Wonderland
(entry for 9/18/2024)
When I was nine years old, someone (I don’t remember who) gave me a book for my birthday entitled Cubby in Wonderland by Frances Joyce Farnsworth, about a little bear cub, born in a cave in the Teton Range in Wyoming, and accompanied by his mother into the nearby Yellowstone National Park, which he calls Wonderland, because it is full of so many strange natural features. It’s a kids’ novel, told in the third person from the cub’s point of view, and while it was a bit below my normal reading level (I had just finished Huckleberry Finn), I did devour it and love it.
We had passed through Yellowstone briefly in the late spring of 1947, on our way through to see my Aunt Reba’s college graduation in College Place, Washington, but I had very few memories of it. Old Faithful, of course, and West Thumb, and the Petrified Forest and the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone River, with its upper and lower falls, but that was about it, as far as anything sticking in my mind was concerned. (We had skipped Mammoth.) I had much more vivid memories of the hot springs at Thermopolis (which we had visited at night!), and of my aunt’s graduation ceremony, and of the lava fields near Bend, Oregon, and of Canon Beach, which I have mentioned in an earlier blog post. Yellowstone was pretty much just a quick blur.
But I remembered enough about it to understand what Cubby was seeing, according to the story, and was fascinated by the things he saw that I didn’t see, or at least didn’t remember seeing. And I made no secret of the fact that I would like to go back and catch up with the bear’s experiences. I also asked for, and soon received, a copy of the sequel, called Cubby Returns, which contained even more Wonders, and in which the cub is weaned and goes off on his own, which both scared and excited me. (It’s also about twice as long a book as the first one, and was therefore a more familiar size to me.)
By the time I was ten I had begun to have elaborate fantasies about a model I would make of the entire Park, or at least the Upper Geyser Basin, where Old Faithful is. I bought a can of paraffin to carve the geysers out of, ignoring the fact that all the geysers go off at diverse intervals, making it almost impossible for all them to go erupt at the same time. (I never opened the can! I did draw the map that I planned to use to create the model, but that’s as far as the project ever went.)
So in the early summer of 1951, when my dad suddenly announced that we going to go to Yellowstone for a whole week (!), I was ecstatic.
My dad had recently bought the back-end portion of an old and wrecked Studebaker pickup truck, and had turned the bed of it into a trailer. He bought long, but thin and narrow, maple planks, which he steamed and bent into ‘Covered Wagon’ hoops that could be inserted into holders on the sides of the trailer, to be covered with a canvas tarpaulin for protection from the weather for sleeping purposes. (Two of us would fit in the trailer, equipped with a full-size mattress, while the other two slept in the car, an old DeSoto with wide and undivided seats.)
For some unknown reason we departed on the trip from Greeley, instead of from Montrose, where we had now lived for almost two years. We got away at two p.m., rather than the planned ten a.m., mostly because my mom insisted on unpacking everything my dad had packed and re-doing it her way.
Getting such a late start, we didn’t make it very far into Wyoming before darkness fell, and our fist campsite with the trailer wasn’t really a campsite at all, just a rural school-yard on a hillside near the small town of Chugwater. (Where, the next morning, I for the first time witnessed a sunrise, which I thought was quite exciting.)
After stopping at a natural bridge a few miles farther north, we detoured through Jackson Hole, and stayed that night within view of the Grand Tetons. (The fictional Cubby’s birthplace.)
The next day, we finally made it into Yellowstone.
I felt right at home, having read both books over and over again. I found the famous Fishing Bridge to be rather a let-down, and thought it was fairly unlikely that a bear cub could have gotten as close to it as Cubby supposedly had, without spooking a bunch of little kids.
Next was Upper Geyser Basin. Old Faithful was in those days just as regular as the name suggests, erupting almost exactly once every hour, give or take a few minutes. (It’s now much less predictable, as its schedule was messed up rather badly by a huge earthquake in 1959.) We stayed long enough to watch it twice, then went on to Morning Glory Pool (the picture at the top of this blog post).
[By the way, very sad to say, people have pretty much ruined Morning Glory now. They've thrown coins, and even trash, into it, and the beautiful colors have faded badly, the deep blue center being now a sort of olive green. I'm glad I got to see it when it was still gorgeous.]
Then we back-tracked to Lone Star Geyser, which at that time went off only once every three hours or so, and which we had bypassed earlier because it wasn’t due for quite a while yet. In fact we had just missed one eruption by a few minutes. Everybody was rather disappointed, because instead of the hundred feet or so that Old Faithful shoots into the air, Lone Star could only manage about two or three feet. (It shoots a lot higher than that since the earthquake, and a lot more often to boot.)
We stayed that night in the Basin Campground, and my dad and I the next morning were awakened by a violent shaking of the trailer. He got out to see what was going on, then got right back in again. “Big yellow Grizzly Bear,” he announced. “Scratching his back on our axle.” Needless to say, we waited till the bear wandered off before getting out of the trailer for the day.
I’ll never know if she made it up or if it really happened, but my mom had a cautionary tale to tell me later that morning, as we were eating breakfast, cooked over an open campfire made between large stones. “A kid fell in a hot springs pool yesterday,” she said. “Not Morning Glory, one of the smaller ones.”
“What happened?” I asked, breathless.
“Well, you know how when I do canning of tomatoes, I stick the cold tomato in a kettle of boiling water first, on a fork, for fifteen seconds?”
I did indeed know, having helped her count off the seconds on several occasions.
“And you know how when I lift the tomato out, its skin stays behind, in the water?”
I nodded my head, solemnly.
“Well, that’s what happened to the little boy,” she said. “When they lifted him out, his skin stayed behind in the boiling water. Just like a tomato.”
Welcome to Wonderland.
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To see previous posts in Len’s Memory Blog, please click HERE.
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