OLIVE YU’S MOSTLY AMERICAN SUMMER

Chapter 17

Yellowstone National Park, WY: The Old Bear’s Hot Tub

After rising early that morning, the Yus drove back into West Yellowstone. No one said anything. No one had the energy for words. The kids dozed (as did Hawaii Halmunee, but this was not in the least unusual). Mr. Yu pulled into the parking lot of McDonald’s and no one complained.

They yawned hugely over their breakfast sandwiches and blinked their bleary eyes over their orange juice (for the kids) and coffee (for the grown-ups). After they finally finished their slow-motion breakfast, they all trudged back out to the car to get their toiletries and then trudged into the bathrooms to wash up.

After washing up, everyone was a bit more awake. The kids began to chatter and laugh in the back of the van. Mr. Lee and Mr. Yu conversed, too, getting louder and louder with each exchange.

“Dad,” asked Sting suddenly, “where are we going?”

“Yellowstone,” replied Mr. Yu, surprised.

“Okay, just wanted to make sure,” said a satisfied Sting.

Olive and Henry looked at each other and shrugged. Sting was so random, sometimes. But his question sparked Olive’s curiosity, too.

“Dad, are we going to see Old Faithful?” inquired Olive.

“Soon,” Mr. Yu reassured his daughter.

Olive smiled in anticipation. She’d read a bit about Old Faithful in her national parks book. The pictures of the geyser erupting in her book were really cool – she couldn’t wait to see it with her own eyes.

“Did you know,” Olive started, “that Yellowstone National Park has half of the world’s geothermal features.”

Henry rolled her eyes.

“What’s a geothermal feature?” asked Sting.

“Aww, man, please, don’t get her going,” muttered Henry under her breath.

“Well,” said Olive condescendingly, ignoring her sister, “a geothermal feature is something like a geyser, where the heat from magma in a volcano makes the water boil so that it shoots out of the geyser’s hole.”

“Really?” asked Sting dubiously.

“Well, it’s something like that,” said Olive. She wasn’t quite sure if a geyser was the only kind of geothermal feature that there was. She didn’t read the bit about geysers in her book too carefully, but she didn’t want to admit that.

“So does that mean that there’s a volcano around here?”

“We’re sitting on it,” whispered Olive eerily.

Sting looked around nervously. Olive relented.

“Oh, don’t be such a baby,” she scoffed. “It’s not going to erupt right now. Do you think they’d let so many people into Yellowstone if they thought a volcano might explode and kill everybody?”

“Well, how do you know?” retorted Sting. His anger overrode his fear and he and Olive spent the next ten minutes bickering about how Olive could possibly know about this kind of stuff.

Then, Mr. Yu pulled up to the guard shack. Olive hoped that there was a different person there this time. It would be so embarrassing if the same person saw them skulking back into the park so early in the morning.

Olive breathed an audible sigh of relief when she saw that there was a new person manning the shack. Mr. Yu paid the fee and the man gave them a parking pass. “Enjoy your time in the park,” he grinned as he waved them through.

The kids, relieved to be spared further humiliation, cheered.

“Where are we going first?” asked Henry.

Mr. Yu paused dramatically. “We go… to…” he paused again.

The kids were nearly wild with anticipation. Were they going someplace special?

“Bisitor center!” cried Mr. Yu.

The kids, worked up by Mr. Yu’s dramatic pauses, erupted into cheers. Sting even experimented with a scream at one point.

They drove up to the visitor center. The kids ran ahead of the adults to the doors.

The doors were locked.

“What’s going on?” cried Sting. “Is it closed today?”

Henry inspected the center hours, which were posted on the door.

“They don’t open until eight o’clock,” she exclaimed.

“Well, what time is it?” asked Olive.

The three kids ran back to the van, where the adults were taking their time getting out.

“Dad, Dad, what time is it?” demanded Sting anxiously. Olive and Henry exchanged looks. Once wound up, it was difficult to get Sting to calm down.

“Seben o’clock,” replied their father.

“Well, the visitor center doesn’t open until eight,” explained Henry. “What should we do until then?”

