What This Place Has Saved
We’re nearing what landscape photographers, like my late husband, Richard, call the golden hour, when we spot the cars. Lined up along both shoulders of the narrow two-lane road, the dozen or so stopped vehicles have caused traffic, which ought to be moving, to grind to a halt.
At first, I fear there’s been an accident. What else would cause a pile-up of cars, basically stopping life and movement in its tracks?
Kurt, our kind, smart driver and guide, explains. When you come upon a scene like this, most likely it has to do with a bear.
A few days ago, I met my fellow passengers and an equal number in a second van, after a jaw-droppingly gorgeous drive from the Bozeman, Montana airport. My third-floor room in a modest motel has a balcony that looks out over a roaring river. To the left and right, majestic snow-covered peaks edge up into the sky.
For the past three and a half years, I have been following an unfamiliar path, lacking a single guidepost or sign. I’ve done this because the life I’d known, both familiar and adored, was gone.
Three and a half years ago, the love of my life, my husband and best friend, Richard, died. For nearly thirty years, Richard had accompanied me on hikes up and down mountains, on paddles down rivers and around lakes, and on drives to the nearby Northern California Coast, east to Yosemite National Park, and north to remote cabins in the Cascade Mountains. When he left this earth, he also took with him my life.
My remedy for this achingly awful blow has been to join groups of strangers on trips into the great outdoors. I have lost count of the number I’ve taken so far. Until I found myself in a van wondering why all these cars were stopped along the road, I wasn’t sure if these journeys were helping me create a life in place of the one I lost. But sometime after Kurt added our van to the line of vehicles on the shoulder, I came up with a response.
The motive for why these drivers decided to pull over to the side of the road and park appears oblivious to all the attention. He stands in a meadow of bright new grass, a safe distance from where we are on the road’s shoulder, his enormous head down, while he silently eats. Every so often, he raises his head, apparently checking on how many more sweet greens there might be to enjoy. He lifts one paw and then another, which gets him to where he can sample the bounty a few feet away.
He is, Kurt says, a grizzly bear guy. His dark brown fur looks full and soft. Yes, he does resemble a toy.
Though I have spent a lifetime hiking trails in national and state parks, I have only seen a bear once, at a distance across Lake Mary, while on a boat in Glacier National Park. I have hiked in several places, including Glacier, Waterton Lakes, and Banff National Parks, where trails have been closed to protect visitors from bear attacks. In this very place, Yellowstone National Park, a young man and teenage boy were attacked by a mother bear with a cub a few weeks ago. The area where that happened is still closed.
Every so often, the grizzly looks up and I see his face. He doesn’t appear to be looking at me or anyone in the crowd, which is following his every move, with binoculars held up to their eyes or scopes set on spindly black legs above the ground. Unlike we humans, frequently angling for social media attention, the bear’s lack of interest in us is a clear sign he would feel perfectly fine to be ignored.
As excited as I am to stand and admire this handsome creature, something else about the scene has touched my heart. All these people are here because of him. They stand silently in awe. Strangers offer strangers a look through their binoculars or scopes. At a time of darkness and deep division in this country, here we are, regardless of race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, language, country of origin, religion or political beliefs, sharing profound and grateful wonder over what this magnificent place, the first national park in the United States and the world, has saved. We are celebrating the fact that this land belongs to us, not some billionaire who added these acres, blessed with bubbling water, magnificent mountains, herds of bison, elk, and pronghorn antelope, plus wolf packs and solitary black bears and grizzly, to his collection of homes and yachts.
The morning after our grizzly sighting, Kurt drives us to the trailhead for the next hike. Snow was in today’s forecast, and sure enough, as we make our way up and around the winding road through the park, white flakes begin swirling all around. The higher we go, the more the ground is buried under clean white powder. Pine trees wear several-inch-thick layers draped across their elegant arms.
We begin the hike at the bottom of a snow-covered rise, bordered by tall lodgepole pines. Following a short climb, we see we’re not alone. One dark brown, nearly black, bison plods through the snow and mud on our right, joined a moment later by a second matching one. These animals were hunted almost to extinction before indigenous preservation, conservation efforts and laws, and protected public spaces caused the population to rebound. Through my phone lens, the picture of two bison standing atop a field of white, their huge heads bowed, looks like a scene from a public television nature documentary.
Snow continues to fall, mostly light, as we hike. At one point, I walk alongside a second guide, Julie, and we talk. I tell her I lost my husband a few years back. She shares that both her father and a dear friend died this past year. She’s still experiencing the awful dark grief over not one but two huge losses.
I express my condolences, then relate some of what I’ve learned in my three and a half years of widowhood. Unlike what people who haven’t lost a great love sometimes say, that time will heal this wound, I offer a different take. What softens the grief, I say, are moments of joy. It’s such moments with the people we loved and lost that we miss most.
The next morning, a black bear ambles across the road, stopping traffic in both directions and not giving a hoot. Everyone in the van with me is excited, as am I. I imagine that folks in the other stopped cars, who might be upset if delayed by an accident or road work, are delighted that this oblivious being has silently forced them to pause and take in a glorious vestige of the wild, only possible to encounter in a few special spots.
A few days ago, one of the trip leaders, Deborah, prefaced her introductory talk about the wonders of Yellowstone National Park with an admission.
“I’m not supposed to be political,” she said.
Deborah went on to explain that the current administration in Washington was, at that very moment, attempting to take our public lands away.
“We all need to do whatever we can to stop it,” she urged.
Deborah gave us this warning before we’d stood next to strangers, enthralled by a grizzly who didn’t have to bolt away to save his life. This happened before we hiked in lightly fallen snow along the rim trail overlooking the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, gazing down at Yellowstone Falls pouring into the Yellowstone River, which over millennia carved this canyon. Her admonition came prior to our witnessing the Grand Geyser, the tallest predictable geyser in the world, shooting streams of water high into the air, before pausing, and then erupting again.
This was also before I’d added an untold number of joyful moments into my life, moments that softened the edges of the sharp dark stone of grief I carry in my heart. Her words, along with the hope, awe and wonder I experienced in this treasured place, set aside for bears, bison, wolves, elk, moose, antelope, marmot, and “the benefit and enjoyment of the people,” as the 1872 act creating Yellowstone National Park stated, will nudge me to do my part, to ensure our public lands remain places of preservation and protection for all the generations of wildlife and humans to come.
Patty Somlo’s books, Hairway to Heaven Stories (Cherry Castle Publishing), The First to Disappear (Spuyten Duyvil) and Even When Trapped Behind Clouds: A Memoir of Quiet Grace (WiDo Publishing), have been Finalists in the International Book, Best Book, National Indie Excellence, American Fiction and Reader Views Literary Awards.
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