Julie had her 52nd birthday last week. She celebrated it by getting in the car and heading for Yellowstone National Park and Chico Hot Springs Resort. I was lucky enough to get to go with her.
At Yellowstone, we stayed at the Lake Hotel, the oldest hotel in the Park. At Chico, we stayed in the Warren Wing, named after Warren Oates, a movie star now chiefly remembered for his role in the hyper-violent movie The Wild Bunch. Oates was a regular at Chico before Chico was cool, and his support of the resort helped transform it from a funky, cheap, run-down place into a high-end destination for nomadic sybarites.
The hallways of the Warren Wing are covered with photos of Oates—movie stills, of course, but also shots of Oates and various female companions. He is forty years gone now, and those women are no longer young.
Chico has changed as well. It’s an increasingly famous culinary destination, and its dining room is full of dining widows, women in their 70s and 80s in groups of two and three and four. They talk and laugh together and tell stories about the men who used to be in their lives.
Possibly they tell stories about Warren Oates, possibly about being married to Warren Oates. He married four times, which implies some good stories, if not always happy ones.
Oates died at 53, becoming a memento mori at the height of his career. Death must have been a disappointment to him. He had a ranch in Montana, scripts in his mailbox, and no matter how difficult or wearing the movie business or the divorce courts became, all he had to do was show up at Chico and they’d shake his hand and take him in and ask if he was hungry or needed a soak.
In the mornings, before breakfast, Julie and I visited the hot pools and stayed in the hot water until we woke up. It’s the preferred way to return to consciousness for aging nomadic sybarites.
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The Lake Hotel had been nice, too, although they had only been open a week and were still hiring wait-staff. There was a line at the entrance to the dining room. The cooks were working out kinks in the menu. We did eventually get seated and had a good meal. We had a nice room in the Sandpiper Lodge behind the main building.
The hallway on the way to the dining room had photos and paintings on the walls, but no movie stars. If there had been, it would have been of a young Jack Nicholson, smiling in a sepia-tinted photo in the final frame of the 1980 film, The Shining.
It is not good to have seen The Shining if you’re staying at a hotel in a National Park. It’s not that the National Park Service has done anything wrong, but the Lake Hotel is old and semi-creepy. It was opened in 1891 by the Northern Pacific Railroad. It’s been refurbished since then, but it carries, in its corridors and great rooms, all the weight of its 132 years. In display cases in the lobby, there are photographs of deceased people in old-style hats and coats, impossibly formal and stern. Their eyes stare out from their photos as if they’re trapped there. You decide not to apply for the caretaker’s job at the Lake Hotel for the coming Wyoming winter.
You find yourself glad that the place is crowded with your fellow tourists, very much alive if less formally dressed than the people in the photographs. You even welcome the happy screams of their children, comforting yourself with the knowledge that not all screams are as happy.
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Earlier in the day we had stopped at Old Faithful. We walked into its viewing area from the parking lot and asked a park employee when it was scheduled to go off. Ten minutes, we were told, give or take ten minutes. Old Faithful is still faithful but not always punctual.
We quickly joined a crowd of a thousand onlookers, most of whom had been waiting for a half-hour or longer. A boy and girl—twenty-somethings—were sitting on a bench in front of us, and ten minutes later, when the geyser started showing signs of life, the boy set up his phone on a tripod, got down on one knee, and gave the girl a ring. In the background, water and steam roared high in the sky.
A thousand cheers for Old Faithful. A thousand cell phones at the end of a thousand arms. “Yes! Yes, I will!” the girl shouted over the crowd. The boy kissed her. She kissed him back. The crowd, noticing what was going on, stopped cheering the geyser and started cheering the newly engaged couple.
“I knew you were going to do that,” said the girl, and I hoped that for the rest of her life, whenever she said those words, she would be as happy as she was at that moment.
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After Old Faithful, we visited the Artists’ Paint Pots, a series of multicolored mud springs on a hillside a half-mile or so from its parking lot. A few hundred other people accompanied us, and we all watched as the pools of wet clay slurped and blubbed and spewed thick ropy streamers into the air.
It was comically organic, as though goofy amphibians were living a few inches below the surface, burping and farting and muttering rude things in amphibian about tourists in general and us in particular. It’s impossible to see yourself as a serious naturalist when you’re walking around the Artists’ Paint Pots.
You can’t even see yourself as a serious artist. You have an impulse to finger-paint, and you realize it’s a good thing that the viewing platforms are surrounded by railings and KEEP OFF DELICATE THERMAL AREAS signs, ensuring you and your fingers safe distance from the boiling mud.
We left the Paint Pots and stopped at Norris Geyser Basin, home of Steamboat Geyser, the world’s best of breed, which shoots boiling water 300’ in the air. The Basin contains other violently unstable geological features. Going off, some of the Norris geysers have produced rock-shattering steam explosions rather than steaming sunlit rainbows.