From inside the van, they heard a rasping snore. Hawaii Halmunee, unperturbed by the morning’s mayhem, had decided to nap until it was time for a hike.

The kids looked at each other and shrugged. They climbed into the back of the van and made themselves comfortable. The adults wordlessly got into their seats and settled down to catch up on some of last night’s lost sleep.

Olive awoke with a start when she heard a car door slam. She hear muffled voices outside. She squinted through the window and saw that a car had pulled up next to them. The people in the car were getting out and, still chatting, headed towards the visitor center.

“Get up, get up!” she shouted. “It’s open!”

“Huh?” yawned Henry.

Olive squinted at the clock in the van’s dashboard. “It’s almost nine!” she gasped. “Come on, come on, we’re missing out on stuff! We need to find out what we’re going to do today!”

Olive began hustling her sibs out of the van. They protested sleepily. “Come on, Olive, it’s not like it’s closing anytime soon,” Henry pointed out.

Olive knew that, but she was excited to finally see Old Faithful. “Let’s go,” she commanded.

After much poking and prodding and pleading and cajoling, Olive finally got her family up and out of the car. She led the way to the visitor center. She was amazed at how many cars were already in the parking lot. She hoped that it wouldn’t be too crowded.

And then the kids saw the gift shop and forget everything else.

The gift shop in Yellowstone was filled with great souvenirs. There were the standard t-shirts, caps, mugs, and pencils. But there were also lots of things carved out of wood, as well as Native American-themed trinkets.

“Wow,” breathed Sting. The three kids wordlessly wandered wide-eyed into the depths of the store.

When they finally reunited near the registers, they surveyed each other’s choices of souvenirs with approval. Henry had found a wooden keepsake box with a bear carved onto the cover. On the inside of the cover, there was a small thermometer. Olive had found a wooden bear carving that held a snow globe in its paws.  Inside the snow globe was a tent surrounded by trees. A small bear seemed to sniff inquisitively at the tent.

But Sting’s choice was the most interesting to all of them. It was a large wooden walking stick with a brown leather wrist strap. At the top of the stick, where the strap met the stick, were two silver sleigh-bells – to scare off bears and other wild animals, most likely. Burned down the length of the stick were the words: “Yellowstone National Park.”

Henry and Olive eyed the stick with interest. “I guess it’ll come in handy when we go hiking,” offered Henry.

“Hopefully, Dad’ll let you get it,” added Olive. If he did, maybe Sting would let her borrow it from time to time.

They found their father poring over maps in the visitor center lobby.

“Dad, can we have these?” cried the children.

Mr. Yu nodded without really looking up from his map. “Ask Mommy,” he mumbled absentmindedly.

The kids raced off to find Mrs. Yu, who was contemplating hats. She hadn’t brought one on the trip and was dissatisfied with the job that her sunscreen was doing at keeping her porcelain skin lily-white.

“Mom, Dad said we could have these,” announced Olive. She had an instinct for when to lead off a conversation with daring her mother to contradict her father’s orders.

Mrs. Yu looked over her children’s souvenirs suspiciously. Of the three, Henry’s was the most practical and Olive’s was the most typically touristy. But Sting’s giant stick caught her eye. She took it from him and held it up critically.

“What is this?” she asked.

“It’s a hiking stick, Mom,” explained Sting in a wheedling tone. He was an expert at getting what he wanted from his mother. When he approached her with a request, Olive and Henry would watch with a combination of anger, indignation, and grudging respect. It wasn’t fair that Sting always got his way, but it sure was entertaining to watch.

Seeing that his mother still looked uncertain about his souvenir choice, he coaxed, “I get so tired on the hikes sometimes. Dad goes too fast sometimes.”

Her expression softened a bit. Sting moved fast. “I want to keep up with everybody, but I’m too small,” he explained piteously. “I don’t want to slow everybody down.”

He closed the deal with: “I just want everyone to have a good time without having to worry about me.”

The look on Mrs. Yu’s face said, “Look at my son! So selfless! So sensitive! What a rare gem of a boy!”

“Okay, okay,” she relented at last. “We go pay.”

