Doc and the Bimbo Posts

On our first trip to Yellowstone we exited the park to the west following the Madison River down and into the town of West Yellowstone, MT.  This is the largest town nearest the park and apparently is most noted for being the largest town next to the park.  Our primary reason for stopping in West Yellowstone was that we needed a Laundromat.   This is not one of my favorite things to do on a trip but Judy changes her socks, panties, and shirts on a daily basis and insists that I do also.  Sometimes I can get away with wearing pants for two days in a row, but any coffee stain or cigar ash on them and I get caught. Even with these excessive clothes changing we still have plenty of clothes for the rest of the trip as every drawer, cubby, and shelf is crammed with more.  And getting to the clean stuff at this point in a trip is easier as we have extracted some clothes and worn them.  I can actually get my sweats out without the aid of a pick axe.  That some of this stuff is a bit out of style does not concern me.  What is wrong with polyester plaid bell bottoms?  What’s polyester?   I even found my “I’m with stupid” tee shirt.  Still, Judy insists that we need to do laundry as we are going to run out of clothes.   I suppose she is right as there is a slight chance that Armageddon may occur while we are on vacation and it would be embarrassing to be judged by our maker while wearing dirty underwear.  

We soon found a Laundromat on the main drag in West Yellowstone and I began carrying in the black garbage bags full of lightly soiled clothing.  Judy gets $20 in quarters and begins stuffing the super duty machines adding detergent, bleach, fabric softener and large volumes of change.  After about half an hour of steady labor, all laundry is being washed.  During this time the only other person in the Laundromat is a stocking capped guy with a scruffy beard who we take to be the “maintenance man”.  He has the front panels off a couple of washers inspecting them with a flashlight.  After a bit of poking and pulling on the wires he slowly shuffles across the room to peer at what I take to be a “maintenance manual.”  After a bit he gets bored with fiddling with the non-operating machines and to our amazement takes the bottom panel off of one of the super duty machines that we are using while it is in the spin cycle.  He starts poking and pulling at the wires, then shuffles off to look at the manual again.  He repeats this procedure a few times with Judy and I passing knowing glances between us; we have seen this sort of behavior before; we grew up in the sixties.  

Suddenly with an audible pop, the power goes off.  This does not seem to affect the “maintenance man” one iota.  I am not sure he was even aware of it in his mildly anesthetized state.  As it slowly dawns on him that something is amiss, he just stands there, with his eyes glazed, unmoving.  

Finally, Judy spoils the moment, “The powers off”.

 He looks over at her with a blank expression.  

“Shouldn’t you check the circuit breakers?” she says in a slightly louder voice.  

Her meaning slowly sinks in and passes  his mismatched neurons to what is left of his higher cognitive centers: this woman thinks that he might be responsible for the power going out.  This is probably the first deductive thought this guy has had for years.   With a frown he ambles off and into another room to check.  

Within a couple of minutes he comes back with a relieved smile and says “It’s not me, man”. 

To which Judy answers, “Are you sure?”  

“Pretty sure”, he responds.  

Not quite believing him, I go outside to check.  There are no lights on in any of the businesses around us and even the stop light is not working down the street.  For a split second I wonder how this guy managed to take out the whole grid.  

Regardless of the cause of the outage, we are marooned in West Yellowstone with a pothead and a ton of wet laundry.  After waiting for an hour for the power to come back, we wring out the clothes as best we can and head down the road into Idaho, hoping to find a working coin op in the wilderness.  By the time we eventually find one, rewash the clothes, dry, fold and wedge them back in and over the bell bottoms, the day is pretty much over.  A whole day lost that we could have been fishing with my oldest son, Wes, at Henry’s Lake, where the great lunkers dwell.

Fishing is Wes’s religion.  He has tried other faiths, football then boxing, but over the years two blown knees, a shoulder that requires occasional cortisone shots, and a few too many “I just escaped from the fat farm dinners” have reduced his foot and hand speed, making him vulnerable to the overhand right.   Also there was something about a fight that went badly in Pocatello where he tried to surf the bull in the cowboy bar wearing Birkenstocks and a Hawaiian flowerdy shirt.  

