In 1994 comets hit Jupiter, there was genocide in Rwanda, the Republicans took control of the congress, and Tonya Harding had Nancy Kerrigan whacked in the knee. All of these events pale in comparison to the beginning of our disastrous June trip to Yellowstone National Park. I had wanted to visit Yellowstone NP since the third grade when I saw a Walt Disney documentary. It showed mud pots, geysers, and tame wildlife but inexplicably omitted Yogi and Boo-Boo. You can imagine my excitement when 36 years later I was actually going to go. I had three weeks of vacation and I wanted to maximize every moment of our MSP travel experience. I had meticulously planned our trip for over a year, buying books, looking at atlases while on the toilet, and working out the daily itinerary with cost broken down by category (gas, food, campground fees, misc.) on a spreadsheet. Nothing was left to chance. Unfortunately nobody had thought to clear the trip with the MSP.
We were so anxious to get started that we left on a Friday night after I got off work and drove to the top of the cascades for our first stop. Most of these areas are owned by the federal government and you can primitive camp almost anywhere on forest service or BLM land for free as long as you don’t block a road. We often use snow parks for this boon docking option. These winter play areas require a permit to park for nine months of the year but after the snows melt they are free, paved, just off the main highways, and even have vault toilets some of which are snake free. One of the best of these is Benson Sno Park which is about a mile off of highway 20 near HooDoo Ski Bowl. Being a bit off the main road we had a really quiet night’s sleep with only a few of the estimated ten trillion mosquitoes which were amassed outside of the MSP being able to make it inside. I found this bit of trivia when I went outside the next morning to light the water heater, but soon opted to forgo a shower till the next morning.
From the top of the cascades to Oregon high desert is only a few miles, but the change in the landscape is truly amazing. The difference is water. The cascades are geologically very young mountains and as they grew they stopped the rains from the Pacific before they made it to central and eastern Oregon. Ten to fifteen thousand years ago there were huge lakes in these areas with highly diverse wildlife more like the plains of central Africa than the boring animals that live here today. The camels, saber tooth cats, giant bison and sloth evaporated with the water and the arrival of man who hunted them to extinction. All that remains of that time are a few remnant lakes like Malheur and Goose with almost all of the ancient lake bottoms turned into flat sagebrush covered plains where the locals can feed only a few hardy cows per acre. This high desert is brutally hot during the summer and colder than a witch’s tit during the winter. However, that June when we were passing through, it was full of wild flowers with temperatures that seldom got into the 90’s during the day then chilling nicely after the sun went down.
That afternoon we were nearly to Prineville who’s major claim to fame is that it is the corporate headquarters of Les Schwab, the cowboy tire magnet. Les Schwab was the big cheese in this town and he was one cowpoke I would not want to mess with. Just watch his commercials! Those are not Hispanics running like they are in the pits at Daytona. They are white guys! Schwab might be just good at picking employees, but only fear can make a Caucasian run like that.
Upon reaching the outskirts of Prineville, it was apparent that we had just missed a cloud burst as there were deep puddles of water along the side of the highway lapping out onto the road. In the middle of one of these nameless mini lakes there was a garage sale sign. Judy has a problem passing up sales and as we were an hour or so ahead on my spreadsheet schedule I turned the MSP off the main road and soon found the sale about a mile away. It looked on the surface like an okay sale with tools and a whole table full of paper back books. Unfortunately it had suffered the brunt of the cloud burst and everything was soaked. Picking through the dripping tools I found a router. I have no clue how to use one, but Judy felt that I should learn as it was only $10.
