Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
TherewasnoneednowtodriveontoOldFaithful,stillfortymilesdowntheroad.Iheaded
instead up the steep road over Roaring Mountain, past Nymph Lake, Grizzly Lake and
Sheep eater Cliff-oh, how I love those names-and on down into Mammoth Hot Springs,
home of the park headquarters. Here there was a visitors' center open, so I had a look
around,andapeeandadrinkofwater,beforedrivingon.WhenIemergedfromtheparkat
its northern end, by the little town of Gardiner, I was in a new state, Montana. I drove the
sixty miles or so to Livingston through a landscape that was less wild but more beautiful
than anything Yellowstone had offered. Partly this was because the sun came out and filled
the late afternoon with a sudden springlike warmth. Long, flat shadows lay across the val-
ley. There was no snow here, though the first infusion of green was just beginning to seep
into the grassy and still yellow pastures along the highway. It was almost the first of May
and winter was only just now withdrawing.
I got a room in the Del Mar Motel in Livingston, had some dinner and went for a walk out
along the highway at the edge of town. With the sun sinking behind the nearby mountains,
the evening quickly grew cold. A bleak wind came whipping down from the emptiness of
Canada, 300 miles to the north, the kind of wind that slips up the back of your jacket and
humiliates your hair. It resonated down the telephone lines, like a man whistling through
his teeth, and made the tall grass seethe. Somewhere a gate creaked and banged, creaked
and banged. The highway stretched out flat and straight ahead of me until it narrowed to a
vanishing point some miles away. Every so often a car would come at me down the high-
wayfrombehind,soundingeerilylikeajettakingoff.AsitcamenearerandnearerIwould
halfwonderforonemomentifitwasgoingtohitme-itsoundedthatcloseandthenitwould
flash past and I would watch its taillights disappear into the gathering gloom.
A freight train came along on some tracks that ran parallel to the highway. At first it was a
distant light and short bursts of horn, and then it was rolling past me, slow and stately, on
its nightly procession through Livingston. It was enormous-American trains are twice the
size of European ones-and at least a mile long. I counted sixty freight cars on it before I
losttrack,allofthemwithnamesonthemlikeBurlingtonNorthern,RockIsland,SantaFe.
It struck me as curious that train lines were so often named after towns that never amoun-
ted to much. I wondered how many people a century ago lost their shirts buying property
in places like Atchison and Topeka on the assumption that one day they would be as big
as Chicago and San Francisco. Towards the end of the train one car went by with its door
open and I could see three shadowy figures inside: hobos. I was amazed to find that such
people still existed, that it was still possible to ride the rails. In the dusk it looked a very
romantic way to spend your life. It was all I could do to keep from sprinting along and
climbing aboard and just disappearing with them into the night. There is nothing like an