For a while he was lost in sports purgatory, but fishing saved him.  He is obsessed with it.  He has a dozen rods, several tackle boxes, a vest with attached flies, a float tube, waders, a 4X4 pickup to get him to the inaccessible spots, and he reads fishing magazines on the shitter.  He tried to name his daughters Brook and Rainbow, but his second wife, Gail, would have none of it although he did get her to agree to name the dog Trout.  His obsession with fishing might have contributed to the break up of his first marriage, had his first wife been normal and not the crazed-bitch-from-hell.  On this trip he was in-between wives as she had recently left him for a drunken cowboy who wears proper attire when riding the bar bull.  We tried to get Wes to go to Yellowstone with us.  Although he had been living only a couple of hours away for several years he had never been there as he did not consider the fishing in the park to be of the best quality compared to the streams and lakes in the potato state.  But he did agree to meet us at Henry’s Lake, which is near the west entrance to the park.

According to Wes, Henry’s Lake is the best trout fishing place in the world and he personally has caught trophy class monsters there.  This should have generated some excitement on my part, but as I have been fishing the “perfect spot” many times with him, I have come to accept the tenant that in his religion lying is not a sin.  Until Henry’s Lake, I had never seen him catch anything, nor had I been able to catch anything in his presence.  

Arriving at the primitive campground that he led us to above the lake did not bode well for a miraculous improvement in his honesty.  It was not level as advertised.  It was not even close and we needed to be level.  The MSP had one of those old refrigerators which required extreme care in leveling unless you wanted to replace it at $800 a pop.  Judy and I have become quite adept at this using various combinations of wooden 2X6’s under the tires and a specialized lingo of verbal commands gleaned from watching old WWII submarine movies.  

“Up half a bubble to port” I would bellow out the window.  

To which my mate would nod knowingly and yell “back slow”, then taking a block from the starboard aft yell “ahead dead slow…..all stop!”  

We had it down to the point where with three or four such adjustments we achieved DBL (dead balls level) in only a matter of minutes. At the Henry’s Lake site it soon became apparent that this was not going to be achieved with any combination of blocks we had.  We soon resorted to using fire wood, tree branches, and digging out under the tires.  Our only real option was to blast but all we had were the fireworks I had bought in Wyoming which we were illegally going to fire off back in Oregon on the Fourth of July.  Finally conceding defeat, I turned the refer off and exhaustedly crawled into the bunk with the MSP listing 10 degrees to port.

The next morning we somehow managed to get the MSP down off the pile of branches without tipping it over and drove a mile or so through a cattle pasture to where Wes said the best fishing was.  We had to damn near repel our way down a grassy cliff.  I went first having to hang on to cottonwood saplings with one hand, with our rods and tackle box in my other hand which was dangling over the precipice. Somehow we made it down to the shore without having to call rescue 911, although Judy had to grab me by the back of my pants on one occasion to save me from certain death.  Thank God I had convinced her to let me carry her fishing gear down so that she had both hands free or I would have been a goner.  

The lake itself was green-murky and there was a major caddis fly hatch in progress. So lets’ review: a lake green with algae from the excess nutrients being washed into it from the surrounding ag land, an insect hatch of biblical proportions, and Wes’s track record of taking me to perfect spots where he has never caught a fish when a witness was present.   

Wes tossed me a jar of power bait and not being able to contain his excitement said “Great spot!  Bait up!”   

Fuming at being conned again, I slop half the damn jar on the hook as the sooner I run out, the sooner I can go back to camp and have a cigar and a double scotch.  I sat down and got as comfortable as I could on the rocks, pulling my fishing hat down over my eyes and tried to take a nap.  Napping, however, was not an option as every non-moving object was covered in caddisflies which were crawling out of the water to dry their wings so they could fly off to produce more caddis flies.  With this insect buffet, why in the world would a fish, especially a trophy one, eat power bait even if they could even find it in the murky green of this oversized waste treatment pond?  I could just hear the fish laughing at us with their caddis fly filled bellies jiggling.