Stupidly I asked, “This work?” This puts the seller in an awkward position of having to lie or at least obscure the truth. What I should have said first was “Can I plug this in?” That way the seller could have acted surprised when it didn’t work and try to sell it to some other sucker after I had left. But it was after he told me that it worked that I asked him if I could plug it in. Thus, I had rudely called the seller a liar and branded myself as an asshole tourist. Grumbling under his breath, the seller allowed me to plug in the router. To his credit it ran, but the uneven growling noise and smell of ozone indicated that it was not long for this side of the sod. As I put it back on the table, he came down to $5 saying it only needed new brushes and became really agitated when I did not take the hunk of junk off his hands for even that price. It didn’t help that Judy seemed to agree with him, “You can put in new brushes”, like she or I knew what those were. I could see I was in for some real trouble as Prineville is cowboy country and this guy could have been Les Schwab’s double complete with the hat, boots, and humongous belt buckle. I have watched enough B westerns in my life to know that cowboys are not the types who take insults lightly. I was sure I could take the guy as he was in his eighties, but judging by the moronic look in his eyes he probably had inbred kin within hollerin’ distance. The only thing that staved off the showdown was that just before he said “Bring it on”, an innocent bystander asked about the price of the paper backs. “They’re 50 cents each, ma’am” he said as he spit tobacco juice on my sneakers. The bystander was amazed, “50 cents! They’re soaking wet”! Exasperated he glanced her way and shot back “But they’re all Louis L’Amour!” In that split second of distraction, I grabbed Judy by the arm, turned and walked quickly back to the MSP to escape with only a little of my manhood left behind. The code of west does not allow cowboys to shoot even the most cowardly of tourists in the back unless of course they are from California.
I suppose I should have taken my near death experience at the garage sale as an omen to turn back. Later that afternoon there was another omen. Just a few miles out of Prineville, Highway 26 climbs out of the desert and into the Ochoco Mountains where the increased rainfall with altitude replaces the sagebrush with ponderosa pine which provides just enough cover to shade out the understory making it look as if the whole area is a managed park. We stopped for the night at a quiet little forest service campground at the top of the pass, blissfully unaware that the next day would be the true beginning of the trip to hell.
The next day a few miles down the winding two-lane, a semi lost its load of lumber coming right at us. Most of the lumber went down in the canyon kicking up a cloud of dust as it went, but the truck kept coming toward us dragging its upside down rear trailer behind it. Like in the movies everything seemed to happen in slow motion. Actually it was in slow motion as the truck driver was just creeping ahead trying to pull his upended trailer out of the oncoming lane. Judy took off her seat belt and yelled “Jump!”, as I slammed on the brakes and put it in reverse and stomped the foot feed then slammed on the brakes again. Lucky for her that she had trouble opening the door during my completely idiotic maneuver as she did not manage to get onto the ground till I had come to a complete stop or she might have fallen under the front tires rather than just on her ample ass. After we had regained our composure and our seats, I carefully put the MSP into drive and crept through and over the few 2 x 6’s which were in our lane. As we passed the errant truck the driver laughingly shook his head at us and probably after a few beers still does as he tells the story of the idiot tourists trying to bail out of a moving RV.
Our next scheduled stop was at the John Day Fossil Beds. This is one of the richest fossil areas in the world covering the age of mammals from 5 to 50 million years ago. The John Day fossil beds were named after John Day. Who was this John Day? Was he a renowned paleontologist or explorer, a prominent politician or Indian fighter? Nope, none of the above. He appears to have been tall, good looking and a marksman of note who was employed as a hunter by Ramsey Crooks of the American Fur Company based in what is now Astoria, OR. Day and Crooks were traveling alone in the spring of 1810 along what was then known as the Mau Mau River, where they claimed they were attacked and robbed by Indians. The Indians even took their clothes. The two of them, now naked, somehow made it to the Walla Walla area where they met a “party” of men on their way to Astoria who, if history is to be believed, accepted their wild-ass story involving fur and nudity. The unrobed John Day must have made quite an impression on the people of the time as they began calling the Mau Mau River, the John Day. John Day only lived a couple of more years after the alleged robbery. He apparently went crazy and ran away from another “party” of men running amok in the forest and either died wandering around in the woods or was taken back to Astoria where he died a short time later. By other accounts of the time, he might have even survived until 1820 when he was killed by Indians somewhere along the Snake River. Personally I believe that he most likely survived well into the 20th century as a member of the Village People. Regardless of how he died, this loser is memorialized by having a river, a fossil bed, two towns (Dayville and John Day) and a dam on the Columbia named after him. Ramsey Crooks to the best of my knowledge has nothing named after him even though he became so successful that he eventually bought out Astor’s Astoria Fur Company. Such are the vagaries of gay history.
