I’ve survived another year!
This past week was one of the best I’ve had in a long time. I haven’t been able to go to the gym at all since I hurt my shoulder, but this has given me some time back in the mornings. I’ve been able to get organized, catch up on sleep, and most importantly, to plan out the schemes I accomplished this past weekend.
Originally I had planned either to go to Glacier NP or journey down to Colorado to visit an old friend, but alas, Glacier still has 40 feet of snow on the main road (it’s July, for anyone taking notes), and that old friend had headed back home for the weekend, coincidentally enough. So, I was left to get a bit more creative, and more creative I got.
Thursday saw a journey up to Bozeman, which is sorta like the big city by Montana standards (or Harrisburg, by Pennsylvania standards). I was able to get a whole bunch of shopping done, which included some fun purchases like a “bear canister” (that’s the government term for “insanely overpriced Tupperware we require you to have”) and a camera lens that I got an excellent deal on! I also did my grocery shopping and found that shopping up there saves literally half of what I usually spend here, so I’ll be going there from now on.
I also explored Montana State while I was up there since I was advised by a mentor to look into a professor who teaches there for grad school. It’s actually quite a pretty campus, though admittedly it’s certainly no Villanova (no school could ever be). I was struck with the impression that, setting academics aside for a moment, Bozeman actually seems like a town I could live in for a while. It’s got a fun side, as it is a college town pretty much exclusively, but it’s also completely surrounded by mountain scenery anywhere you look. It’s the exact balance of civilization and wilderness that I’d want out of a place. I think the puzzle pieces might be falling into place for me to stay here a while…
Friday saw a journey into the Tetons. I originally wanted to go back country camping (hence the purchase of my bear canister), but when it was announced that Yellowstone would begin to be fully opened on Saturday, I decided just to go for one day, but what a beautiful day it ended up being. My entire drive down there it looked like the sky might be cloud covered and overcast, but after driving through Jackson Hole and north into the park, the day actually couldn’t have been more perfect. The mountains caught the sun through the remaining clouds in a beautiful manner, and provided a tremendous subject for my first time really testing the abilities of my new camera.
I hiked around Jenny Lake, and somewhat accidentally up into the mountains a bit. I saw a bunch of smaller wildlife, which included a Marmot (or mountain Vinny, as I have chosen to call him), a boatload of chipmunks, and some honey bees flying around the flowers. I wasn’t lucky enough to see any of the native moose (mooses? meese?) in the park, but perhaps that’s for the best since they’re quite dangerous.
The mountains themselves though, are simply awe inspiring. It’s difficult to even begin to describe the scale in words, or even with photos. Every time I send pictures of things out here to people, I always asterisks them by saying that it is quite genuinely impossible to capture how large everything is in a photo. Every time I drive towards mountains, it seems for miles on miles on miles on end that I’m almost there… but then 10, 20, 30, or more minutes go by, and still they just continue to grow in my windshield. They expand upwards into the sky and across your field of view to such an immensity that it’s difficult to describe, and each time I am even more amazed that these are nowhere near the biggest mountains on earth, and hell, not even the biggest ones in the United States. The magnificence and grandeur of mountain landscapes has to be seen to be believed. Never let a picture fool you into thinking you will not be overwhelmingly impressed when you see something in person.
My day in the Tetons concluded and I drove back home once more, and since I got home early enough I drank… a few… beers and watched the last two episodes of Stranger Things. I won’t do a full review or anything, but as someone who vehemently thought the show should’ve ended after season 3, I am so glad that they continued it. This season was phenomenal, and I genuinely think that the character of Vecna was one of my favorite representations of struggling with mental health I’ve seen in a fictional medium.
Finally, Saturday arrived, and all at once I was 22, which means my life is all downhill from here, no more unlocking new abilities like getting drafted or drinking without a fake ID. Nope, just the endless passage of time from now on. But that’s life, and frankly I quite prefer having my birthdays be not that big of a deal, so this aging gig might work out for me indeed.
Saturday was also the day that Yellowstone did away with its limited entry and restored access to the park’s northern loop. I’d never been up there, and really all I knew about it was that it didn’t really have “attractions” in the same way the southern loop does. It has the Mammoth Hot Springs, but in comparison with Old Faithful, the Grand Prismatic Spring, Lake Yellowstone, and the Grand Canyon of Yellowstone (this one is technically in both loops), the points of interest don’t really compare.
With that in mind, I didn’t really know what to expect from going up there, but I set my GPS for the lone-point-of-interest that I knew of, and off I went. I was completely unprepared for the sprawling beauty that unfolded around me once I entered the northern end of the park.
