TRA Parks and R
The Firehole River doesn’t let me pass. Its churning water, at least 10 feet deep here, is pounding me as I cling to a slick rock wall.
I’m trying to go upstream through Firehole Canyon, in Yellowstone National Park, behind my sons, Gus, 16, and Jeb, 14. One is a competitive swimmer, the other on a rockclimbing team. They’re cutting easily through the rapid toward a ledge from which we’ll launch ourselves for a float back downriver.
I watch other people wash past, hooting and laughing. They all look younger than I am - like people who bungee jump and believe in their invincibility. As I struggle through the powerful water, I realize I no longer believe in my invincibility. Maybe I’m too old to be doing this. But I yearn to keep up with my sons.
Over the years I’ve done most everything with them - jumped in puddles, ridden roller coasters, skied lack-diamond slopes. I’ve always thought of myself as a “fun” morn.
However, they’re becoming young men, and it’s harder for me to do what they do. This family vacation, a road trip, reminds me that my husband, Robb, and I don’t have much time left to travel with our boys before they head out into the world.
We’re journeying in a rental RV, a 26-foot-long Coachmen Freelander we’ve nicknamed the Little Beast. Our itinerary takes us through the best of the West, from Yellowstone, in Wyoming, north to Montana and Glacier National Park. Out here, empty spaces where clouds cast penumbras over valleys invigorate as much as the tsunami of peaks on the horizon.
We don’t have a firm plan; with plenty of campgrounds to choose from, we’re following our whims. Robb and I know this proximity to our teenagers presents the risk of meltdowns - which explains the case of wine I’ve packed - but my hope is that distance from the Internet will draw us together again. That once more I’ll be a mom fully plugged into her kids’ lives.
“Where you from?” the man at the next campsite calls out, a standard greeting in the RV world. We’re in Grant Village campground, on the shore of Yellowstone Lake. The man, who introduces himself as “Wayne from Wisconsin,” sits in a camp chair under an awning extending from his motor home. He’s traveling with his wife and three sons, who right now are riding bikes by the lake. Next to him sit a full-size grill and a table covered with a floral tablecloth. “You’re traveling in style,” I say. “We’ve done this a time or two,” he answers as he rises to add charcoal to the grill. “The idea is to make it feel like home. Home on the road.” The best part of RVing, he says, is the absence of are-we-there-yet questions. In a way, we’re always there.” The conversation follows what learn are standard RVing contours: where we’ve been, where we’re going.
When he hears we’re hiking the next day, Wayne insists we buy bear repellent. I’d seen signs recommending the spray, so after our dinner of hamburgers and s’mores cooked over our fire pit (Wayne and family grill salmon), we walk to the campground’s shop to pick up a canister - and a tablecloth.
The next day we drive up Grand Loop Road for a two-mile hike to Cascade Lake, a pool in an alpine meadow in the center of Yellowstone. The boys stay close behind Robb, who has the bear repellent secured to his belt. We’re taking turns carrying the backpack with our lunches because it may attract bears. “We’re playing bear roulette,” Jeb says as he slips on the pack.
In addition to the Old Faithful geyser, Yellowstone is known for its wildlife. Lamar Valley which we’d visited earlier, is called North America’s Serengeti for its gray wolves (reintroduced in 1995), moose, elk, bison, and bears, both the grizzly and black varieties.
Up to 1,200 bears live in the park - one for every three square miles, I calculate. As we walk by fir trees - some full and Christmas-like, some with bark stripped (bear scratchings?) - Robb’s camera clunks against the bear repellent’s spray button, and a mist of the stuff releases. Into Gus’s face. He lets out an “Aaggh” and doubles over, coughing. Thankfully, his throat and eyes clear up within minutes, but we decide we can’t trust the spray, so I suggest talking to ward off bears. Loudly.
The boys oblige, pretending we’re in a horror movie in which a bear picks us off, which prompts jeb to share that he plans to see scary movies only with dates, so the girls will snuggle with him. Horror leads to science fiction, which leads Gus to say he wants to become an aerospace engineer to design crafts that discover the intelligent life he’s sure is out there,
I feel an unexpected gratitude for the bears; it’s been a while since Robb and I’ve had a prolonged look into who our sons are becoming. They speak to us now more as equals, as young men with plans. Yet it’s bittersweet; their dreams don’t include us.
After days of swimming in rivers, biking, and hiking, hiking, hiking, we’re visiting Bozeman, Mont. The boys seem antsy here. Which isn’t the fault of this gritty town north of Yellowstone where gold miners would stop. Rather, our close quarters may be catching up with us; the boys are fighting over who sleeps where. We have three beds in the RV - a queen in the back for Robb and me, another in the loft above the driver’s seat, and a full made by pushing bench cushions together in the dining space. It’s the least desirable because it involves assembling and dismantling. Jeb is tired of table-bed duty, but Gus contends he should have a couple more days in the loft since he’s older.
The upside of RV life is that your living quarters go everywhere with you. That also is the downside. It begins to wear on us that we drive, sleep, cook, eat, shower, and play cards within a 200-square-foot rectangle. Cabin fever is bound to strike. Particularly if the cabin is home to teen siblings whose DNA programs them to twang each other’s nerves.
We have parked our RV at a friend’s home (we’re the hest houseguests; we bring our own house). Bozeman, population 38,000, is surrounded by mountain ranges and appears regularly on lists of hest places to live in the U.S. It’s home base for outdoors types; we watch people tackle the Bridger Ridge Run, a 20- mile route up a mountain, along a ridge, and down again.
Our Bozeman friends aren’t hard-core, but they fly-fish, hike, and snowshoe, and as parents of teens themselves, have good ideas for getting our boys out of our tin box to use up adolescent energy - such as tubing down the Madison River. So the next day we drive west from Bozeman, toting our friends’ inner tubes, for a float. That is, Robb and the boys will float. Someone has to drive the RV to the pickup point four miles downriver. I’m uncomfortable being on the sidelines for the tubing. I’m from a line of energetic parenting; my mother, 84, rides bikes with us, and my father still body-surfs. We’re doers. Except I won’t be today.
I watch Robb and the boys drift, spread like limp starfish over their inner tubes, until they disappear around a bend, then I hop in the eight-foot-wide Beast. Robb’s done most of the driving because I find it nerve-racking; there’s no room for error on the narrow roads. A cross breeze pushes me toward traffic; a truck speeding in the other direction shoves me to the shoulder. I remind