Fifteen minutes later I was getting bored watching the caddis flies drying their wing on my pants.  What excuse could I make up this time to make the escape back to camp, as Wes could do this for hours?  Unlike a true believer, I only enjoy fishing when I am catching fish or have the illusion that I am going to catch fish.  

Just then the end of my pole moved almost imperceptivity.  I ever so gently picked it up from the rocks I had wedged it into in the hope that my aging eyes were not playing tricks.  The second nibble was more felt than seen.  I scarcely breathed waiting for the next slight tug which came a few seconds later.  With cat-like reflexes honed from years of practice I snapped the pole back to set the hook. 

“Fish on” I yelled, trying to exude an aura of professionalism, which might have worked if I had not preceded that comment by “Holy Shit! 

And then the epic struggle commenced.  Me coolly playing the fish while gloatingly ignoring all advice from my son.  Somehow after about 10 minutes I landed the biggest trout I ever caught and will likely ever catch.  Weighed in at seven and a half pounds!  Who cares if it was a mottled green and probably in-bred stupid as it went for the power bait over the yummy insects.  Who cares if the only way these fish are going to be edible is to smoke them as they have been living in green slime.  A minute later I was baited up with the rest of the jar of power bait.  It had worked once, and I could always beg Wes for more.  Five minutes later boom!  Number two was on.  Although not as big, I was flying high.  Not only was I catching monster trout, I was the only one catching fish.  This was great.  Out fishing my son! Out fishing my wife!  Oops! Forgot about that one.  Judy loves to catch fish.  Judy almost always out fishes me.  Judy is competitive.  If she did not catch a fish soon I would be in deep shit.  At that moment the third fish hit my bait.  I instinctively set the hook and thinking quickly yelled at Judy to take the pole telling her that I, according to Idaho out-of-stater fishing regulations and being an Oregonian on a three day license was only allowed to catch two monster fish from the Henry’s Lake recreation area.  Although I thought I was making this up, it turned out to be true. Judy with a bit of reluctance took the pole.  Although this was the smallest fish caught that day, it was still 19 inches and fought like hell as it was a real rainbow not one of the mottled green rainbow cut-throat in-breeds like most of the fish in the lake.

Soon after that I climbed the hill back to where the MSP was parked.  I did not dare show up the rest of the fishing party anymore.   Judy came up an hour or so later never getting a bite.  Wes did not show up till the sun was going down.  He had finally caught one, once again without witnesses being present.  But after checking it for signs of cellophane and Styrofoam, I had to reluctantly come to the conclusion that he had probably caught it.  He was right about Henry’s Lake.  Although it was not pretty and the primitive camping sucked, it did contain monster fish that even I could catch.  I highly recommend it.  Just make sure to bring barn boots and rappelling rope.

After Henry’s Lake we spent the better part of a day in Lava Hot Springs.  This is a little tourist trap town on the Portneuf River.  We floated down the river through the town on rafting tubes which we rented from a local tourist trap shop.  It was a lot of fun except for the walk back into town to drop off the rafts.  We thought about going for an afternoon swim at one of the local spas, but as it was a hot day and we were running a little low on funds, we decided to find a swimming hole upstream from the town where Wes thought there might be a good spot.  We stopped on a grassy slope just above the river.  Wes went ahead to check for swimming holes.  He confided to me later that he had actually gone ahead to make sure that the rattlesnakes were not out in force, for this spot was noted for snakes.  I found out much later that Wes had been bitten at this very spot the year before.  It was probably a good idea that he had kept this a secret, as Judy would have been reluctant to get off pavement at any spot within 10 miles of a real rattlesnake attack.  Wes soon reported back that while the water was deep enough, the bottom was soft and muddy.  

