Issue date: 9/29/05 Section: features

Versus Magazine Online [Image based format]

I still don't know what the woman in the red dress wasdoing on the trail. She was fiftyish, blonde, and had white sneakers to go with her blazing red dress. It was not a modest red, but lipstick red, red enough to make her a garish eyesore in Grand Teton National Park's landscape of greens, grays and browns. But there she was, strolling along the hot, dusty trail to Taggart Lake. And the oddest thing about her was not that she was wearing a long red dress to hike on a hot summer day, but the fact that she did not think she was odd. She was oblivious, to me and to everyone else on the trail, oblivious to how she clashed so magnificently with her surroundings. She was clearly absorbed in her own world where it is normal to wear a long red dress and white sneakers to go for a ramble in the mountains.

But as I walked this last mile of my three-night backpacking trip, it became clear to me that she was an ambassador of sorts, sent to welcome me back from the wilderness. She was the ambassador of all the weird quirks in the human race, the ambassador of "civilized" society. I wanted to run away right then and there, off the trail and up into the mountains from which I had just emerged-back to the uncivilized, where there is nothing so absurd as this woman in a red dress, where everything makes sense and has order and is as it should be. But I did not run, and I walked on past her. She made me sad in an odd sort of way, because it was so apparent that she just doesn't know. She doesn't know, and neither does the family struggling to push their umbrella-shaded stroller down the bumpy trail, nor does the portly family that asked me between short breaths how much farther it was to the lake when they were only ten minutes removed from their car. Most of the tourists hiking that mile and a half to the lake simply don't know what is back there beyond Taggart Lake-the explosive fields of wildflowers, the snowfields that are still to be found in August, and the brilliant blue bowls of water nestled beneath the craggy spires. And it strikes me with a sort of melancholy that they do not know of these things.

I can say this because I know a thing or two about these summer vacationers. As a ranger, I stood in a booth at a park entrance station talking to them all summer. It was my duty to greet the endless stream of "visitors" (we weren't supposed to call them tourists) to Grand Teton, checking their passes, taking their money, and answering their questions. Brilliant questions, like, "Are the salmon spawning right now?" and, "Is that salt on the mountains?" and the perennial favorite, "Are we in Yellowstone?" Often I simply had to orient them on Grand Teton's complicated road map, which essentially consists of two highways. I have been a tourist numerous times in my life, and now that I have dealt with them as an insider, I never want to be one again.

Continued...

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