No matter how much I elevate my intellectual game by watching documentaries and reading National Geographic, the most developed parts of my brain are still the synapses created by Hanna-Barbera. So for a moment, while driving through Yellowstone National Park the scenery turns to cartoon trees and animated mountain peaks with bright green triangles and gray curved lines.
We enter the park with our Toyota Highlander laden with all the wares of vacationers, our car seeming to tip with the weight as it climbs the road to the wild. Ranger Smith gives a wave and Yogi Bear is surely hiding in the bushes waiting for his opportunity on wiggling, wriggling tiptoes, careful and stealthy, to steal our picnic basket full of snacks. I’ve read about the geological processes that have created Yellowstone, but the animators of Hanna-Barbera seem more powerful to me than plate tectonics and volcanoes. They built this park every Saturday morning, coloring the grass ten different shades of green, darkening the sky to mark the time of day, and drawing the brown columns of tree trunks and the white dollops of mountain snow to create the perfect natural landscape to my child’s mind.
I shouldn’t be surprised when I pass through this iconic scenery and experience a flicker of recognition and have a feeling that I’ve been here before. In fact, the Department of the Interior Museum actually presented an exhibit the year we were there that highlighted the use of America’s public lands and national parks in movies, tv shows, and novels. It showcased familiar faces and places from popular culture who used the national lands and parks in their performances. Yogi Bear and Ranger Smith were on display alongside hundreds of other beloved characters and celebrities and picturesque backdrops for movie scenes, music videos, and artwork.
Yellowstone is full-blooded American and the combined lore of the American West and the classic family road trip live in the landscape. I never expected to leave my own tracks here at Yellowstone, to lay my story over the others left behind, both real and imagined. I’m following the covered wagons, the station wagons, the RVs and the SUVs, yet we are going our own way and telling our own unique odyssey story.
Growing up, my family never ventured west of I-95. We took a one week vacation to Florida like many East Coast families. We took weekend trips to D.C. and to the Outer Banks. We went to New York once to see the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. We traveled north and south along an east coast strip of the original 13 colonies as if going past the Mississippi was venturing into hostile frontier land. My parents never even talked about the possibility of traveling out west.
As teenagers, my husband and I would meet up at the public library to study. We bloomed there in those stacks and stacks of books in the hush and quiet. We left our math books closed, our projects undone, our papers unwritten and opened up travel books, big coffee table books with miles and miles of landscapes for us to browse. We were looking for our future in every page, making promises to walk the world together. We wanted to see beyond I-95 to travel together across rivers and oceans and mountains, islands and continents and villages.
Years later, we both became teachers, got married and started paying the bills, mostly school loans. We had the summers off but no money to go anywhere. Then we had two kids and the summers still off and more debt and more bills. We had to get creative with our lifestyle if we were going to travel. So, first we sold our house and moved to Argentina to teach at an American International school. We saw a lot of Buenos Aires, but we didn’t have much money to travel beyond our new city. We came back home and settled into a winter rental near the beach and finally figured out the only way to travel during the summers was without any bills during those months: no rent, no mortgage, no power bills, no gas and water. The winter rental was the solution and our beach town had plenty of options.
When we would tell people about our extended travels in the summer and our manipulation to live the dream, they often would shake their head in recognition of our feat and tell us how brilliant the whole plan was to work the system this way. More than anything, we lived up to the promise of our 16 year-old desires to see the world together, and we always believed it was okay to live a constantly moving life that others might not totally embrace.
So, there we were well past I-95 and the Mississippi in Yellowstone National Park driving through Wyoming streets looking for buffaloes and bears, waterfalls and geysers, meadows and mountain peaks. The land here is bustling with effort, everything is humming with life like a village of plants and animals, rocks and water. We forget concrete and brick for a while. Furniture is from a lifetime ago. Walls are artifacts as we return to this, our first world with its wide open spaces. This all-natural attraction is free of the constant sell in progress in our lives back home, the endless ads and signs beckoning us, commanding us to buy and to consume and to experience.
All the earth demanded of us in Yellowstone was to see and to hear and to feel and to think, to let the landscape work its way into our citified souls until the trees overtook the buildings, the hillsides demolished McDonald’s and the grass carpeted the roads. I started to believe in the superiority of this landscape, the necessity of it to be alive and well not so much because of what it is but for what it is not, its resistance to commercialism and to modernization, to pavement and to parking lots, to amusement and to gimmicks. It isn’t here for our entertainment but for our edification. It hasn’t been carved out and fussed over, designed and bedazzled with neon and sparkle. It hasn’t become a playground of slides and ziplines.
Yellowstone is wayfinding paths and mind clearing vistas. Yellowstone is wild animals and smoking earth. Yet, Yellowstone is on display and is tamed with trails and scenic overlooks. For now, it remains protected from the worst predator possible, corporations who can smell the profits in the Yellowstone air. The greed that makes them hungry may bring them circling this land in their blackened Land Rovers, licking their chops, counting their money, making their phone calls, cutting their ribbons and carrying ceremonial spades coming in for the kill, for the upheaval of earth. Maybe we should follow the example of Hanna-Barbera who certainly made a fortune off of Yellowstone without doing harm taking only inspiration from the lands.
Sometimes it seems miraculous that we eventually made our way to Yellowstone to see the real thing. It’s not crazy to think this place could be immortalized forever in cartoons only, an artifact of another time. It’s also not crazy to think that we would ever make it past I-95 on two teachers’ salaries and three kids. The longshot of Yellowstone preserved and our freedom-filled summers made it possible for us to see the natural wonders of America.