Yellowstone is a place you fall in love with. It gets under your skin and you smell it and taste it and hear it and feel it. The things you see and the people you meet while in the park remain in your mind and reside in your soul for years after you leave. Coming back to Yellowstone after being gone for a while is like coming home to a place and a time you remember from your dreams. Yet the things you have seen, the dark nights and the brilliant days, the wilderness and the rawness and the possibilities, are as real as anything you know. The steam from a healthy bison cow rising in the frosty air of a raw October morning in Hayden valley is a poem. The night spent in a tent in the Bechler, waiting out the sounds of snuffling and scuffing, hoping it’s not a grizzly bear; that fear, that exhilaration, is a drug. Staying up all night on the summer solstice to watch the sun go down and then rise again over Yellowstone Lake is a requiem. Breathing the perfume of pine, the sulfur stink, the wood smoke, and the sage is a love song.
The people I worked with while employed seasonally in the park are some of the most generous, kind, strange, lonely, intelligent, tragic, and heart-breaking people I have ever met. Some were running away from something. They ran to the wilderness and the communal lifestyle to escape abuse, depression, love, hate, memories, and responsibility. Others were running to something, looking for love, escape, hope, inspiration, and truth. What I think we all found was something in between. We found people who were very different from ourselves and who were exactly the same. We found magic in the mountains and tragedy in the dark woods. We found such joy in each other and in the valleys that we were brought to tears. We found such sad desolation in everyone and everything around us that we were driven to reckless irresponsibility, incapacitated with sick laughter. We fell in love with one another, and we broke each other’s hearts. Some of us have never left the park physically, and still live our days on the edge of both wilderness and civilization, holding on to something we cannot describe, but know it cannot be found elsewhere. Others of us have left park employment and have moved away geographically, remembering our days at Lake or Old Faithful especially when the snow flies a certain way or a particular song comes over the airwaves. But the Park has never left us, no matter on what terms we left, good or bad. When you are in love with a place, it stays with you.
