The Anticlimactic Story of How I Did Not Surreptitiously Run Into My 80-Year Old Pen Pal, Carl Love, in Yellowstone National Park

It was August 2000, year of our lord. The Kreitner family was in Yellowstone for around five days, taking our sweet time with a park that, if it is not America’s largest, is at least the densest as far as attractions go. While most parks tend to specialize in either amazing creatures, beautiful scenery, or interesting geological phenomena, Yellowstone excels in all three.

Anyway, one day we were visiting yet another batch of geo-thermal pools and hot springs. We were standing on the boardwalk the park service constructs above these features, allowing you to walk right out and over them and to see into their crystal-clear, colorful depths. I was leaning over the railing, probably trying to wrap my mind around the concept, if not the word, of the “abyss,” when my beloved Yankees bucket cap fell into the boiling, sulfuric water. I started bawling, knowing, having watched the parks video, that many people die every year by accidentally falling into the thermal waters or deliberating reaching in to retrieve some cherished artifact which they know, in the opposite case, would do the same. I loved that hat, but did not want to die. Broken-hearted—I had lost another cherished Yankees hat the year before after I left it in a Broadway theatre where I had been forced to endure some one-woman play about the Titanic—I repaired to the car and eventually flew back to New Jersey, thinking there wasn’t a chance in the world I’d get the hat back. A good stoic, I was already learning to move on.

After dinner at the Red Robin near the Newark International Airport (a returning-from-vacation Kreitner tradition), we got back home and my parents checked the messages on the machine. I was called in to listen to one. It was from a man named Carl Love, who said he had been visiting a geothermal pool in Yellowstone when he saw a hat floating in the water. He got his fishing pole from his car and yanked the hat out. When it had cooled down, he checked the inside and found our phone number there. If we would just give him our address, he’d mail it back.

I don’t know what happened to that hat. I probably lost it in some much less illustrious way or finally threw sentimentality out the window during a rare purge of my closet. Perhaps it did not survive my self-granted promotion from "Yankees fan" to "Ramones-listener." 

Anyway, I have been pen pals with Carl Love ever since. I’d send him letters from camp, postcards from my travels around America, England, and elsewhere, and he would send me his family’s generic typed Christmas letter with a personal handwritten note at the bottom. Carl lives in Boulder, Colorado, most of the year, but for 30 years or so has worked and lived in Yellowstone for the whole summer. Every year I love reading his stories about life in the park, especially his close encounters with grizzly bears. We’ve never met, though I nearly had the chance when I was in Denver for a few days two years ago. I could have taken the bus to Boulder and surprised him at his house—one of only a few addresses I've ever bothered to memorize—but for some reason I opted to spend another day exploring Denver.

Fast forward to this spring. I sent Carl a postcard from somewhere in the South, saying that Brahna and I were on a four-month trip across the U.S. and that we would probably be in Denver sometime in May. When we decided later that a dip down through Colorado wasn’t in the cards, I was pretty disappointed, figuring I’d lost my last chance to meet the man who is technically (and in more than one way) one of my oldest friends. I was thrilled, though, when my parents told me on the phone that they’d gotten a letter from Carl Love, asking them to tell me that he would be going up to Yellowstone on May 11^th, and that he was sorry we couldn’t meet. Coincidentally, Brahna and I had specifically chosen not to go to Colorado in May so that we could spend more time in Yellowstone and its environs. My dad found his phone number online, but, because I’m me, I didn’t call it until the morning of May 11^th. It rang and rang, no answer, no voicemail. Another Google search found his name in a church bulletin, so I called the church. A very nice lady, amused by my story, confirmed that Carl had left that morning. She did give me the helpful information that Carl worked at a store inside the park. Beyond that, I'd have to do some old-time investigating.

The decision to make it home for Grandpa's funeral contracted our time in Yellowstone from four days to one, and anyway it seemed like tracking a man whose picture I'd never seen in a park as big as Yellowstone was a lost cause. We started at the northern entrance to the park, where informal interviews at several gift shops led me to the personnel office of one of the two companies who are contracted to run concessions in Yellowstone. They, probably illegally, told me that they had no record of an employee named Carl Love, but wished me good luck. At least I now knew which company he worked for.

