A command performance

About fifty miles north of Teton—a drive we spent idling along behind a bird watcher hanging his head out the window at 35 miles per hour—we passed the gates of America's first national park. Yellowstone has two major attractions: the first is wildlife. It's easy to see bison and elk, and easier to see a bear, especially if you leave the remains of a good steak dinner on your picnic table and head off to bed. The second is what the park likes to call "geothermal features."

In layman's terms, Yellowstone has more active geysers than the rest of the world combined. There are some in a remote area of Russia, a few in New Zealand, and a handful in Iceland. But even if you travel the ten thousand miles needed to see all of these, you won't see as many steam plumes, bubbling mud pits, sulfurous pools, and boiling hot springs as you can in one hour in Yellowstone. It is a fascinating place to walk around.

Given the general interest of these geologic marvels, you have to wonder at the sheer scale of devotion lavished on Old Faithful. To see the famous geyser, you start at a stadium-sized parking lot filed with vans, RVs, and tour buses. Then you pass through a mammoth lodge with a lobby, a sitting room, a cafeteria, and a fireplace large enough to roast an entire elk—a waste too, given their protected status. There's also a gift store half the size of a Wal-Mart.

It's packed with a regular United Nations of tourists. There are old ladies speaking German, young ladies speaking German, young men speaking German, and even babies babbling out a few words of German.

Everyone is brimming with anticipation over Old Faithful. All around the lodge, you can see a chart with the words: "Next eruption predicted at 4:10." You eat, you drink, you trade opinions on the upcoming match between Dortmund and Schalke.

Finally, the scheduled appearance draws near. The entire mass of people in the lodge head towards the door. They go in a great flood of T-shirts, jeans, baseball caps, polyester shirts, golf shoes, and flip-flops. They have video cameras, tripods, zoom lenses, and disposable Flash cameras. There are even walkers and wheelchairs, and not a few people drunk enough to need both.

Five hundred strong, they crowd into two banks of benches spread into a broad arc around a large white mound with a little trickle of steam coming up from it. Friends are made, phone numbers exchanged, and bottles get passed around. Finally, the steam grows more active, and soon, splashes of white water are seen bubbling over the top of the mound.

Then, the wind shifts, and, lo, a cloud of sulfurous steam powers upward envelops the crowd. Blindly, we flail about with cameras.

"It's erupting," shouts one person.

"Der Geysir bricht aus!" shout the other 499.

The cloud makes it impossible to see and difficult to breathe. But we persevere. Every moment or so, we see a plume of water splash high in the air. For two long minutes, the cloud lingers over us, fogging over our cameras and permeating our clothes. Then, as suddenly as it began, it ends. Old Faithful has turned in another of his world-famous performances. We all get up and turn towards the exit.

Old Faithful, it seems, suffers from the same fate as David Hasselhoff. He's much more popular in Europe.