6/25-6/26: The Marathon

Yellowstone to San Francisco: Woke up at 8.  Took a walk.  When we’d come in the night before we’d seen that we were placed next to a number of bro-y looking dudes.  We looked at each other sadly and wondered aloud if these bros would be rowdy and drunk the whole time.  However it turned out that we were the rowdy ones.  We even did an interval workout in the morning, about the broiest thing one can do at Yellowstone National Park.  Thus we realized that WE were the bros.  We were the bros’ bros.  At least neither we nor they were blasting hair metal a la the people camping across the way in Iowa.  

Ate a leisurely breakfast and decided to check out early from the park: rather than staying two nights there we would spend only the one.  Why?  It would be $30 cheaper and effectively our plan HAD been to leave around 4am and drive fourteen and a half hours to San Francisco.  That would have necessitated our packing up the tent in the middle of the night and wouldn’t have afforded us much sleep.  The only downside was that we’d be driving to SF mostly in the dark.  But the pros outweighed the cons.  We went to the office and checked out and got a refund and then went to the cattle stall showers, which weren’t that bad all things considered.  We had to wait in line to get into them and as we did I realized that they might very well be those 1950s gymnasium/jailhouse showers where everyone stood around naked in plain view of everyone else.  They weren't.

We drove to Old Faithful and watched it erupt (cool) and Tim bought a Teddy Roosevelt bookmark/Christmas ornament in the gift shop.  Waiting for Old Faithful we were chatted up by a Louisiana man who was big and fat and tan and had missed a few spots shaving and so had white stubble growing in patches on his chin and cheeks.  He wore big glasses but not stylishly or ironically and had on a hat that identified him as a Vietnam War veteran, air force.  We asked if the seat next to him was taken and didn’t understand his first answer.  Then he said something like, “They was some that was eatin’ lunch out here, but they packed it up and said, ‘We done.’”  Awesome.  We learned that this man was from a small town 30 miles south-southwest of New Orleans (“We didn’t know there was anything that far south of New Orleans.”  “That’s what everybody says!”) and had worked for the Louisiana State Police for 30 years before retiring.  Now he RV’d around the US with his wife.  The two had just come from the Grand Canyon and he was very enthusiastic about it.  “Breathtaking.”  He didn’t seem to believe I was an adult although Tim’s credentials weren’t questioned.  “So what do you do, young man?”  “I teach high school history.”  “Oh that’s wonderful.  And you…are you a…a student?”  

Drove north and checked out the Artists Claypots.  At the entranceway there was a great warning sign depicting a boy being boiled alive in a geyser and a girl (his sister?) screaming after him.  In the background a lone man (their father? Ranger Rick?) could be seen walking in the other direction as if too tired to deal with it.  The “Claypots” themselves looked like something out of the Jurassic.  We saw a pit of boiling mud that bubbled up and exploded and re-solidified immediately and Tim and I agreed after the fact that this was the most notable of all the “Claypots” though I’m not exactly sure why.  Soul-crushing traffic at the Norris Pass, both ways.  Construction in the West is far worse than anything encountered in the East because here (this seems to be a Western thing) they just stop traffic for ten, fifteen minutes at a time instead of marking out lanes where traffic can pass slowly but constantly.  A lot of the Yellowstone landmarks had awesome names, chief among these being “Sheepeater Cliffs.”  Holy crap.  This in comparison to “Butte Lake,” which basically demanded we call it “Butt Lake.”  “Hey, do you want to go for a refreshing swim in BUTT LAKE?”  “Hey, you know what’s looking really moist today?  BUTT LAKE.”  

We cooked lunch fugitively at a vacant picnic table.  More hamburger scramble.  About 25 minutes into cooking it we were approached by a senior citizen on a golf cart who told us very excitedly that there were two bears “just 100 yards away!”  Turned out to be 100 yards DOWNWIND from us.  He asked if we wanted to see them and we gave him a tentative “yes” but didn’t go with him in the golf cart and packed our stuff up quickly and took the pot off the fire and ate the scramble before the vegetables were satisfactorily cooked.  We cleaned quickly and put everything, including the trash, in the car.  We drove in the direction of the rumored bears but didn’t see anything except an idling car with its emergency lights on and no driver.  We went up to the Mammoth Hot Springs, which turned out to be not that active.  Drove back south and west and saw buffalo and elk up close along the road. Left Yellowstone around 5:30.

