That shirt’s not just some random kitschy buy, either. Although I certainly WOULD have raced to the register with it in my hands if I’d found it at a thrift store, this old, beat-up, holey, stained shirt is a Yellowstone original.*

For the summer of 2001, I was a front desk clerk on the graveyard shift at the Grant Village Hotel on the southern end of the figure 8 formed by the major roads in the park. The park is far more gorgeous, more dangerous, more rewarding and more vast than anyone who hasn’t been there can imagine. Actually, I’d go so far as to include anyone who’s merely driven through it or spent one night in it. I’m not looking down at all on people who haven’t spent time in the park. I’m just hoping people might listen to what I’m saying and go find out for themselves. I still feel very connected to that place and to my time there. The geysers are incredibly tall, the waterfalls blinding white, the sulfur putrid, the wildlife huge and raw and damn near sacred. The volcanic water fueling the whole enterprise from below, forcing itself up into hot springs breaking through the earth’s surface, zitty reminders of all the heat and turmoil and LIFE right under the crust, permanently altering and sustaining the world on its roof. The experience was life-changing in so many ways. Some personal and emotional… I fell in real love there for the first time, but the guy and I, we never got together. Even years afterward when we would visit each other, things were intense, but not fuzzy like a body buzz. Painfully electric, like a fence. We could barely shake hands. Other lessons were pragmatic and practical. I learned so much about survival and nature and conservation, things that would stick with me and form my sense of environmentalism for the rest of my life. I fear I come off as some insufferable prig who can’t pass up a chance to brag about my knowledge or lecture about bears, but that’s not what I’m trying to do. I hope sharing that time, so short and so long ago, with the people now in my life will help them somehow (knowledge is power, even when you’re not in bear country). And also it might help me. I don’t want to ever lose what I learned and felt there. I can’t go back and have a similar experience — life’s taught me that much — but at least I can keep those memories with me, right under my crust, permanently altering the world on my roof.

*Full disclosure: OK, really it was from a touristy outpost at the park entrance in West Yellowstone, Montana. What can I say, all the t-shirts in our gift shop were ugly and they made me return my uniform.

Crosscountry Drive

Yellowstone National Park

Click below for another list, hopefully also forever partial, of cool things I HAVE done. If you have an unlisted favorite memory of me/us, you let me know.

1. I have sang along to “Rock the Casbah” blaring through iPod speakers while looking at an actual casbah in the moonlight from a hotel rooftop in Tangier, Morocco.
2. I have waded in the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans.
3. I have taken midnight road trips to Graceland Too, several times. One time, another time, lifetime membership time.
4. I have graduated college with honors.
5. I have ridden in planes, trains and automobiles. And cruise ships, speedboats and rafts.
6. I have hiked up a mountain. Mt. Washburn in Yellowstone Park, to be exact.
7. I have snorkeled off the coast of Mexico.
8. I have climbed onto the rooftops of several University of Memphis campus buildings.
9. I have eaten a baby octopus in one bite.
10. I have received standing ovations after karaoke performances.
11. I have acted in plays, delivered speeches in front of hundreds of people, and sang in county talent shows.
12. I have skipped a grade (kindergarten).
13. I have visited North America, Europe and Africa.
14. I have been feet from buffalo, elk and moose. And not in a zoo.
15. I have survived an interstate car wreck.
16. I have cried while listening to music.
17. I have seen Pope John Paul II. We were in the eighth row. After he spoke, thousands of people stood on their chairs in the Vatican City, cheering and chanting “Viva Il Papa!!” as he rode through the crowd in the Popemobile.
18. I have placed my ear directly against a wall of thumping speakers at a rave.
19. I have mended fences, laid laminate flooring, spackled walls, painted trim and planted flowers.
20. I have been stopped in my tracks by guys who only wanted to tell me I am beautiful.