Fortunately, there were postcards racks near the line to pay or else Ellen and Karen might not have had a memento of Yellowstone from the Yus. Olive chose a card with a picture of Old Faithful spewing hot water high into a clear, blue sky.

Finally, everything was paid for and the group piled back into the van. Everyone looked at Mr. Yu expectantly.

Mr. Yu began to drive without a word. The kids looked at each other and shrugged. They figured that they would figure out where they were headed when they got there.

Soon enough, Mr. Yu pulled into a parking area. They all disembarked.

Henry wrinkled her nose daintily. She had a sharper sense of smell than her siblings, but Olive and Sting could smell it too.

“It smells like…” Henry trailed off, not wanting to say anything inappropriate.

“Farts,” Sting finished for her. Olive nodded in agreement. Wherever they were, it totally stunk.

The kids could see a mass of people crowded around a wooden fence. People were talking and crowding in and taking pictures. The kids were impatient to see what everyone was staring it.

When they finally were able to make it to the edge of crowd, they were amazed to find a little pond. But it wasn’t anything like the little ponds the kids sometimes saw at the parks around their house.

This pond was boiling hot. The kids could see steam rising from the top of it and even feel the heat from where they were standing behind the fence. It was also crystal clear. The kids could see the bottom of it.

And the bottom of the pond was like nothing they’d ever seen before. It was a veritable rainbow of colors. It was the most beautiful thing the kids had ever seen.

“What makes it look like that?” asked Sting, slack-jawed in wonder.

“According to this, it’s algae that can survive in that hot water,” said Henry, indicating an informational plaque mounted on a post near the fence.

The kids continued to stare at it.

Mr. Yu and Mr. Lee took turns snapping photos of the kids and the hot spring. Olive overheard a man telling his wife that a man had once chased his dog into the boiling pond. The dog died of his burns and the man only barely survived. Olive shuddered and backed away from the fence railing. It was hard to believe that something as beautiful as that hot spring could be so lethal.

The Yus continued on and saw a mudhole. It was like a hot spring full of mud. As the water in the mud boiled, it bubbled up and made plopping sounds that the children found hilarious. They stood by the railing around the mudhole and laughed every time it made a particularly loud pop.

The Yus then got back in their car and made their way to the Norris Geyser Basin. When the kids got out of the car, they didn’t see anything particularly interesting. They entered a building called the Norris Museum. There were displays explaining some of the geothermal features at the Basin that the kids found interesting.

They made their way through the museum, stopping to look at displays or read the descriptions under photographs of features. That was when Sting, who hated reading captions under pictures, ran out to the back of the museum to see what else the museum had to offer.

“Guys!” he cried, gaping out the glass doors. “Look at that!”

Olive and Henry raced to see what their brother was staring at. When they got to the glass doors, they, too, stared in wide-eyed amazement at the strange landscape before them.

A wooden walkway meandered through a steaming terrain of white. Olive couldn’t tell if the ground was hard rock or soft sand. There were brilliant blue pools here and there, and steam arose from their surfaces.

She suddenly remembered her teacher telling them about Lewis and Clark’s expedition to the Pacific Ocean. Mrs. Marks had said that the explorers, upon finding Yellowstone, thought that they had discovered an entrance to hell. Olive could see why they thought this.

She imagined the landscape without the bridge, without the museum, as it must have looked to those explorers when they first came upon it. She suddenly felt that Grand Canyon feeling of smallness and shivered.

“You want to go on it?” asked their father, who had walked up behind them.

“Yeah! Yeah, let’s go!” the kids shouted eagerly.

Mr. Yu smiled and led the way to the beginning of the walkway.

There was a sign asking people to take off their glasses because the sulfur in the air could etch into the surface of glass. Olive was disappointed – she wouldn’t be able to see the cool landscape as well without her glasses. But she supposed that she’d need her glasses to see other cool stuff later on in their trip, so she folded them up and put them in her pocket. Henry and Sting followed suit.

They proceeded down the path of the Porcelain Basin. The hike was as amazing as the view had promised. There were pools of blue, rainbow ponds like the one they had seen earlier that day, mudholes galore, and a few things they hadn’t seen yet.

