As Fantastic As Ever

It's Wednesday as I write this, and Linda is having dialysis, her second at the hospital in Cody, WY. I have two days to write about, since we've been on the go so much that I haven't had time the past two evenings to write. I hope to catch up here.

We spent Monday morning at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center here in Cody, which I remembered well from my travels here in the 1970s. There were four connected museums on the site back then; now there are six, and we did justice to several of them in a little less than four hours. The one I was most anxious to share with Linda was the Whitney Gallery of Western Art (yes, that Whitney family, which includes a couple of current members Linda knows from her previous life in Saratoga Springs). We saw dozens of fine works depicting all aspects of Western life: cowboys and Indians; horses, cattle, and wildlife; and the magnificent settings in which those various beings lived, struggled, and survived. From the early, sweeping landscapes of Albert Bierstadt to a 2013 piece titled "Tonto's Dream" which depicts the current influence of casinos on Indians' welfare, it was all there. So is a reproduction of Frederic Remington's studio (see photos currently on Facebook, soon to be here) in New Rochelle, NY, where the most prolific and well-known Western artist churned out paintings and sculptures during the day and dispensed eloquent discourse in the evenings.

My favorite Western artist is Charles M. Russell, who is well represented here along with late-19th century giants like Henry Jackson and Thomas Moran. The sculptures in particular have a dynamic quality with dramatic interaction between people and animals; one, with cowboy and horse almost wrapped around each other in mid-turn, is humorously titled "Dirty Dancing." The largest paintings depict battles, including one of the Battle of Big Horn in which Custer is highlighted in a nearly golden glow at the painting's center while Crazy Horse almost has to sneak onto the canvas at the lower right.

That seems to be the only thing missing from the various museums here, including the Plains Indian Museum--that is, some sense of the massive genocide of Native Americans perpetrated by the forces implementing the invading force of "manifest destiny." The Plains Indian Museum has strong exhibits on native crafts and lifestyle, but treats it as if it existed in some kind of historical vacuum. Oh, there's a little indication here or there of how and why the Indians weren't allowed to continue their noble and picturesque traditions. But it is not central to the story being told here. Recently I visited the National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia, and believe me, you can't leave there without knowing about the Holocaust.

Defying demographics, Linda was interested in the Colt Museum of firearms, which contained about 1,500 different kinds of guns and rifles, while I was not. I went instead to the newer Natural History Museum instead and spoke with a couple of volunteers who confirmed my impression that the exhibits are long on aesthetics and short on historical perspective. Then Linda and I joined forces again to check out the Buffalo Bill Museum, devoted to Bill Cody, a native of this town and the proprietor of one of the greatest shows in show-biz history. Most fascinating was the film of his "Wild West" show from 1911-12, which included 400 horses, numerous elephants and other animals, and about 700 cast members including cowboys and Indians, not to mention Annie Oakley. What a show that must have been! Buffalo Bill's presence is still strong in Cody, where the social hub is the Irma Hotel, built by Bill for his daughter Irma, and where another business proudly boasts that it was founded in 1967 by Bill's grandson.

We'll be taking in more of Cody later today after Linda is done with her dialysis, but now I must turn to yesterday's expedition to the Grand Tetons, my favorite place in the country. I've been there at least a dozen times, but this was the first visit for Linda, so naturally I wanted to show her everything at once. But mainly I wanted to take her to Jenny Lake, one place where I just sit idly for the rest of my life and do nothing but stare at what was in front of me. I did take her there, and we did plant ourselves in our lawn chairs for more than two hours while I read to her, finishing up our latest shared novel (Stranger in a Strange Land--this morning we started a new one we picked up at Wall Drug, a new, uncensored edition of Zane Grey's Riders of the Purple Sage).

The thing that distinguishes the Grand Tetons from anyplace else I've visited is that the mountains rise directly from the edges of the half-dozen lakes running the (north-south) length of the park. The most scenic of those is Jenny Lake, with Mount Moran (12,605' high) and is distinctive glacier just to the north and the three Grand Tetons (Grand Teton itself is 13,770' high) to the south. We stopped along the road on the east side of the lake and looked across at the Hanging Canyon area, a gap in the mountains where you can hike to Inspiration Point (as I did several times years ago) or further into the mountains. Hikers passed by every five or ten minutes, and some apologized for momentarily blocking our view as they took photos ("That's okay," I'd tell them. "It's the only decent place around here, so we don't mind sharing it."). We could've stayed there much longer than we did, but we had places to go.

Mainly, we had to get back to Cody, a three-hour drive. We had left Cody at 9am and didn't get back until 8:30pm, so it was a good, long, full day. After looping around Yellowstone Lake and south into the Tetons, we began our stay there with a picnic lunch at Colter Bay, where we're renting a cabin for tomorrow night. Predictably, we spent much of the drive through the park looking for moose. Someone said one had been spotted behind the Jackson Lake Lodge, so we checked that out; magnificent view, but no moose. No sign of life in the Willow Flats, where I've always found moose at some point in each visit. No sign of moose anywhere during our sublime afternoon in the park.

So we headed back through Yellowstone, and as we curved back around Yellowstone Lake and came around a bench, two oncoming cars flashed their high beams at us. In a national park, that means only one thing: slow down for an animal in the middle of the road. It was a moose! It sauntered along the shoulder on Linda's side, and after we stopped (with several vehicles stopping behind us), it moseyed in front of us to the middle of the road for a moment. I scrambled for the camera and the batteries (which I'd removed because they were running low), had a lot of trouble finding the damn batteries, and by the time I did, the moose was scrambling up a hillside on the other side of the road. That's why I didn't get any good photos of the bull or its massive antlers. That is too bad. But it wasn't as important as Linda's joy at seeing it. She was thrilled beyond even her anticipation. I promised her a moose sighting on this trip, put it in the brochure and everything, and nature has delivered. Thank you.

Earlier this week, I wrote about two days which each combined natural and man-made wonders. That was true again these past two days--first the artwork and other treasures of the Cody museums, and yesterday the splendor of the Grand Tetons. Today is another Cody day, and tomorrow we'll be back in the Tetons, with a likely detour on the way there to check out Old Faithful. And so the varied delights of this trip continue.