If the Yellowstone Caldera blows its top, it’ll probably happen at Norris, so there’s always a little shiver of excitement when you walk around its boardwalks. We didn’t visit Steamboat, as its dormant periods range from three days to fifty years, but in past visits, when we’ve walked out to it, there have been groups of septuagenarian bucket-listers sitting in aluminum lawn chairs, waiting for an eruption. Nobody, at least nobody that we noticed, was waiting there with an engagement ring. It’s possible we missed them. It’s possible that somebody’s still hoping for a proposal if death hasn’t asked first.
We did see—at least we think we saw, out of the corners of our eyes—some real artists at Norris, mostly photographers in Mossy Oak camouflage, carrying Mossy Oak cameras with giant Mossy Oak lenses. They were deeply serious about their photos, as if they knew that any amphibians under Norris would have to be the giant Triassic kind, with giant teeth that could grab an arm or leg and pull you under the thin crust. National Geographic would pay well for a photo, if you and your camera survived that first savage bite-and-jerk into the underworld.
Yellowstone encourages undersurface fantasies. You know there’s a vast magma chamber down there somewhere, big enough, if all its dissolved gases were suddenly released, to bring a decade-long volcanic ash winter to the Northern Hemisphere, putting an end to wars, governments, global heating, agriculture, stray human thoughts of free will, and any surviving stray humans. It’s hard, walking around a geyser basin, not to give the local geology eyes, ears, and a face with glowing eyes and sharp teeth.
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I never met Warren Oates. My first visit to Chico was in 1988, and he died in 1982. But I did see The Wild Bunch when it came out in the summer of 1969. It was the only movie I have ever seen that made me physically ill due to the amount of blood it spilled. Slow motion in the most violent scenes hadn’t helped.
Had I met Warren Oates at the time, I wouldn’t have been able to separate the actor from the character he played. If I had met him at Chico, I probably wouldn’t have liked Chico.
When I did finally go to Chico, I thought the Warren Wing had been named for Warren Beatty, who had made a 1975 movie I had liked, Shampoo. That movie portrayed the lonely middle-age of a good-looking pathological narcissist hairdresser with so many women in his life he couldn’t keep them apart. He had thought that sleeping with his clients would keep him young. Instead, it made him old.
I liked Chico just fine. No harm, no foul, was my reaction when I found out I had confused the two Warrens. By then I had deliberately forgotten the blood and gore of The Wild Bunch, and what I now recognize as the psychological violence of Shampoo didn’t seem violent to me at all. These days I can see that it was a hyper-violent movie, too.
Human beings do horrible things to each other in Shampoo, and it means nothing to any of them. It teaches that shallowness can be a defense against tragedy. True enough, but that’s an argument in favor of tragedy.
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According to Google Maps, it’s seven hours and four minutes from Chico Hot Springs to our home in Sawtooth Valley. It took us less than that, due to Montana’s lax speed limits and my tendency to pick up the pace when heading for the barn.
It was a beautiful drive. It’s been a long winter in our corner of the country, but we’ve had enough warm weather that the grass is greening and the wildflowers are out. We saw elk and antelope and deer and their babies. Lots of cows and baby cows.
The world was new again. Even Butte, the city next to the giant pit filled with purple acid, looked halfway fresh. At Montana’s Big Hole, we drove though burned areas on either side of the road, but grass was beginning to rise around the black trunks of trees. In Salmon, we stopped for groceries, and continued up the Salmon River, which was flooding over banks lined by new-leafing cottonwoods. We slowed to go through Challis, and then pushed on to our front door.
It felt good to end our time as nomads. It felt good to rein in our sybaritic impulses. While Julie was cooking a light dinner, I put on hip boots and went out with a shovel to patch muskrat holes in the irrigation ditch. It’s hard work, and I was hungry enough that I didn’t stay with it for long. It still felt good to be doing something useful.
When you first head out on a road trip you think it would be good to travel forever, living in a series of hotels, eating at a series of restaurants, getting poolside massages at a series of hot-water spas. But very quickly the sights you see and the meals you eat and the moments in the sun on a chaise lounge begin to recall other trips, other summers, other companions. You remember movies you’ve seen and realize they contained messages for the person you are rather than the person you were when you saw them.
Your age shoots back through your experience and changes it. You realize you’ve outlived a lot of friends and family and a bunch of the people you’ve seen in movies. You realize that a lot of people are going to outlive you.
All these things need to be ruminated about. New data needs to be integrated into an old consciousness, preferably while sitting amid the quiet if relatively spartan comforts of home.
You don’t have to come to any conclusions, but you do have to realize that as you age, the world gets deeper. Each new thing you experience is layered over the experience of other, older people, some of them previous versions of yourself. Your experiences are as much theirs as yours. You owe them something. To call it gratitude is oversimplifying things.