The year we went to the fossil beds the information center/museum was in an old ranch house that was donated by the previous owners. Inside the neat old house were numerous displays of fossils collected from the beds. My favorite of these is the saber tooth cat with its whimsically descriptive scientific name (Smiladon). After about an hour we went back to the MSP to renew our trip only to find a puddle of water dribbling from the water pump. Relying on my vast knowledge of mechanics I decided that the water pump would make it to Baker City about two hours away. I based this decision on the fact that the nearest parts store and competent mechanic (according to a friend I called in the area) was likely to be there and if the leaking got worse we could at least cut down on the cost of a tow. Somehow we made it, and after a $300 repair bill and a night at a local RV park, we were on the way the next afternoon only about 12 hours behind my spreadsheet schedule.
The next leg was from Baker City to Glenns Ferry, ID. This was accomplished with only one incident in which a tire on a small travel trailer blew up just in front of us, pelting us with rubber shrapnel. Although no damage was done and my underwear was easily cleaned, in retrospect it was another omen telling us to “turn baaaaack”. We spent the night at Three Island Crossing State Park along the banks of the Snake River. This is an area along the Oregon Trail where the pioneers had to make a choice either to make a dangerous river crossing using three gravelly islands as stepping stones or to stay on the south bank of the river which was safer but had fewer amenities.
The goal of our next leg was Pocatello, ID where we would spend a few days with our son, this time without the fear of frostbite. Just like our pioneer ancestors we had a choice of routes. The quickest and most direct was to stay on the freeway. A more scenic route was to go along the Snake River though an area called 1000 Springs. The route with the least amenities was to head northwest on Highway 20 into the lava beds, visit the Mountains of the Moon National Monument where the astronauts had trained to walk on the moon, then swing though Blackfoot, ID and down to Pocatello. As we were not too far off my spreadsheet schedule and as one of the major attractions of buying an RV is to spontaneously go exploring on secondary roads, we opted for the path less traveled as “thars where adventures be”. For example, if we saw a sign advertising a place where the world’s second largest ball of string was on display, we could go there and be inspired. But the real reason I wanted to go this direction was sinister. I wanted to find a “Snake Pit”
In the 1950’s it was really common to see billboard advertisements for roadside attractions with names like “Trees of Mystery” or “Prehistoric Gardens” which would entice you with the head of a T. rex and the number of miles to said destination. But the real gems in this genre of tourist traps were small roadside attractions usually associated with a gas station which attempted to attract an extra customer or two by having a petting zoo where you could “pet the tame deer”. By far the best and one of the most common of these attractions was the ubiquitous and generic “Snake Pit”. To be honest, I really had no desire to visit one. I just wanted to have my parents stop because I knew that my sister, Sandra, was terrified of snakes. While some of her ignorant terror of “Mr. no shoulders” had rubbed off on me, it was such great fun to yell at the top of my voice “Snake Pit!! They have a Snake Pit! Stop!!!!”, just to watch my sister get all twitchy and try to crawl under the car seat. As my parents had no intention to ever stop at one, I could then pout and say things like “You never stop at things I like to do.” I assumed that this would earn me sympathy and more presents at Christmas rather than eliciting the true feelings of mayhem that all parents have toward a brat on a long road trip. Decades later and married to a woman equally if not more afraid of snakes than my sister, I have been using the same tease in an attempt to reduce my wife’s addiction to fabric stores. Whenever she forces me to make a side trip to a fabric store, I say “Okay, but if I ever find a Snake Pit, we are going to stop ‘cause I never got to when I was a kid!” As Snake Pits have apparently gone the way of the do-do, she just nods her head knowing that finding one in this day and age is as likely as Trump admitting he made a mistake. Perhaps she is right, but in my heart of hearts, I believe that somewhere on the rural back roads of America there must still be at least one surviving Snake Pit just like the ones I never visited in my youth. With the Snake Pit quest in the back of my mind and my love of all things lava I drove off that morning from Glenns Ferry in high spirits. Not even the small puddle of water under the MSP could deflate me as in my mechanically challenged mind I assumed that they had just overfilled the radiator when the water pump was fixed.