We drove through Idaho listening to an audiobook of DELIVERANCE and the desolation of the land combined with the dismal hollow tone of the story filled us with dread.  Lots of pathetic sights along 20W.  A billboard boasting “Largest Seedling Potato Growing Region in the World!”  A Shell gas station housed in what looked like a manmade cottage, gray old splintery wood like a frontier house.  As if Shell were an artisanal local gas station.  Along the side of a big and equally gray, splintery barn was hand-painted “Thank You for Supporting Shell.”  One American flag away from a really inspired marketing campaign.  Dramatic, cloudy sunset.  Tim pulled off a half-mile lane change as per an antecedent conversation about pulling off absurdly long lane changes on empty straight roads.  We’ll see if I can best him somewhere down the line. 

We drove fourteen and a half hours to San Francisco stopping maybe four times along the way to change drivers.  Very little sleep but enough to sustain us. Tim almost hit a coyote around 1am.  Traumatically I did hit a baby rabbit shortly thereafter.  Tim started and had been driving Yellowstone all day when we set out.  So technically 5:30 to 8:30 was his first shift but take that with a grain of salt.  Then I took over from 8:30 to 12, but Tim was snoozing when we changed over to Pacific time and I reset the clock surreptitiously thinking I’d clock an extra hour without him knowing (why I wanted to do this I have no idea).  But I couldn’t handle driving so long in the dark and we traded at 12 Pacific.  When DELIVERANCE ended we listened to a series of recorded lectures on Ancient Greece by this University of Oklahoma prof. named J. Rufus Fears.  Great lecturer, especially when paraphrasing Herodotus’ histories.  Tim drove from 12 to 2:30am at which point instead of stopping at a gas station as per tradition we just pulled off to the side of the highway and turned on the emergency lights and left the passenger’s door open (for fear of being locked out of the car) and peed into the scrub with the strong wind at our backs and the lights of oncoming semis illuminating us periodically.  At the start of my 2:30 shift I had a Five Hour Energy and that jet propelled me from Utah to a mountainous region of California where Tim took over at around 5:30.  The sun started rising around 4:30 in a kind of unplaceable overcast gray way.  I was flexing my jaw compulsively for like the entirety of my drive and had the wheel in a death grip.  Those FHEs are serious business.  I immediately passed out upon relinquishing the driver’s seat.  Tim drove us into an urban area where we stopped at a Starbucks and tried to clean ourselves as best we could.  There was nowhere for us to sleep since our hostess, Miranda "Marathon Girl" Bona, was working until 5pm, so we just had to stay up.

Drove to SF via the Golden Gate Bridge.  It was covered in fog so we couldn’t see the view.  We walked around Golden Gate Park and in many ways I found it to be more wild than Yellowstone.  At least there weren’t thousands of people driving through it.  At one point we did encounter a group of children with their…babysitters?  Teachers?  One red-haired kid was running around pretending to be a firetruck.  We had some trouble finding the car afterwards – had we parked on 39th or 49th?  Or for that matter 59th?  39th, it turned out.  We drove to the touristy area of SF, Fisherman’s Warf, which was incredibly busy and expensive.  Ate at In-N-Out Burger and it was damn good.  I had three hamburgers.  Tim had a “Double Double” with fries but these, despite being FRESH CUT EVERY DAY!, were kind of stale-tasting and disappointing.  Even so it was a balm.  After that we drove to the Marina.  Approaching we saw a few spandexed Adonises working out at a public fitness site (something that apparently exists in SF).  The Marina itself was breezy and brisk and I fell asleep and Tim read a magazine about teaching.  When we left about an hour later the Adonises were still working out at the fitness site.  We then headed to Berkeley (where Miranda lives) rather than paying exorbitant SF prices for parking and coffee.

At Berkeley we hit a bar called “The Jupiter” which was a little too pretentious and not nearly dive-y enough for our discerning tastes.  Tim and I sat there and read our respective books but only had one pencil with which to take notes so we passed the one between us.  After three or four beers apiece we met up with Miranda.  She led us to a restaurant with cheap liters of an IPA called “Monkey Head” and by the time we’d finished a liter each Tim and I had been awake for something like 36 hours and were very groggy.  I had a burger and Tim had a basket of fries and these probably saved us from utter destruction.  Got back to Miranda’s apartment and realized that we didn’t know where we’d parked the car (N.B.: this was the second time we’d lost the car in like six hours).  I took Miranda’s extra keys and started wandering around the neighborhood looking for the car.  I couldn’t find it and gave up after about ten minutes of searching and had a semi-mystical experience walking around Berkeley.  Wrote a lot of notes down about it but probably the only thing notable was the...ahem...illicit smokey smell I ran into in front of an Episcopal Church.  Got back to Miranda's (she and Tim were still up and hanging out) and we went to bed and slept like kings, I on a blow-up mattress and Tim on a couch.  Super impressed that Miranda stayed up with us despite her plan to get up at like 5 the next day to go for a run (she didn’t) and then go to work at 8 (she did).

Thus ended the 6/25-6/26 marathon stretch.