Several dozen bison, one grizzly bear, and a few geysers later, we decided to stop for lunch at Canyon Junction, near the famed Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone and Yellowstone Falls. One of the stores in the complex was still closed for the season, though I saw sealed boxes inside waiting to be unpacked. While Brahna surreptitiously heated up our leftovers in the microwave of the other store, I asked the oldest employee I could find whether they knew of one Carl Love. Indeed, she did, she pronounced him lovely and a real old-timer at the store next door, the one that hadn't yet opened. That that store should be his home-away-from-home made sense, I realized, since he had just arrived in Yellowstone the day before, and the store seemed ready to open in just a few days.

In any case, since this story is already getting too long and, quite honestly, there is no great climax to it—no Oprah-worthy moment where I meet and hug Carl Love and perhaps experience some kind of grand realization about my own life and that of my late grandfather—I'll just wind it down here. She didn't know where Carl was at that moment, though she did say I could try the motels in West Yellowstone, about 30 miles or so out of the way. Time was short, though, and we still had a lot of park to get through before retiring for the night in Jackson and catching our sunrise flight the next morning. I scrawled out a little note for the woman to give to Carl when she saw him. I explained the situation, about how we just missed each other and how Brahna and I were flying home last-minute. In the back of my mind, I thought about the possibility that we would try to find him again the following week, after flying into Jackson and driving back through Yellowstone towards our next destination. When the time came, of course, we had somewhere we wanted to be and didn't make the stop. It leaves us with a good reason to make it to Denver in the not-too-distant future: another one of those little presents Brahna and I have left to our future, older, more earth-bound selves, places all around the country that we decided to skip this time but to which we have promised to return. As for my pen pal, as a lifelong fisherman he should know as well as anyone that things come up.

***

Lastly, because that was a lame ending, because I only really wrote this post because I finished the last one with an implied promise of a story to come, and because, as it was mostly set in the pre-digital past, I didn't have any pictures to put in it, and because you've been very well-behaved in reading this far, here's a picture of an elk.

A Few Days in New Mexico

 Heading north from the Antelope Lodge in Alpine, our first stop was Fort Davis National Historic Site in Fort Davis, Texas. It was built in the 1850s to protect travelers along the road from San Antonio and El Paso from the ever-constant threat of Apache and Comanche attacks, and named after the man who was then the Secretary of War, Jefferson Davis. After the Civil War, it hosted “Buffalo Soldiers,” black troops charged with the task of eradicating the threat of Indian raids from the American West. It was abandoned and partially dismantled in the early 1890s, once the Indian threat was neutralized—through their near-eradication and total defeat—and the advent of the railroad made the El Paso Road, and military protection of it, obsolete.

The troops at Fort Davis were charged with protecting travel along the El Paso Road, including postal deliveries.

Fascinating stuff, no doubt. But our real reason for stopping at Fort Davis was what we have come to call a “cancellation stamp opportunity.”

At the Martin Luther King National Historic Site in Atlanta, a National Parks ranger gave us the hardest of hard sells to purchase, for $8.95, a National Parks Passport. He said that he only had a few 25^th anniversary editions of the passport left, and that once they sold out they’d be gone for good. Ordinarily, Brahna and I would both be pretty opposed to what seemed like such a trite, juvenile souvenir, but since the ranger said it would be a shame for us to cross the country without the passport, and with such a low price, we decided to go for it.

The passport is about the size of a small reporter’s notebook. It’s divided into regions of the country—Southeast, Southwest, Western Region, etc. When you get to a National Park, National Historic Site, or National Monument, there is a small counter in the corner, which we’d never noticed before, with a few stamps, a stamp pad, and some spare sheets of paper to practice on. Each park has its own “cancellation stamp,” a term referring to the stamps post offices place on your envelope indicating where it has entered the system. The National Parks Service apparently started offering these stamps in 1986, and, according to every ranger we meet, the program has ignited a passionate fervor within a certain very small portion of the populace ever since. Brahna and I are proud to be among those special, special few.

