0
0
There I was staring at a mountain cliff 10,000 times bigger than I am or thereabouts, feeling small and overpowered. The cliff couldn’t be more steep, a straight drop down from the upper skies somewhere far down below to a place I didn’t even look over the edge to see because I didn’t want to.
I was in Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming for the first time and there were so many things I saw I had never seen before a 360 waterfall drop that looked ominous but gave off a soothing consistent sound you could take a nap to; geysers of water shooting up from the ground; off-white “mud pots” boiling over, bison walking around in the wild known to be unkind.
I was standing on top of a volcano for the first time in my life and it sure didn’t feel like just your average volcano. This one formed the underbelly of all of Yellowstone. I got the sense this place had no real end, it just stretched into eternity.
“How big is Yellowstone?” I asked the tour guide.
“Bigger than Rhode Island and Delaware combined,” he said.
What?
I like to understand things but at this stage realized Yellowstone wasn’t a place I was going to figure out because there was too much to it, too many cliffs, streams, bison, waterfalls, trees, and grass, stretching all around me for miles, extending far beyond my ability to process.
What kind of place was this?
A place like no other is the short answer.
Who created it?
No one. It came to be.
Why did it exist?
To blow peoples’ minds.
A mystical place so packed with eye stimuli you’ve never seen in your life that you realize you can’t get to it all, or half of it, even if you spent your life exploring it, because that would be impossible because this is Yellowstone National Park and there is nothing like it anywhere in the world. There are sections of mountains no one will ever touch or walk on. This is not a place you conquer but rather where you acquiesce.
The tour guide threw around some volcano stats about the last eruption being some 800 million years ago (or some number like that meant nothing) and the next one likely to explode 800 million years from now. We were safe for at least the day, from a volcanic perspective, but I couldn’t stop thinking about all the hot bubbly volcanic mud piles that seemed to suggest a volcanic eruption might be happening in front of our eyes.
The tour guide told us the bubbling water mud pots got up to 180 degrees. It looked like a boiling stew on a skillet except for outside and off-white colors, one the color of a swimming pool, another a rusty shade and bubbles that had power and they knew it and thought their own thoughts.
“You mean to tell me those bubbles will keep bubbling 100 years from now just like they are now?” I asked the guide.
“More like 1,000 years or who knows how long,” he estimated.
In other words, the bubbling began long before any of us were born and will continue long after we’re gone. Nature would decide how long. People did not have a say. Bystanders here, all of us.
How could that be? Why?
The soupy bubbles looked like a field day for chemists and botanists across Earth flocking here to study how the liquid forms and how long ago that was. Why the bubbles, why such scorching water, and what about the grass that could grow amid all this on top of bison waste piles?
Then the mountain, that mountain I described earlier. It stood back at me as if staring me down, all sandy and light brown and completely swallowing me with its size that could only be described as frighteningly huge. Right there it was, a few hundred feet away yet seeming to be five feet away, making me want to stop staring because I was feeling dominated.
I wanted to stop staring so I did.
This I did not expect, to be intimidated by the mere sight of a mountain. So I looked at the ground and walked to the car somehow changed in a way I don’t yet understand but am sure is for the better.
Author Profile
-
Sammy Sportface, a sports blogger, galvanizes, inspires, and amuses The Baby Boomer Brotherhood. And you can learn about his vision and join this group's Facebook page here:
Sammy Sportface Has a Vision -- Check It Out
Sammy Sportface -- The Baby Boomer Brotherhood Blog -- Facebook Page