Steam vents were holes in the ground that sent forth a steady stream of steam. Olive noticed that the pungent odor of sulfur was even stronger near the steam vents. She deduced that there must be sulfur in the water that turned into the steam.

One of the pools that Olive saw scared her. Instead of being the usual shallow pool of boiling water, this one was deep – she could not see its bottom. It looked like it went on forever. For some reason, this thought scared Olive – a deep, dark pool of never-ending boiling water. She shuddered and walked quickly on.

Scattered throughout the almost alien landscape of the Norris Geyser Basin were occasional stands of barren trees. Olive wondered how they even survived out there.

After finishing the hike, the kids were all quiet and thoughtful. The amazing things they had seen had amazed them into speechlessness. For this, Mrs. Yu was thankful.

Olive couldn’t believe that what they had seen on that hike had been formed without the assistance of any human being. No human being could even imagine anything as incredible as those hot springs and steam vents. “Geothermal features” now seemed a misnomer – something that beautiful had to have a better name.

But Olive couldn’t think of a name befitting such a majestic display of nature’s power.

After this, the Yus piled silently into the van. Mr. Yu drove and the kids all thought about all of the amazing sights they had seen that day.

Then, he pulled into a parking lot. Olive saw a sign that read “Old Faithful.”

They were going to see Old Faithful! This world-famous geyser was the first thing she’d wanted to see when she discovered that they were in Yellowstone, and they were finally going to see it! She could hardly contain her excitement.

But she would have to contain it. Apparently, it had gone off not too long ago, so the Yus would have to wait ninety minutes before it erupted again. Mr. Yu decided that it would be a nice place to eat their lunch (he didn’t mind the sulfuric stench as everyone else did, apparently).

Mrs. Yu brought out rice and banchan and everyone ate in their seats. After lunch was over, they all drifted in and out of sleep, waiting for the geyser to spew forth.

Olive, determined not to miss it, sat ramrod straight in her seat. She pulled out her book about national parks. She wanted to read more about the geothermal features of Yellowstone. As she read, her head began to nod over the pages of the book, and the words gradually began to blur and finally darken as her heavy eyelids finally drooped over her eyes and she fell asleep.

She awoke with a start once again when she heard a car door slam outside. Then, she heard and engine starting and she realized that the car parked next to them was now driving away.

“Oh! Dad, what time is it?” she called out to Mr. Yu.

“Aw,” said Mr. Yu. He said nothing else. Olive realized that they’d missed Old Faithful.

She was sorely disappointed. Now they’d have to wait another ninety minutes!

But Mr. Yu turned the key in the van’s ignition and began driving out of the parking lot!

“Dad, what are you doing?” exclaimed Olive in alarm.

“We miss it. Now we go see something else,” replied Mr. Yu.

“But, Dad, we only have to wait ninety more minutes before it goes off again!” argued Olive.

“We got other things to see,” answered Mr. Yu inexorably and continued driving.

Olive folded her arms and harrumphed in anger and disappointment. What was the point of coming all the way to Yellowstone if they weren’t even going to see its most famous geyser?

She stayed angry until they came upon the Yellowstone River. Mr. Yu pulled the car over to the side of the road near a herd of elk.

“Ebrybody out! Take picture!” he commanded.

By this time, everyone was awake, so they all tumbled out of the car to take pictures by the elk.

Mr. Yu positioned his children in front of the elk as they grazed. “One, two, three!” he counted and clicked away with his camera.

Once again, they took photographs in every possible combination of their group – all the kids, then all the grown-ups, then Mr. Yu with his mother, then all the girls, then all the boys (“all the men,” Sting corrected her), and, of course, the requisite picture of Mr. Lee by himself.

Then, Mr. Lee took another picture of the kids.

“Oreeb, duck down,” he ordered. Olive, puzzled, did as she was told. She was standing on the curb, but she wasn’t that much higher than Henry and Sting. Later, she would look at the photos of their visit to Yellowstone and discover that he’d taken a picture of her standing in front of an elk so that it looked like she had antlers. “Very funny, Mr. Lee,” she’d fume.

