nature—a subtle flow of energy that eastern philosophers called
chi—that links all things together. In Yellowstone, and the places on its family tree, wild things move to a different cadence than we do. It is slow and measured, sometimes violent, but always harmonious.