Our passport, with some hard-earned cancellation stamps from the Southwest.

One benefit of the passport is that it often convinces us to go out of our way to get a stamp. Such a decision inevitably leads us to places that we previously knew very little about, like the Jean Lafitte National Monument in Louisiana (Cajun history and culture); the San Antonio Missions (Spanish proselytization to natives); and Fort Davis. The passport gives us a tiny extra incentive to visit places we otherwise would miss, and thus adds to what Brahna has dryly commented is already a pretty rigorous curriculum.

After Fort Davis we stopped at Balmorhea State Park, just south of the New Mexico border, which is the location of a massive pool—25 feet deep in some places—built by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s around a natural mineral spring. Brahna and I laid out a blanket and enjoyed a pleasant picnic of leftovers before hopping in the pool. Thousands of tiny snowballs floated down from the park’s cottonwood trees, giving the scene a bit of a surreal air.

Fortunately, my memory of that pleasant afternoon was not completely marred by the diagnosis, a few days later, of a doctor in Albuquerque, basically to the effect that the small, red hives-like rashes that appeared all over my body were caused by “hot tub folliculitis,” a non-lethal, merely itchy, condition caused by bacteria often found in hot tubs or mineral springs. Rashes, topical Benedryl, and antibiotics are temporary, but memories are forever.

After crossing into New Mexico and spending the night at a private campground, we headed south toward Carlsbad Caverns National Park, which encompasses an unfathomably large system of caves under the foothills of the Guadalupe Mountains. The only cave actually named Carlsbad Cavern is the one most often visited by tourists, and whose most prominent feature is the Big Room, the floor space of which is the size of about six football fields.

The most amazing thing about the caverns, though, when you consider the size of the cave you do see, is just how much of the caverns is not available for viewing. Just three caves are open to the general public. An additional seven can be accessed by your more serious cavers and official, park-endorsed expeditions. If I recall correctly, there are about 80 distinct caves in the whole Carlsbad system, most of which have never been explored by human beings. Only relatively recently, researchers felt wind blowing out of a tunnel off Carlsbad Cavern, and decided to investigate. They uncovered a cave so large it makes Carlsbad look like one of the tunnels my father and I used to dig at the beach. The Parks Service has no plans to open it to the public. 
 

Rightfully so. Ansel Adams, who photographed Carlsbad in the 1930s (though he disliked those photographs, due to the need for artificial light in the completely dark caves), called the caverns “something that should not exist in relation to human beings. Something as remote as the galaxy, as incomprehensible as a nightmare and beautiful in spite of everything.” The bizarre formations of Carlsbad Caverns—to rehearse it once again: stalagmites from the ground, stalactites from the ceiling—are indeed beautiful, but it is strange to admire the beauty of something that, one could argue, ought to have never really been seen.

One of Ansel Adams' photographs he did at Carlsbad for the U.S. government.

 From Carlsbad we drove into the Sacramento Mountains and passed through the tiny town of Cloudcroft, which I heard described as America’s highest town (in elevation) at about 7,000 feet, though I think there’s reason to doubt that. Our destination was a small campground in what we found out was a ridiculously obscure corner of the Lincoln National Forest. As the sun set we raced around turns of a scenic byway (promising we’d linger to enjoy the views in the morning), down a long dirt road and into the empty parking lot. That the campground was one of the national forest’s few year-round camping options should have warned us that it could be completely covered in snow. Besides that, the air was dangerously cold.

Mortimer at Lincoln National Forest.

Sorry to give up what seemed like the most isolated campsite in America, we raced back down the scenic byway and out of the mountains towards the town of Alamogordo, trying to beat the clock as the only food option in town told us over the phone they’d be closing soon due to a shortage of food. By the time we finished the meal, around 9:30 pm, we still didn’t know where we were spending the night, which is, for good and for bad, always a rush. We ended up finding out that the campground in town was much cheaper than the price listed in our AAA camping book, and called it a night.