Everything up there just grew in size and scale compared to the south; the mountains rose on all sides, and the valleys between them seemed to roll and roll out into infinity. There were rocky cliff faces, grassy valleys that stretched for miles, and pointed mountains which I didn’t really know existed inside Yellowstone.
Then the Mammoth Hot Springs, which I’d been told weren’t all that special, turned out to be quite gorgeous in themselves. They’re fairly small, which I’ll admit, but for what is there, they are beautiful. They look as though they’ve been purposefully and intricately sculpted by careful hand, but are instead the word of nature itself. I cannot even begin to guess at how such patterns and formations came to be, but I certainly am glad they have. The active springs are a brilliant orange-creamsicle sort of color, and the inactive ones have hardened to form a brilliant, almost marble color white. The trickle of water forms formations that look like cities out of Star Wars in some places, and in others gently stepped rock formations that rival even the most ornate manmade fountains in beauty. I really loved them, even if other people don’t really seem to.
The drive around the rest of the north loop was also fantastic. The scenery I described earlier attracts the most wildlife of anywhere in the park, and over the course of my drive I saw bison, a mating pair of elk, and even a black bear, which is the first bear I’ve seen. It’s a real shame they’re dangerous, because they’re also really adorable and look fluffy. Alas, I like my organs where they are and would prefer not to see them ripped out, so I think I’ll leave the bears alone.
I arrived back to my apartment a little after dinner, and cooked myself my usual bountiful meal of “beddar cheddar” sausages, which I accompanied by a side of chocolate cupcakes I’d bought myself for my birthday (possibly the saddest thing I’ve ever done). After this gourmet meal, the wifi went out, so I decided to spend some time smoking the stupidly large cigar I’d bought in Bozeman simply because it was funny. It took me well over two hours to smoke the stupid thing, which honestly was one of the worst cigars I’ve ever had, but am I ever glad it did.
While the cigar was mildly unpleasant, just the act of smoking it obviously requires you to just sit still, reflect, and take a look around at things. I’ve come to really like cigars, and while I’ll admit it’s not my healthiest habit, I think I’ve come to love them so much in large part due to their ability to really ground you in whatever activity you’re doing. A cigar is a commitment to being in the same place for quite a while, and as such you’d better pick a good one and hunker in. This particular cigar took me back behind my apartment complex to a picnic table, which sat in such a way that most of the artificial lights around were blocked out. I put on some Zach Bryan, took 10 minutes to light the brick of tobacco I’d stupidly purchased, and once this herculean feat was accomplished, leaned back to look at the sky.
Vincent Van Gogh said, “for my part I know nothing with any certainty, but the sight of the stars makes me dream.” The sky which our modern cities and way of life has taken from us is the most awe inspiring sight available to us, and has only become moreso in its absence (though absence may be the wrong word, it’s still there always, only obscured). The night sky out here is magnificent. The stars are described in countless old texts as innumerable, which seems weird to us in modernity who can look up, count the 5 stars of the Big Dipper, the North Star, and maybe a handful of others that are visible to us, and rightly conclude that there are in fact about 25 stars. What we’ve taken from ourselves is astounding, and utterly depressing.
The stars are indeed countless out here, and the expanse of them seems to suggest that it isn’t worth even trying. So, instead, you just look at them, and wonder. Suddenly a shooting star darts across the sky, and for the first time in your suburban life you actually realize they’re real. Then another, and another, and another… and finally by the time I went inside, I’d seen at least six shooting stars fly across the heavens above me. That’s a lot of wishing firepower that you certainly don’t get back home.
This weekend has me thinking that I might just be willing to at least try to endure winter here to stay a bit longer, though I’ll still admit that the prospect of 4:00 p.m. nightfalls and -20 degree temperatures are quite appalling to think about. That said, there’s something quite magical about being here. The pull of familiarity is still quite strong, and the need to figure out if being away from my friends and family for longer is really worth it is most certainly there. That said… I am really starting to love it out here, and I love the type of lifestyle that is begged of me by my surroundings. Plus, if I do go to school here, living here gets me MUCH cheaper tuition so… that’s motivating too.
I suppose we’ll see how the rest of summer pans out, and how I withstand the four feet of snow I’m sure we’ll inevitably get on Labor Day weekend. Nonetheless, I’m falling in love with this place quickly, even in the absence of making any friends out here and missing the ones I’ve got. Who knows, maybe airline prices will go down again, and then I’ll be able to visit home with less prohibiting me, and wouldn’t that be nice (this is a joke/dream, the federal reserve has permanently damaged the dollar, the inflation will stick).
And hey, there’s always coming out here, which I’ll continue campaigning for to everyone who’ll listen.
Song of the Week:
The Line 
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