But rather than just go home, Wes suggested we try a little fishing, as trout were rising everywhere he looked.  I might have been suspicious that Wes had intentionally lured us out here to go fishing rather than swimming except that he had left all of his fishing tackle at home.  In retrospect this may have been a diversion as he probably assumed that we had plenty stashed somewhere in the MSP as we had just come down from Henry’s Lake.  Unfortunately his assumptions were wrong.  We were totally out of weights, had no bait, and our licenses had expired.  All we really had left was our rods, a few hooks, and some bobbers.  While I doubted that we would get caught by the game warden, having no weight or bait did pose a dilemma.  We resorted to throwing out our line using the bobber as a weight, and baited the hook with whatever we had that might be similar to fish bait.  Lets see, canned garbanzo beans sort of look like salmon eggs.  Somewhere in the back of my mind I had heard that fish like cheese.  We debated whether to use some sharp cheddar but thought that as it was Idaho, Velveta might work better.  We even tried a little raw bacon just for the hell of it.  We soon found that it did not seem to matter what kind of food we used.  These fish were both stupid and hungry and unlike their human counterparts in this neck of the woods might have even had a taste for brie if we had any.  After a while we had easily caught about a dozen foot-long rainbows, and unlike their Henry’s Lake counterparts they tasted mighty good for dinner that night.  But best of all, for the second time in less than a week I had been with my son when he caught a fish and for the first time ever I had actually seen him catch one.  Maybe there was something to his religion after all.

I can’t remember most of the trip home.  Although it had started badly with evil omens and MSP breakdowns, we had the best and longest vacation in our lives.  I had seen Yellowstone, rafted the Snake, and caught monster trout.  Judy and I could have had more sex, but what we did have was great.

Somewhere on I84 in western Idaho Judy heard a noise.  One of those noises that only women can hear when their husbands are driving.

“There! You must have heard it that time.  Tic Tic Tic” .

“Don’t worry dear that is just a little suspension noise” which is my typical response to one of her imagined, “the engine is about to blow up” scenarios.

“Don’t you think you had better stop and check, I think there is something wrong with the pistons”. Like she even knows what a piston is.

“Ah, it’s just a little fan belt noise, nothing to worry about” is my next level mechanical sounding ploy to try and placate her.  I also turn on the radio hoping that this might distract her.

However, another hundred miles closer to home and I hear it as well.  I stop and check the belts.  They are all tight and look to be in reasonably good shape.  I crawl underneath and look at the engine.  Why I do this I haven’t a clue.  It is just something guys do and being a guy I feel obligated.  Everything looks OK, but then again, what do I know.  

We cross the Oregon Cascades and most of the Willamette Valley.  It is getting dark and the noise is now evolved from a tic tic to a tic-a-wack, tic-a-wack.   I am a bit concerned but am still pretty sure that there is nothing wrong as the noise seems to have stabilized at the same level two hundred miles ago.  Just outside of the small town of Philomath, the noise stops.  Judy, to my exasperation, is now worried that the noise she has been bugging me about for 500 miles has suddenly stopped.

I’ve had it,   “What is wrong with you woman! You’ve nagged me all day about that damn noise and when it finally stopped, you start nagging me to stop and see why”.  

If I had looked at my temperature gauge a split second sooner it probably would have saved me about 10 years of the “you never listen to me-s”.  But it was too late.  I had said it and the heat gauge was pegged. Lucky for me we were in a town and managed to coast right up to the door of an automotive shop which the gas station owner next door assured me had a competent mechanic and that the shop would be open the next morning.  Turned out that the housing that attached the fan to the engine block had broken.  The water pump replacement mechanic way back in Baker City probably had not tightened the bolts down hard enough and it had been slowly working back and forth over that last 1500 miles of the trip till it finally broke.  The young kid mechanic was able to find one in a local junkyard the next day and we went home that next afternoon.

Judy, knowing my embarrassment at her being right and me being wrong at something mechanical, waited a few weeks to remind me of my error while we were showing off pictures of our trip to some friends over dinner.  

To which I replied, “You were right once that something was wrong out of how many times it was nothing”?

To which she responded, “Yes but that time I was right, we broke down, and you said that I should keep my mouth shut”.  

Sometimes it is best to admit that you cannot win an argument with your wife.  I just nodded my head and said “yes dear” to which my buddy who had been married even longer than I nodded ever so slightly in agreement.  This is the kind of thing that drives men to drink.  Since I was already there anyway, I might as well have another and enjoy the rest of the evening.  As she was always providing me with so much new material to tease her about, graciously accepting a few jabs in my direction is only fair and one of the secrets of having a long and happy marriage.  Besides, I could always send her to the lumber yard to pick up a half a dozen 4 X 2’s.    