We had not gone very far that morning when I noticed a sign advertising the Idaho Mammoth Cave and a jackalope museum. To the skeptic the jackalope looks like someone has glued deer antlers to a jack rabbit. But there are many of us who believe that it is a relic species from the last ice age which somehow managed to survive in small and wary populations. I personally have never seen one alive but over the years I have observed an occasional preserved jackalope in small museums and curio shops. As we drove up the rutted gravel road my excitement grew, a cave and a jackalope museum and we had just begun our side trip. This had to be Snake Pit country.
The roadside attraction known as Mammoth Cave has seen better days, but I doubt it. It was basically a run down farm with a shabby museum full of dead stuffed animals and a run of the mill lava tube cave. I have been in much better ones at the Lava Beds National Monument and those were free. I unfortunately had seen better days as well because when I stopped, I noticed a plume of steam rising from the hood of the MSP. It turned out to be a split heater hose. This is a problem I have had before and know a trick. Simply remove the bad hose from where it attaches to the water pump then disconnect the good hose from the heater core and bend it back to the water pump and attach it to where you just took off the bad hose. All it requires is a screwdriver to loosen the hose clamps and a lot of cussing as the end of the hose is usually fused onto the water pump and heater core nipples. It is also very wise to let the engine cool for about an hour so that you do not burn yourself with boiling radiator fluid. In this manner you can get by with only one heater hose. It was really easy for me this time as the mechanic in Baker City had to have taken off the hoses when he replaced the water pump. You can drive this way for months if you don’t mind freezing to death in the winter as you will have no heat. However, even if you have Eskimo in your blood line, leaving your vehicle in this configuration is not a good idea as when one heater hose blows, the other is usually not far behind. But it will get you by in a pinch, and as we were in the middle of nowhere, it qualified. I figured that when I got to my son’s house it would only take a half hour or so to do the for-real fix. Once again I underestimated my enemy.
Our next unscheduled stop was Shoshone Ice Caves. This tourist trap is a lot more commercial than Mammoth Cave, complete with a giant green dinosaur with a caveman on its head. This BS always gets to me as many kids and fundamentalist Christian whack-o’s actually believe that dinosaurs and cavemen interacted. Dinosaurs were extinct for over 60 million years before the first ape-man evolved. If they had been around at the same time, man, if he had evolved at all, would not be on top of the food chain, let alone riding on a lime green sauropod. Although Jurassic Park portrayed these extinct herbivores as docile giants whose only adverse interaction with man was sneezing giant lugies, it’s my bet they would have enjoyed playing “make the pancake” with any critter stupid enough to get close.
The ice cave itself was not very interesting. It is not very big, you have to pay to get in, and if they don’t keep the door shut the ice will melt in the hot Idaho summers. It’s kind of like visiting your local ice plant without the machinery and the illegal aliens. Once again, the Lava Bed National Monument has this waste-of-time beat as it has two ice caves that you visit for free without a tour guide telling you what not to touch and those ice caves seem to maintain themselves naturally without the aid of a door. I found myself actually liking Mammoth Cave better as it was a lot cheaper and with its’ jackalope/dead animal museum, at least it gave you the creeps.
