We have maybe two hours of daylight left, which gives us an hour or so to complete the first days tasks. Skirting around the buffalo, then hiking south along the west rim of the valley and over the rolling west hills and to our rented car out along the highway will take an hour or more, the last mile-long leg of which is a flat, well-traveled footpath we could move along by flashlight.
There are, of course, more experiments deployed in the hot spring we’ll tackle over the course of the next few days. Our final piece of work on this day, though, is to reel in what I call the Bazooka: a long glass tube some six inches in diameter, twelve in length, that has a little red cylindrical float attached to it and is suspended out in the middle of the hot spring. A thirty-foot segment of polypropylene rope, anchored to opposite sides of the hot spring, holds the Bazooka in place over the vent, where heated water and gas bubble up from the bottom. Evelyn and some of her students deployed this experiment last September, and it has been bobbing around out there a full year. The Bazooka is stuffed full of a fine-weave glass wool that looks from a distance like pinkish-white cotton batten. The ends of the Bazooka are open, and heated spring water is free to flow through it. Evelyn tells me that the pinkish color, which she’s very pleased to see, is caused by the hyperthermophiles that have colonized the glass wool.
“We’re lucky it’s still here,” Evelyn says, reaching for something inside her backpack. “There’s someone going around pulling up people’s experiments. They think we shouldn’t work in the park.” She goes to her knees and digs deeper into her pack.
“Why do they think that?”
“There are bio-tech researchers out here now, industrial people, and they’re looking at all kinds of things. Mostly bacterial enzymes that break down oils, industrial waste––that kind of thing. And there are issues that have to do with damage to the park and how the park isn’t getting its fair share of the profits, which are looking to be enormous.”
“I never knew that.”
“Yeah.” She stands now, a quart-size Baggie of trail mix in one hand. “It’s something new. No one knows who’s pulling up experiments, though. Here”––she holds the trail mix out at me, the Baggie rippling in the wind––”you should have some. Jesus, it’s cold. You look cold.”
I take a handful of trail mix and start looking for the peppery-hot Oriental quarter-moons I like. “I’m cold as hell right now, to tell you the truth.”
“We’ll be on our way soon. Hey,” she says, reaching into the Baggie herself, “you know what I was thinking?”
“What’s that?”
“After we’re through here, I mean at the end of the week, we could drive up to Bozeman and stay at the Best Western. They’ve got a pool there.”
“Sounds okay. Maybe we could warm up a little.”
“That’s what I was thinking. And maybe we could get some wine and some things to have in the room, too. Make a night of it and then––”
“Sounds great,” I say and remember, as if a wrinkle in time has occurred out here in the middle of Sentinel Meadows, Evelyn and I checking into a hotel just off Wabash in Chicago where the Kronos Quartet was at Roosevelt University. They were to perform composer Steve Reich’s ground-breaking string quartet and tape piece, Different Trains, which has to do with Reich’s family separating and having to flee Europe during World War II. Evelyn and I hadn’t known each other long, maybe only a few weeks, prior to our meeting up in Chicago for the concert. Evelyn was still living with her parents and taking some college classes at a small school outside of Milwaukee. She was eighteen, and I was twenty-two. This would have been in the fall of 1991.
For some reason I could never understand, Evelyn was the only girlfriend I had who liked the music I liked. The only one. Most couldn’t understand it, couldn’t hear what it was. It confused them because, like a lot of people then, their ears couldn’t reach beyond the popular music of the time. It didn’t help, of course, that I was steeped by then in the New Complexity movement out of Europe, which was ushered in by the Richard Barretts and Brian Ferneyhoughs of the world who were turning post-modernist classical music on its head.
In a cab on our way to Roosevelt University’s concert hall that night in Chicago, Evelyn told me that she thought Different Trains was like the Big Bang, everything flying apart all at once. I was, of course, surprised and delighted to hear that. Her description was so exactly right I was a little taken aback. In fact, we’ve both followed Steve Reich’s career over the years—I’ve reviewed close to a dozen performances of his works for The Examiner––which was always about change. He is one of those who never stands still in terms of the music or the way it’s approached. His affinity for the new––new sounds, new rhythms, new directions––is what has made him the legend he’s become.
“Hey!” Evelyn says suddenly, and I realize that I’ve lost the thread of any conversation we were having.
“What?”
“‘What?'” she says, looking at me as if my face has rearranged itself and she has no idea who I am. “Jesus, I’m trying to tell you something.” She brushes some wind-blown strands of hair and a piece of wet trail mix from her mouth, her eyes narrowed now, shadowed. “What’s the matter with you anyway? It’s like you’re not even here, for Christ’s sake. You’re turning morbid on me.”
“I’m here. I’m here.”
“Well, what do you think? Do you want to do something like that? Up in Bozeman, I mean?”
“Sure,” I say, a sketchy-dark recollection of a naked, narrower-waisted Evelyn at the window of that Chicago hotel room, looking out over a blackened Lake Michigan, makes itself known but then fades to black.