If you are not a type A trip planner or a type A trip TAKER, I am not ever going to be a good companion for you when it comes to taking trips. I research the places I'm going, the places that are must sees, the things you might miss unless you're in the know, the general vibe of a place, I have to know everything about a place that I'm traveling to. I think this mostly stems from the idea that like, I rarely go to places twice (except New Orleans and Chicago!!!) and thus I must maximize the time I'm spending in any given place because I'm unlikely to return. FOMO is real. There's another part of me...much smaller...that wants to make sure my arrival in any given location is feasible. Will there be potties for me, will there be things I can eat, what do I need to bring from home that I likely can't get when I'm traveling, etc. So I do a lot of preparing.
A lot.
I asked Derek yesterday if he hates that I'm a type A trip person and he said he doesn't hate it, but it can be a little much and sometimes I hyperfixate on things.
Keeping all of this in mind, I had initially planned for this preface to our trip (42 days!) to be a quick peek in to the madness that is my itinerary creation, and now, that's going to be a PS instead of the main body.
Back in the 90s, I was an absolutely fiendish reader. You gave me a book, I read it. And fast. Naturally, I loved the Scholastic Book Fair. Me and the Scholastic Book Fair would have been besties if I hadn't grown up super poor, but not every scholastic book fair was a disappointment. I do recall a few where I got to walk away with a book or two. At one of these book fairs, I found a book, judged it by its cover and determined it was surely the pinnacle of the truest journalism ever, and bought it. I remember looking at it in class after returning from the library where the book fair was held and counting down the seconds to recess when I could finally sit under a tree outside and read, unbothered, for fifteen minutes.
The book was called Phone Call From a Ghost.
And this was the cover:
Eat your heart out, Al Jazeera.
I do not recall a single story from this. Not one. I DO have memories of carrying this book around with me on more than one occasion after I bought it, though. And I have always been a heavy leaner toward the side of the fence that says ghosts are real, not because of any science or eidence, but because I have a lot of anecdotes that I can't explain away with reasoning or rationality, and so the next logical conclusion is ghost. Obviously.
I have not thought about this book in easily three decades. After looking it up, I saw that the version I bought is the second edition, published in 1990 (presumably the give it a more believable cover), and the first edition was published in 1988. I was four at the time of publication, 6 at the time of reprinting with a skeleton about to use a rotary phone...and also fully dressed, which raises a lot of questions about the lives of animated skeletons for me, but that's for another time, I suppose...and I don't know that I was kicking around book fairs at 6 years old, so if I had to guess, I likely bought this at age 8. I bet it lived with me until my mom and Dee got maried, and my mom went nuts against anything that wasn't her idea of good, so I bet this got chucked when my mom and Dee consolidated homes. I was around 10. So I haven't thought about this book in thirty odd years.
In preparation for this trip, I called my dad and Caryn and asked about their trip, anything they could recommend Derek and I do, that sort of thing. My dad was like, oh I have these two great books, let me send them to you! One of them is like, a picture book of some of the sights at Yellowstone, and another is called Spooky Yellowstone, it's full of ghost stories.
Sure, that sounds fun to me. I love ghost stories. Though these days, I am more fond of finding out the truth of like...travel ghost stories. Headless bride, you say? Murdered in the room, you say? Let's just look that up. I verify, I debunk, and all the while I'm still kind of in on the fun of it all. There is nothing wrong with a little spooky vibe, and I cannot stress enough that I have dozens of stories that I attribute to ghosts because I cannot explain them any other way. I don't hate the game, I don't hate the player, I am just...I guess I'm just choosy about where my gullibility lands. And it always lands on the side of believing for myself. I'm selfish about my gullibility, too, I guess.
The books arrived today, and when I saw the cover of Spooky Yellowstone, I kinda rolled my eyes. I would NEVER tell my dad that, it was such a thoughtful gesture on his part and I love my dad. And also he didn't write the fucking book, he just passed it along.
No fully dressed Park Ranger skeletons??
While there really isn't anything on the cover that is inherently dumb or silly, I had a suspicion that this book was going to be dumb as fuck. Again, as a lover of all things haunting, strange, and local, I do not like betting against the home team. With extreme hesitation, I flipped through the first few pages and read the first chapter, titled "Mattie".
And I immediately thought of the book Phone Call From a Ghost. The author tells the story of how she was visitng Yellowstone and had lunch with a pleasant lady named Mattie who was absolutely tits deep in implied consumption, and upon the lady's exit from their shared meal at the Nez Perce Picnic Area, the author realizes MATTIE HAD BEEN A GHOST THE WHOLE TIME! Her old timey clothes? Ghost clothes. Her manners? Ghost manners. Her consumption? GHOST CONSUMPTION. The author describes her discovery of her lunch companion's ghostly nature by seeing the gravesite of Mattie Gilbert by the very same place she had been recently lunching. With Matties ghost. Let me tell you, when Matti'es ghost had a coughing fit and coughed up blood, then ever so daintily wiped it away with a little lace handkerchief, I laughed out loud. Ghost manners indeed.