The elk were grazing in the lush grass alongside the Yellowstone River. Remembering how much fun they’d had in the river at Zion, and they begged their parents to go wading on the banks – the Yellowstone River was far too deep and wide for them to cross.

Mr. Yu told them that this wasn’t a good place because there were so many elk, but he promised to stop somewhere with better wading prospects.

They got back in the van and drove until Mr. Yu found a nice spot for the adults to rest and the kids to wade. As soon as the van stopped, the kids raced to the riverbank and began hopping from rock to rock. Sting dipped an experimental toe in the river.

“YIKES! It’s cold!” he howled.

Olive remembered reading somewhere that the water in the Yellowstone River was so cold that people even got hypothermia from swimming in it in the summer. It was because the water in the river was melted snow from further up the mountain.

Because the water was so cold, it wasn’t as fun to wade in the Yellowstone River. But it was certainly beautiful, and the kids chased each other in the grass and sometimes just lay there looking at the river.

After a while, Mr. Yu called them back to the van.

“Time to go,” he said.

The kids were exhausted from their exciting day and climbed obediently into the van.

They buckled their seat belts and talked about their favorite part of the day: seeing the geothermal features in the Norris Geyser Basin.

Mr. Yu overheard them talking and started telling them a story. “There was old bear who live in Yellowstone. He got a lot of hurt in his legs, his back because he so old. He was king of bear. So he come to hot spring and take a bath in hot spring. To him, it like a spa.”

“You mean like a Jacuzzi?” asked Sting.

“An old bear hot tub!” joked Olive.

“Yeah,” agreed Mr. Yu. The children waited for the rest of the story. As it turned out, that was the end.

Mr. Yu often told stories with no end. Once, he had told the children a story during dinner about a monkey who lived in the zoo. The monkey saw boys and girls every day that came to look at him in his cage and he wondered what it was like to be a boy instead of a monkey. One morning, he awoke to find that he had become a boy in the night! He climbed out of his cage and ran through the town, being chased by the police. He stopped at a woman’s house and stole some clothes from her clothesline.

The monkey boy continued running through the town until he came to a carnival. The Ferris wheel at the carnival was broken, and a girl was trapped at the top. Using his monkey skills, the monkey climbed up to the girl, whom Mr. Yu randomly dubbed “Lisa” – although he said it “Reesa” – and carried her down to safety. She asked him his name, and he just made a monkey face at her in reply. He then dashed back to the zoo and hid in his cage until morning.

The next morning, he was a monkey again. Lisa came to the zoo on a field trip with her school. When she saw the monkey, she thought he looked familiar. The monkey recognized her immediately and began screaming, “Reesa! Reesa!”

She then realized where she had seen the monkey before and began screaming, “I know you! I know you!” back to him.

That was when their father stopped abruptly.

“What happened next?” asked Olive, wanting to know how the story ended.

“That’s the end,” said her father, surprised. And so the children learned that their father was terrible at ending stories.

Olive and her sibs looked at each other after their father had told them about the bear’s hot tub. They laughed heartily as their father continued to drive.

***

Dear Elle and Kares,

We visited Yellowstone today, and we all agree that it is the coolest thing in America. You guys have to come here. It’s awesome. We saw a lot of hot springs and steam vents and mudholes. They were amazing. Pictures don’t do them justice. You have to see the real thing.

We tried to see Old Faithful, but we fell asleep. But you can see from this postcard what it looks like when it erupts.

Our dad told us this crazy story about a bear using the hot springs like a hot tub. I think it would be cool to swim in a hot spring, if it wouldn’t burn all my skin off.

Love,

Ol, Hen, and Sting

P.S. It smells like farts here.

P.P.S. Sting wrote that. He's so gross.

P.P.P.S. I'm telling Mom you said I was gross.

P.P.P.P.S. Go ahead. She thinks you're gross, too.

P.P.P.P.P.S. It's too bad we're all out of room on this postcard for you to make another comeback.

p.p.p.p.p.p.s. oh yeah well you stink worse than yellowstone