When walking about the geothermal features there are lots of signs that tell you to stay on the walk ways.  Seems if you don’t do this, not only will you damage the area but unlike other natural wonders, the area may damage you.  Geothermal areas are hot, damn hot.  Hot enough to give you scalding burns.  Hot enough to melt your dog if you are stupid enough to let it off the leash.  I can accept this, it makes perfect sense.  What I have trouble with is that buffalo apparently don’t read the signs, or so I thought. 

 At the edges of nearly every pool of boiling hot water were buffalo, buffalo tracks, and buffalo meadow muffins.  Sometimes there were even tracks and muffins in the pool.  Yet in four prolonged trips to the park, I never once saw a three legged buffalo or a stewed buffalo in a hot spring.   The only thing I can conclude from this is that buffalo are tough bastards who do not feel pain and when severely injured are totally devoured by the rest of the herd.  This conclusion is reinforced by the frequent warning signs about leaving the wildlife in the park alone and the admonition to stay 40 feet away from the buffalo as they can head butt you with three point distance and accuracy.   The dilemma is what to do when you are almost to the paint pots in this clearly marked geothermal area and a buffalo is using the boardwalk for a pillow.   I could have gone back, but the artist paint pots were one of the most fun things in that Walt Disney movie I had seen so many years ago.  I could step off the path and possibly get scalded.  I could throw rocks at the buffalo but there is probably some rule and hefty fine if caught.  And even if I got away with it, I would never hear the end of it from Judy.  My last option was to hold my breath and tiptoe past the buffalo’s nose in the hopes that it was a sound sleeper.  Which is what I did.  That Judy did the same was somewhat of a surprise.  A woman who runs screaming from a three inch garter snake in her flower bed is fearless when confronted by a ton of buffalo.  Turns out that the paint pots were worth the risk as we pointed and laughed for a half hour at the funny faces the mud seemed to make whenever the paint pots farted.  Only problem was that the way in was also the only way out and buffalo are noted for their long naps.   

My purist friends are always correcting me.  They are not really buffalo, they are BISON.  Fuck that.  I know a buffalo when I see one.  Native Americans and John Wayne called them buffalo and that is good enough for me.  Besides, he was called Buffalo Bill, not BISON Bill, though that would be a good name for a male stripper if I was into that shit.

On our last trip to the park I discovered that buffalo are sticklers for enforcing park rules.  Our neighbors, Erich and Wendy went with us on that trip at the end of May.  Snow was still on the ground and Yellowstone lake was totally iced over.  Not a lot of animals had moved up from the lower elevations at that time of year, but a couple of bull buffalo were hanging out at the mud volcano, our first stop on a week long trip.  Erich and Wendy decided to hike up the trail from the lower geothermal features to the upper ones.  It was a loop trail going straight up then looping around the hill top and straight down to the trail end about 100 yards from where it had begun. Although my mind wanted to climb up the hill and stairs with them, my 71 year old arthritic knees disagreed.  Besides the two gigantic bulls were putting on a heading butting show better than anything I had seen on pay-for-view wrestlemania and it was for real.  Judy and I watched the show for about 30 minutes as the two pushed each other around from the start of the trail loop to the other end of it.  After a bit, the two quit butting heads and began grazing in the new grass.  Only problem was they were on the trail, the very same trail that Erich and Wendy were coming down the hill on.  Within sight of the parking lot Erich found himself trying to stare down a hairy beast who had no intention of yielding the right of way.  Erich, a bit winded after hiking a mile up and down a hill at 7500 feet elevation, thought he could go off the trail a bit and side step the horns of death.  As soon as he put a foot off the trail the bulls head snapped up and snorted.  Erich gingerly got his foot back on the trail and the buffalo put its head down to graze.  Erich tried the same maneuver again with the same but slightly more empathic response from the buffalo park ranger.  The snort language of the buffalo is extremely hard for a non-buffalo speaker to enunciate, but it is easily understood. “Stay on the trail!  Can’t you read the fucking signs, you dumb shit tourist.”   Erich and Wendy turned around and hiked back up the trail.