There IS a real gravesite there. The person buried there was called Mattie, she had been a living, breathing person at one point. I looked her up. But I cannot find any instances of reported hauntings at this location. I guess gosts just don't want to eat lunch with travlers nowadays? Covid really ruined everything for us.
I was initially going to put the book down and not read a single letter more from it, but then I kicked myself for how much more silly shit I could be missing out on. I flipped to a random page in the book, and....my body was not ready.
It appears that the schtick of the book is "retelling" stories...in the first person...from different people...as if this is a collection of conversations from the various story tellers directly to you. The book, to its credit, does say "retold by SE Schlosser. I had incorrectly assumed this would be like, me sitting anybody down and saying, "A friend of mine told me about this time that XYZ thing happened", maybe taking a liberty here and there for drama or emphasis, but otherwise keeping a tight story structure of a historical nature. No no. These are all "event unfolds to the reader in real time" stories told by various people, filtered through this Schlosser person. Actually, when I read Mattie and understood the way the narrative was operating, I kind of thought the book was going to be written as if every single ghostly interaction happened to SE Schlosser and I was like, "who the fuck buys that one person meets up with this many ghosts?" But flipping through the book and landing on The Sentinel corrected that for me.
The Sentinel is so fucking racist that I didn't know how to react except to fucking read it with my mouth agape, tiny little spits of incredulous laughter popping out every few seconds (and not a dainty lace kerchief in sight to wipe my mouth with!). The Sentinel is absurd. Would you like a taste? Excellent.
"I don't know why I let my friend Johnny talk me into taking an all-day Yellowstone Tour. I hadn't intended to visit Yellowstone at all on this trip. But Johnny, who is Crow on his mother's side, told me he had "important business" in Yellowstone this weekend and that I should come along. And who was I to argue with a medicine man?"
That is the introductory paragraph to this story. I guess we're not tired of the MYSTICAL NATIVE trope, SE Schlosser. Was this the way you CHOSE to retell the story? Good fucking call. Anyway, apparently Johnny is a medicine man. In the same way every white woman has a tribal princess in her family tree, I'm sure. If all indigenous men are medicine men and all indigenous women are princesses, who is left doing all of the indigenous banality of life? I don't understand the social order. Maybe SE Schlosser can explain.
The story goes on, with Johnny never ever EVER using a single fucking contraction any time they are depictued speaking, despite everyone else using contractions.
""But why arrange a tour?" Why don't we just drive down in your truck?" I asked, confused by his desire to play tourist. "It is important," Johnny said somberly, his eyes fixed on two ravens perched on the fence."
The ol' medicine man just communing with animals, using short sentences. I hear the pan flute playing in the distance, somewhere.
""What's with all the ravens?" I asked Johnny. My friend shrugged, a sure sign he was keeping something to himself. "You know what they say about ravens," he evaded my question, stepping on to the waiting tour bus. "No I don't know what they say about ravens, " I retorted, swinging myself in behind. "Shape-shifter, " he murmered without turning his head. "Raven teaches people how to understand the language of animals and helps them as they move within different dimensional realms and different states of consciousness. A powerful totem.""
What fucking episode of Walker, Texas Ranger have I fucking stepped into? This shit is patently racist and absurd. Johnny might as well be saying, "Him Make-um big smoke signal at pow wow. You enjoy crow teachings in teepee". Culturally in touch and so on it, SE Schlosser.
The crux of this craaaaaaaazy tale? A bear tells the narrator that it is a sentinel and guards Dunraven Pass. Fucking stupid. So fucking stupid. So obscene. And the kicker is that the narrator just assumes Johnny brought him to Yellowstone in that spirit guide kinda way that only tropey natives can.
"I glanced from the raven to my dark eyed, mysterious friend. "Let us go, David. I am hungry," said the medicine man."
SAID THE MEDICINE MAN.
BRO.
I'm going to fucking crash out, this is so fucking offensively silly. Text copyright TWENTY THIRTEEN. Come the fuck on.
I do not think I'll be reading any more of these stories. I'm going to send this back to my dad.
I am, however, going to read a few stories from Phone Call From a Ghost. Right now. I found it on archives.org, give it a try if you'd like.
(I am not going to give a page by page description of Phone Call From a Ghost, but I read about fifteen pages and as hysterical as it is, it's also written in a more journalistic and authoritative tone. If I had to choose truth tellers, Daniel Cohen gets my vote, and SE Schlosser can eat bugs somewhere else. For whatever it's worth, the first chapter of Phone Call From a Ghost IS hilarious. Not intentionally, but it is well worth a look.)
I am neck deep in planning our National PArks trip, and I know it's going to get a bit more intense as we get closer. I don't want to miss anything, but I was zooming into the map last night and I'm not sure how the fuck we're supposed to feel like we've seen even a tiny little bit of enough of Yellowstone. Evey INCH is lousy with new things to see. This is going to be an intense full two days to plan. Last night, I started compiling a list...just for Yellowstone. I am going to have to do this for Badlands and Grand Tetons, too, though with Grand Tetons (and Rocky Mountain National Park) I am pretty locked in to what I want us to do in those places.
This list is just going to get more intense.
I am so excited for this trip, but I am sper overwhelmed by the choices it means making.
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