The only way back in was Amtrak. I had to pull some strings to get a ticket on that very first train, after service resumed. I took the Empire Builder out of Chicago across the top tier of the United States. Naturally, we took the long way around to Yellowstone. We made a broad circle and came in upwind, from the west, from the backside. This was toward the end of the second summer of the story, about the time when kids started going back to school.
Amtrak skipped the dining car. That meant everyone took their own cooler aboard. The observation car would have been a sick joke, and so Amtrak skipped that, too. Those coolers clogged up the aisles, but no one seemed to mind. The trip west turned into one long cocktail hour. It was probably better for all of us to get tight, except that we murmured in small groups, like mourners. It reminded me of a wake, after you get back from the graveyard.
Sometimes the railroad will follow the river. Sometimes a highway joins up, to run alongside. And then, sometimes, it is just the railroad, finding its own lonesome way as best it can. The railroad is always all business.
Some of the passengers began calling our train The Brimstone Express. Some of us did not see the humor in that, but later I began thinking of the tunnel boring machines that way, at least the one that made it.
We passed a lot of spurs and rail sidings along rows of agri-business grain bins. For the first time, I wondered how much food was inside and whether it was wheat, or some other grain. I wondered if there would be enough to last us, until we got back on our feet. Americans have never had to wonder where the baker was going to get his flour.
We mainly followed the Missouri River west, until we got close to the Continental Divide. Then Amtrak struck out on its own, clinging to mountainsides, and crossing gorges on trestles. Finally, on the west side of the Rockies, we picked up the Columbia River and followed that down into Pasco, Washington, population 65,000—or maybe a little higher these days with displaced persons. That was the end of the line for the Empire Builder. I would like to take it again, someday, when it returns to full service, and I know it will.
Leaving Pasco, the next train crossed the Snake River, but then it took a short cut. The train turned away from the Snake to cut cross-country through that northeast neck of Oregon. We caught up with the Snake River again, at the end of that day, and crossed it a few miles downstream of Weiser, Idaho.
We ran alongside the Snake, all through the night and until noon the next day. That was 400 miles in a big arc across southern Idaho. Finally, we pulled into the Union Pacific rail yard in Pocatello. That was as close as they would take me. At that point, I would start living by my wits. I knew no one and had no transportation, but I was going to get there all the same. The people had to know.
In one of life’s odd coincidences, I saw Claire on the train. You cannot help but notice a woman like that and there did not seem to be a mark on her.
She got on ahead of me in Chicago and rode it the whole way. Public Broadcasting had interviewed her many times over the past year. Those reporters had caught her out in the open, in the park, tramping along with her bear dogs. At the end, she just vanished, and people wondered to each other if she had managed to get through it.
Claire was riding in the car ahead of mine. What must have been going through her mind, with all that time just to sit and think! And why had she gone east? And how did she get there?
When I told her I was a reporter, when I asked for an interview, she just looked up at me like everything inside had been drained away. A couple of the men in the car suggested that I leave her alone. I figured that she was going my way and that, sooner or later, I’d run into her again.
When she got off at Pasco, we boarded the same train to Pocatello. That was the end of the line for now. There, Claire was met at the train by this equally stunning woman with a great figure that a well-worn flight jacket and coveralls did not attempt to conceal.
They acted like long-lost sisters. Once again, I did not interrupt. She walked Claire over to a helicopter next to the last row of tracks and they took off—right from the Union Pacific rail yard. That babe was the barnstorming bush pilot Cherry Brady. She was the one at the end who tried to rescue Claire, but the turbulence was too strong for her helicopter.
I had drawn expense money from my newspaper chain for two months on the road. I have been a contributing editor for them for twenty years. This means that, when I am in the office, I have to borrow a desk, if I think I need one. I travel most of the time. I do not know whether this has made me old before my time, or keeps me forever young. The answer depends on how much sleep I have had. The bottom line is that, in this line of work, you cannot become attached to more than you can carry—and you need to like hotels. And people? Well, you have to learn to miss them, and let it go at that.
It used to be that I always wanted to move on. That way folks never had a chance to disappoint me. It could be a lonely life, but there was always another story. I never got to know people well, but they were always fresh. That counts for something.
Being a reporter gives me permission to ask all the nosey questions I need for my story plus a few for the care and feeding of my own curiosity. You might wonder why a normal fellow would take on this kind of life. The answer is easy, but you might be too polite to guess it, so I will tell you. Normal has never been my cup of tea.
I was sitting on a bench outside Catholic Hospital a little over twenty-two years ago wondering where I was going to sleep that night. The doctors had taken me in a few weeks before. I do not know if they actually cured me of anything—I just got well on my own—but the combination of regular hours, 3 squares a day and nothing stronger than coffee at least had me up on my feet. They sent a Sister of St. Benedict in to see me once I got my color back. Those afternoons I had the first normal conversations in years. The Catholics expect a little more from a miracle, but I told Sister that I thought it ought to count as one.
Despite Sister’s good intentions, I didn’t take her advice either. I decided that I would let fate find me since I had been doing such a lousy job of chasing it.
I left my wedding ring and house key on the kitchen table, took half the savings and my car, filled a suitcase and said goodbye to the worst year of my life. The further I got, the better it felt, so I just kept on going.