Most of the year the central portions of the park are infested with buffalo. After a while you just get used to them.  They come into campgrounds, hang out next to the Old Faithful Inn, and in general ignore the people pointing and snapping pics of them as long as they don’t bonk them on the head for a better pose.  However, they are not courteous.  Leaving our campsite one morning we were stuck for two hours in a traffic jam that moved at a leisurely walking pace.  Eventually we heard on our CB radio that the reason for this snarl was a herd of buffalo walking down the middle of the road and refusing to take the frequent slow vehicle turn outs.  Using my vast knowledge of animal behavior learned from watching B-westerns, I could tell that the traffic was moving just slightly faster than the self absorbed herd as the buffalo shit and urine on the road was getting fresher the farther we went.  I was actually looking forward to driving slowly though the herd, but just as we caught up with them, a meadow opened up on the side of the road and they meandered off.  

Other animals also cause traffic jams in the park.  These occur when a herd of something other than buffalo appears next to the highway and all the tourists stop to take pictures.  I have been in moose jams, antelope jams, and even got held up for a few minutes by a coyote begging for scraps.  After a while you get a little blasé about stopping to see elk for the fifth time.  Some people even react with displays of animal/tourist induced road rage.  We were stopped at a three elk jam watching the biggest elk of the three as it showed off its rack to the admiring tourists. A few minutes into this a frustrated driver started beeping his horn to clear the road.  I would have turned around and glared but was too busy laughing at the elk who put the insensitive jerk in his place without uttering a word.  The elk looked at the offending car then slowly turned his head to profile, arched his back and puffed out his chest in an OSCAR winning performance that put Bambi’s father to shame.  The elk held that pose for well over a minute to the delight of the crowd taking snapshots and the shame of the offending driver.

On late spring  afternoon we parked on a hill overlooking Hayden Valley with a mixed herd of about a hundred elk and buffalo in the meadow below us.  Newly born, dun-colored buffalo calves were cavorting around adding a contrasting rhythm to the slow movements of the herd.  The Yellowstone River meandered through the bottom of the idyllic meadow.  In the middle of this menagerie was a single pine tree with a lone bald eagle perched on its broken top.  As the light faded we drove back to the campground, neither of us wanting to talk and break the spell.

About the only disappointment in the animal department was the lack of bears and wolves.  That Disney movie I had seen as a child was full of bears who were being hand fed by tourists   The bears are still there but the rangers apparently keep them all to themselves for whenever a bear shows up near lots of people, they move right in and chase it out or capture it with some diabolically clever trap,  like food in a section of corrugated culvert with a trap door.  They then haul it off away from people where all there is to eat are nuts and berries.  Many bears, to their credit, have figured this out for if you see one they are usually shagging their hairy ass as fast and as far away from you as they can get.  On our last trip to the park my bear drought finally ended.  Maybe it was the snow on the ground or there are more bears now than in the past, possibly because they were better fed by chasing the wolves away from the elk carcasses.  The bears, especially the grizzlies were usually accompanied by a park ranger who were trying ineptly to keep the tourists safely away from them.  Where are the buffalo rangers when you really need them?

On our second trip to Yellowstone we spent the better part of a day looking for wolves.  We drove out to Lamar Valley along with lots of others looking for them.  We soon discovered that the best way to find out where the wolves were and what they had for breakfast was to find a Wolf Guy.  This was a lot easier than finding Geyser Guys as the big ass spotting scopes give them away.  The Wolf Guy we talked to for about an hour that day turned out to be Wolf Gal.  She was a volunteer who drove up on weekends from Boulder, CO, nine hours to the south, just to watch wolves.  She informed us that wolves were just over the next ridge having a good nap after feeding on elk steak tartar the day before.  Having had a few rare elk steaks in my day I understood the need for the nap.    