The next morning we drove to White Sands National Monument. It comprises a few hundred square miles of pristine white sand dunes, formed from gypsum swept by rain down from the surrounding mountains into a basin, and then chopped into grain-size pieces by the valley’s fierce wind. It is geologically interesting, and it is beautiful, but more than anything else White Sands is just plain fun. Brahna and I treated it like a massive playground—struggling up the dunes and running back down. Doing so doesn’t hurt the dunes at all, since they tend to move a few feet every year anyway, and the supply of gypsum from the mountains is essentially unlimited. Our morning at White Sands was the most plain fun I’ve had so far on the trip.

A concession stand at the park sells sleds for something around $10, but we found a broken one in the garbage and broke it some more.

As we left White Sands and drove north towards Albuquerque, we passed the Trinity test site, where the world’s first atomic bomb was exploded. To skip ahead a little bit, we later also visited Los Alamos, where the bomb was invented and designed, thus rounding out the “nuclear weapons” portion of our Southwest education. The Bradbury Science Museum in Los Alamos was an especially interesting and accessible museum on what is a pretty uninteresting and inaccessible subject for both Brahna and me—science. It also had something I’ve never seen in a museum before: one corner was set aside as a “public forum,” where public advocacy groups present, with varying degrees of English fluency and command of basic logic, their own parochial opinions on important questions covered (or, in their opinion, not covered) by the museum itself. Topics like the viability of nuclear energy and the necessity of dropping Little Boy on Hiroshima drew particularly heated curatorial debate.

Our first stop in Albuquerque was the home of Ernie Pyle—now a branch of the Albuquerque public library—whose name the older readers of this blog might recognize as that of a famous war reporter who died in the Pacific theatre in 1945. They’d be right, but it was not the house of Ernie Pyle, 1940s war reporter, that I wanted to see, but that of Ernie Pyle, roving 1930s newspaper columnist, that I’d been looking forward to, and talking Brahna’s ear off about, since we left New Jersey. Since finding, in an Amherst bookstore, “Ernie’s America: The Best of Ernie Pyle’s 1930s Travel Dispatches,” I’ve become a bit obsessed with Pyle, and what he got and what he missed in writing about America.

At the Ernie Pyle House and Library in Albuquerque.

 I really wanted to write a long post about my discovery of Pyle and my reading of his American travel pieces, but, seeing as life on the road isn’t exactly conducive to strenuous thought and diligent writing—and this is quite ironic, when it comes to talking about Ernie Pyle—I’ll have to save that more intensive meditation for somewhere else and present here what thoughts I can.

Sometime in the early years of the Great Depression, Ernie Pyle’s editors at the Scripps Howard newspaper chain handed him a dream job. They would pay him to travel around the country full-time, and he would have the liberty to write about anything he damn well pleased. That was the set-up, no strings attached. Pyle was responsible for six columns every week, which is, of course, completely nuts.

Pyle’s columns were famous, at the time, for their down-home folksiness and for their author’s willingness and courage to let his subjects tell their own stories. Pyle is so different from other cross-country road trip authors—Kerouac and Henry Miller, especially—in that the story, for him, is always about America and Americans, and almost never about himself. Pyle would roll into town and just look for interesting characters to write about: he’d check with the local paper, the police department, the bartenders. Then he’d drive out to meet them. His columns, when read in bulk, form a more complex and variegated picture of America during the Great Depression than any other work I’ve seen.

I’ll end this now, since I could really go on for quite awhile about Ernie Pyle. Now that I’ve at least introduced him, though, I’ll try to use Pyle and his writings as a counter-point as we continue our journey west, then north, and finally back east. I’ve been mostly reading his columns on a state-by-state basis, as we pass through them. His reflections on places like New Orleans or Carlsbad, or on traveling in America more generally, hold up after nearly 80 years, and are often better for their age.

"I have no home. My home is where my extra luggage is, and where the car is stored, and where I happen to be getting mail this time. My home is America."