Eighty Miles of Grass
I went
to the United States to enroll in a Masters program in Computer Sciecne at Texas
A&M Universtiy in August 1991. I was dazzled seeing the 747 that I flew in,
amazed at Heathrow airport in London – it seemed like a city not an airport-
and equally amazed by Gatwick Airport, where there was one plane landing or
taking off every minute. I was hungry and cold in London, but every thing
seemed so expensive, I didn’t buy any food. My uncle Varadarajan picked me up
at Houston Airport and we drove to a small town College Station; I saw eighty
miles of grass on that drive and that looked beautiful then.
College
life was busy, cash-strapped, and restricted to where I could walk, unless
someone took me along somewhere. I visited my mother’s sister, Ramani Chithi
and her family in Baton Rouge, Louisiana for a Thanksgiving vacation, and the bridges
over the Atchafalaya swamp and Missisippi rivers were the tourist highlights on
that trip. Later, my thesis advisor at Texas A&M, Prof Swaminathan took me
on a two-day trip to Los Angeles – I visited Universal Studios, while he
attended a conference. Travel was few and far between during my college days,
though I visited Baton Rouge and New Orleans once again, Galveston with
friends, the Johnson Space Center in Houston.
In 1994
I started working for a company in Phoenix, Arizona. And during the fourth of
July weekend, I rented a car, drove 800 miles to visit my friend and AKCE alumnus
Gokul Janga in Logan Utah, and then was drive another 400 miles to Yellowstone
National Park. It was my first drive longer than ten miles in a car, and I took
nearly 24 hours to drive the distance. My inexperience was most significant on
the mountain curves, but I really enjoyed driving. I was caught in a lot of
weekend traffic in Phoenix, and incredibly thick downpour, but the got the hang
of driving in the rain too. I reached Flagstaff, had dinner, drove a little
north, reached a small town, found the motels closed, and slept in the car for
a few hours. Then drove through canyons (including sections of the Grand
Canyon) and mountains and the long wide open plains of Utah. Then one of Gokul’s buddies drove five of us
to Jackson Hole.
A River of Boiling Water
Yellowstone
is not merely beautiful, it is bizarre. It is a geological oddity, with
geysers, and mud volcanos, and boiling rivers and sulphuric pools and terraces
of boiling chemicals oozing all over the place. If a factory did the same, it
would be vilified by environmentalists and citizens as evil and polluting, but
when nature does it, people consider it beautiful. (Also true of underwater
volcanic vents.) Theodore Roosevelt understood this and declared it a protected
monument.
America
has a passion for the road that the rest of the world may not quite understand
or feel. In India, trains are the romantic means of transport; so too in
Europe, I suspect. In America one
drives. Especially in the western states, where I lived for six years.
One
reaches Yellowstone National Park from the Utah side by driving past the Grand
Tetons National Park, which has two majestic peaks, lots of snow, sparkling
lakes, and beautiful forests. The snow had mostly melted but it was cold and we
needed our jackets in the night and early hours. We arrived too late to find a
lodge, so we slept in the car, with the windows cracked open. One guy slept in
a sleeping bag, outside, which would have killed him in the winter, but it was
ok in July.
Yellowstone
suffered a forest fire in the 1980s and
its effects were all too visible in 1994 when I visited first. There are
several types of forest fire, some that just burn ground level vegetation, some
that burn parts of the forest, some that burn everything. For some speices like
pines, whose cones need intense heat to release and reproduce, forest fires are
a necessary part of their life cycle.
We had
breakfast in a wooden chalet, that looked it would fit in quite nicely in
Switzerland. No shower.
Oddment! Vapor! Sulphur! Bubble!
 |
| Old Faithful - the geyser (July 1994) |
Yellowstone is a 80 mile loop by road. We drove to Old
Faithful, a geyser – a somewhat predictable hot spring that was bubbling most
of the time. Once every 75 minutes or so, it would erupt into an 80 foot
fountain of steam, then subside after a minute.
We then
drove over to some coloured terraces of sulphur and other subterranean
chemicals pouring out of the ground, driving past a lonely bison walking along
the road. We hiked along the trails between the oozing mud, on planks brilliantly
laid by the US Forest Department! No words can capture the experience. Fumes and vapors rose and swirled about, a toxic natural sauna, surreal and sublime.
We saw a
few more geological oddities, driving around a few places, then went to the
Montana part of the park for a lunch of pizza. After lunch, we drove over to
the Grand Canyon of the YellowStone. Much smaller than the world famous one in Arizona, but the stone was yellow, which
gave the park its name, and it had a river running at its bottom, and a couple
of waterfalls and absolutely beautiful views. We walked down a trail, saw a
beaver dam, got sprayed by a small waterfall, walked back up and then drove
further on, where we could view a waterfall from its top. The waterfall may have been about two hundred and the spray rebounded a hundred feet of the ground, glinting with the colors of the rainbow in the evening sun.
The scenery
everywhere was astounding, vistas of incomparably greenery and distance and
majesty. I had three years with almost no travel in Texas and a month in the
desert that is Phoenix, and had never really seen the wilderness in India,
except on train journeys, so to me this was an unparalleled, incredible
connection and communion with Nature, in the company of four guys cracking
jokes and enjoying Ilayaraja’s music. We traveled back that night to Utah, and
I drove back to Phoenix the next evening.
 |
| Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone July 1994 |
In
September 1994 I moved to Seattle and in May 1995 I visited Yellowstone again
with friends from Seattle, driving 800 miles then too. The big difference
was that I was a much better driver now,
and this time I had a day and a half in Yellowstone, rather than 12 hours from
dawn to dusk. The culinary highlight was strawberry pancakes for breakfast in a
restaurant in the village of West Yellowstone. This time we stayed in a log
cabin in a KOA lodge, and that night we took back a pizza and ate it by the
side of a campfire under the Montana sky. Awesome. The geological tour was no
different though.
We got
to see much more of the boiling Snake river. Also the route from Seattle to
Yellowstone, via the Snowqualmie mountains, over the very broad Columbia river,
the Idaho mountains and most of the blue skies and large plains of Montana.
While
living in Seattle, I did a lot of travel to mountains and volcanoes and lakes
and ice caves and river gorges and seasides – Rainier, St Helens, Glacier,
Sequoia, Crater Lake, Kings Canyon, Hoh rainforest, Olympic mountains, whitewater rafting in
the Methow and Wenatchee rivers, but Yellowstone remains my favorite natural
wonder in the Americas. Among other places, I hope to visit it this summer.
Travelogues
1. Skydiving
3. Vaishali
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