All I needed from there was the great good luck to run out of money in the right town, at the right time, which is what I did. They say the rest is history and it will be, just as soon as I get around to writing it. But first, I must finish this one.
The photographs that came out of this trip into the west would alone be worth the newspaper’s investment. In some ways, they will remind you of the Matthew Brady photographs during the Civil War. Of course, my focus was better than Brady’s. And my pictures were in color, when there was any color.
I blew through my expense money in 2 weeks. I do not think there was not a bargain to be found west of Chicago. The people out west were not greedy. They were scared.
Lumber companies were already starting to move into the fringes. It cost me two hundred dollars to hitch a ride on the back of a lumber company flatbed that was deadheading back inside. Nobody was giving anything away to strangers, and everyone holstered a sidearm, just to keep things friendly. Most of those handguns in that part of the country are big bear killers, like Bennington’s .44 magnum.
I rode back there on the flatbed for about two-thirds of the remaining 150 miles into Yellowstone. It was late summer. In those higher elevations, the mornings could be nippy, but the afternoons were still warm. I sheltered down out of the wind behind the canvas that covered the trucker’s pile of tie-down chains.
All that fallen timber would become a fire hazard once it dried out. Logjams clogged streams and filled little valleys with new lakes. These would be dynamited, and then picked through. There were millions of board feet for lumber, railroad ties, and telephone poles. All of it could be salvaged cheap. Yellowstone is three times the size of Rhode Island and the gas wall did not stop at the front gate. Normally, we cut Mother Nature a lot of slack, but this time, we went toe to toe with her. It would have been worse if we had not gotten started when we did.
The newspapers got their stories and they got their pictures. When I returned east, I don’t think I was allowed to buy my own beer for the first month.
But what happened deserved more than just newspaper clippings. Feature writing alone cannot reveal the truth of it. Reporters move too fast. For that reason, and with this book, I fuse the conscious to the intuitive and form my own brand of New Journalism. Where there is missing DNA, I will fill it in, until we have a complete gene sequence—a full story. I know the truth of these people, and I want to tell it.
I want whoever reads this story to feel the grit in his eyes. I want him to feel his heart trying to jump out of his chest. And when he reads the last page, I want him to lay this book down and to tip-toe into his kids’ bedrooms to tuck them in.
And then, I want him to whisper that little prayer that Digger O’Dell used to say. If Digger thought of praying sometimes, as tough as he was, then none of us should feel too big to say one, especially over sleeping children.
I think that this has ruined me for the East. When I get done with this story, I am probably going to move out west. I feel changed by this.
I’m just not a city boy any longer. I am done reporting on drug wars and the weekend body count downtown. The Rocky Mountain country is in my blood now and all I know is that I have to get back to it. That is, if I want to thrive, I do.
My newspaper chain got all the good out of me there was to get. They came out ahead on the deal.
I will get on some newspaper somewhere between the Sacramento Bee and the Idaho State Journal in Pocatello. The Bozeman Daily Chronicle made it though. Others that were closer-in have closed up for a while, like the Idaho Falls Post Register—but they’ll be back. From here on, I just want to report on ranch life and the fingerling releases by state fish hatcheries. Maybe I will tell the story of the forests as they are coming back. Life will find a way.
Without exception, anyone who was close to this, and survived, is happier than anyone I had ever known before this happened. The starkest example of this is Byron Cody from the Earth Mechanics Institute. He has since bought himself a little place in Northern Florida with the money that NPR raised for him.
His wife left him the day after she saw him. He had lost both limbs on his left side. There is not enough remaining to attach prostheses to. But he’s got a Catholic nun looking after him, seven days a week. The rest of his left side is chewed up, the way the burns healed. But you would never know any of it to talk to him. I interviewed him when I returned east.
Everybody else who lived through this, I interviewed out west. For some reason this sort of people did not evacuate any farther than they thought they absolutely had to. But these folks are a different breed of cat than the ones back east. You can call them cowboys, if you like.
Millions of others slowly got themselves worked-up by the news on PBS, and they began to stream out from the West. You could buy a house cheap in Denver, if you had the nerve.
Millions went up into Canada. Some of them are finishing their second year up there. I think a lot of them just might stay put, now that it is warmer up there than it used to be.
This trip taught me a lot about Geology, and people, and about dogs, too. After a month out there, I felt almost like I could work as a roustabout or as a rigger. The only thing I never got to see, that I really wanted to, was those god-damned tunnel boring machines.
Later on, they gave me a plant tour through Subterranean Technologies, but it just was not the same thing. It was like Claire, compared to only a picture of Claire.
Sometimes life turns dangerous. The other animals know it. Maybe they hear things we do not. Or maybe we have a higher instinct that makes us head straight for trouble. Danger and opportunity are two sides of the same coin.
Sometimes folks will spend their whole lives being careful and then one day they will do something from which they can never recover, when only one moment later, nothing can ever be the same again. It can be some decision, an accident, a small mistake that passes through the unfair lens of fate and magnifies until the product of a life is undone.
Our word “Hell” comes from an Old English word meaning “to conceal.” This is what Claire and the Professor had come to Yellowstone for—to learn what was concealed below. Of course, Hell always threatens to break loose. Yet we are always surprised when it does.