On our way back to camp that wonderful fall evening we stopped near the south entrance to the park just a few miles shy of Mammoth Hot Springs.  On the side of the road was a bull elk in full rut.  Words cannot describe the alien sound (bugle) that an elk makes when looking for the next Mrs. Elk.  This was the first bull elk we had seen on that trip.  We had seen plenty of cow elk as I think they were trying to get as close to humans as possible for protection from their deranged spouses.  After a bit we left our lovelorn elk and drove the short distance into Mammoth Hot Springs proper only to find a whole herd of elk cows on the lawns around park HQ with a solitary bull feeding on a shrub not ten feet off the road.  Later that evening along the Gardner River we came upon a massive herd of elk where in the distance several bulls were fighting, kicking up great clouds of dust in the process. I was getting a pretty good view through my binoculars if I held my breath to steady them. What fun! Just then another car pulled up and a whole family got out and asked me, yes me, what was going on.  My God!  I was the Elk Guy!   I got that smug elitist feeling that I had the day before at the Lion and Cub geyser.  I began explaining that the bull elks just out of eyeshot were fighting, when the guys smartass ass kid said, “Is that all.  We just left Mammoth Hot Springs and two bulls were fighting on the grass outside the HQ building not 10 feet from us”.

On the way back to camp that evening we stopped in an area noted for moose along a marsh with the Gardner River running through the middle of it.   On our first trip in the spring of 1994 we had stopped at this same spot during the hottest part of the day to let our German Shepherd out for a walk, as she was a bit whiney and was noted for weak bladder control in what were then her latter years.  Although your pets must be on a leash at all times in the park, she was so compliant that we almost never bothered unless there was a ranger watching.  However, this time she just kept walking into the high grass next to the turn out and did not even glance back when we called her name.   We both started running after her when we heard it.  Splash! Cindy had found the river and decided to flop in it to cool off.  This was not funny as Cindy was a white German Shepherd.  The hairs on this peculiar mutation of dog are not just white, they are very fine and when they get wet they stay wet for days.  As Cindy would spend a lot of time cooped up in the RV, we were going to smell a lot of wet dog.  We found her laying half submerged in the river.  She looked like she was having a good time.  Judy and I looked at each other and the next thing you know we were right in the water with her.  Judy and I do not normally skinny dip but it was hot and we were miles away from civilization.  What we had not counted on were the fly fishermen that came wading upstream a half hour later.  Don’t know who was more startled.  And the damn dog never even barked although I am pretty sure I know what doggie laugher sounds like.  

But that fall evening on our second trip we did not skinny dip.  It was a lot cooler and Cindy had passed on to the places that dogs with good senses of humor go.  We sat in our pickup listening to the elk bugle as it went from dusk to dark.  Just as we were leaving, a single moose came out of the reeds as a black silhouette on a nearly black background.  It shook its head sending water drops in all directions that seemed to fall in slow motion, falling like so many diamonds in the dying light.  It was a perfect ending to a nearly perfect day.

That night as we pulled back into Madison campground, we passed a motorhome with a group of people standing around a largish man who I assumed had fallen out onto the pavement.  I stopped and Judy asked if we could help, “not really” was our answer.  It was then I noticed it was not a normal fall.  He was in the process of dying from a heart attack with foam coming out of his mouth.  Stunned, I drove a few yards on when I suddenly remembered that as a federal employee I have been trained multiple times in CPR.  I stopped, told Judy that I would meet her back at camp, and walked quickly back.  I told the family that I was trained in CPR and asked if I could help.  The man’s wife told me to “let him go, just let him go”.  I knew from my training that it was not her decision.  The victim was unconscious which without a written do not resuscitate document, the decision to begin CPR was not hers but mine.  Knowing what you should do and actually doing it is a common problem.  I did nothing and he died.  

The next day after a sleepless night, Judy and I talked to the campground managers on duty.  The family had confided in them that the deceased had terminal health problems.  His wish was to see Alaska and Yellowstone before he died.  The daughter and son-in-law who I had talked briefly with the night before had taken two months off to give him that wish.  They had spent a month in Alaska and this was their last night in Yellowstone before returning home.  I have never been to Alaska.  But I know just how he felt about Yellowstone.