Our final stop that day was the Mountains of the Moon National Monument. We spent the night in the campground and did a little exploring the next day. Got a wonderful guided tour by a park ranger who explained the oddities of a lava flow and we climbed to the top of a cinder cone, mostly because we were stupid. Why does it always look so easy from the bottom? Although we had a bit of fun on the way down telling the other idiots that they were nearly there and that the top was just a bit farther. That afternoon we were once again on our way.
The highway then goes past the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory commonly referred to as “The Site”. Apparently there are tours you can take of the nuclear reactors, at least there were before 9-11, but there is also secret shit happening there with all kinds of signs warning you not to drive down the frequent dirt side roads that sprout off the highway. Just past “The Site” I saw in the side view mirror a contrail of smoke. I immediately pulled to the side of the road and discovered, after crawling around on my back for an hour, that the sharp end of a hose clamp on the bottom radiator hose had sliced into a hose to the automatic transmission cooler. Not only had the mechanic in Baker not replaced the obviously worn heater hoses, he had put on too big a hose clamp on the radiator hose which took the worst possible moment to do its thing. The smoke I saw was ATF leaking, more like a hemorrhage than a leak, onto the exhaust pipe. I found the leak by lying on my back underneath the RV with the engine running, having Judy put it into gear, and then getting sprayed in the face with ATF. We were truly out in the middle of nowhere this time. I have since heard that if we would have broken down a couple of miles closer to “The Site” that I would have attracted the attention of security guards who, depending on the current federal administration, would have either provided me assistance or caused us to disappear in some unspecified black ops manner. However, I was past “The Site” and on my own, without a cell phone, and it was getting dark. Although I had, with some effort managed to find and fix the leak, I had used up my only quart of emergency ATF in the process. Finally somebody stopped; actually he was the first and only car to come by in an hour. We gave him our son’s phone number in Pocatello and asked him to give him a call giving our position, status, and our need for additional ATF with maybe some duct tape thrown in as you can always use some of that shit. About midnight Wes showed up with the items. I added the ATF, checked for leaks and had an owl dive at the crack of my butt as I guess I must have smelled as if a rodent had crawled up it and died. An hour or two later we were safe and sound back in the bosom of civilization or what passes as such in Pocatello.
I did manage to fix everything the next day. It was an ordeal as the nipple from the water pump to the “good” heater hose was hidden behind the air conditioning compressor. I had a choice, remove the new water pump so that I could attach the new heater hoses then snake the hose around the compressor as the mechanic in Baker City must have done, or I could remove the air conditioner compressor to give access to the water pump hose nipples. It was only four bolts, I had all the tools, no problem, and as the air conditioner and I had issues about it dumping ice water on my foot, I might even feel good about it, sort of like lancing a boil. Once again I underestimated the MSP’s fighting elan. Three of the four bolts came off with ease. The fourth was inaccessible to any tool known to man, woman, or Bob Villa. Eventually after much trial and error I attacked a ½” open end wrench with a grinder so that it would fit it into the space and then found that I had to bend the shaft of the wrench as well. Removing the bolt with this customized tool took some time as I could only get the bolt to turn a tiny bit, then had to pull out the wrench, turn it over, reposition it at a slightly different angle and get another infinitesimal turn. But four hours later, the hoses were replaced with the compressor neatly stored in the proper receptacle amid the broken beer bottles and potato peels. I had won the battle, but victory was not cheap. I had suffered two skinned knuckles, several arm bruises and a sore neck and back from having to put my body at odd angles that are too extreme even for the Kama Sutra. I also could no longer speak above a whisper. To this day, when the light is just right in Pocatello you can see this faint blue haze.
That night I lay wide awake with visions of Yellowstone dancing in my brain. All my pains of the day were forgotten or more likely numbed by half a bottle of cheap scotch. There was nothing now but a few miles between me and my childhood dream. The great adventure will begin tomorrow. Little was I aware that the MSP was listening and waiting with infinite patience to pounce on its unsuspecting and totally clueless prey.