Jackson Hole Summer Journey

We left Maryland last Saturday for Jackson Hole, Wyoming. It has been a year and a half since I went on a family vacation with my father and my older brothers. The last vacation we had together was a Christmas cruise to the Caribbean with both my parents and our children.  My mother died two months later after a fall in the hospital.  For the rest of the year, we could not think of taking a vacation mostly because of our grieving for her.  This year, my father turned ninety and I had the feeling that my mother would have told us that it is time to go on. She would have urged us to live the moment.  We decided to celebrate my father being ninety and my nephew Jeremy’s high school graduation by taking a family vacation to Jackson Hole, Wyoming.

 We arrived at Jackson Hole’s Spring Creek Ranch Resort as the full moon was rising above the almost lavender sky and the Grand Teton Mountains. This weekend, the moon was supposed to be the biggest of the year.  The bright moon was glancing at us above the shadow of the majestic mountains. I think my father was shocked to see how incredibly beautiful the Grand Tetons were, even in the night time.

 I woke up Sunday morning to the stunning view of the mountains from the all glass floor to ceiling windows in our bedroom and the living room. Even though David and I had been to Switzerland, Australia, Patagonia of Argentina, Southern China, and even Tanzania with Mt. Kilimanjaro, the sight of Grand Tetons was just breathtaking! “Majestic” is the true word to describe this mountain range.

 For several days, we drove through the Grand Tetons and Yellowstone National Parks and were in awe at one stop after another.  My ninety year-old father managed to walk through almost every site we stopped at.  He marveled at Jenny and Jackson lakes, and asked to have his picture taken multiple times along the mountain range. He was fascinated with the Bison leisurely eating the grass, and begged me not to cross the street to take their picture.  It was amusing watching a parade of people including my dad standing a few feet from an elk who ignored them while having his lunch in the field. 

 I can’t help but show you the picture of my dad and his grandchildren in front of the “Continental Divide”. My brother was explaining in Vietnamese to him what the “Continental Divide” means, but I don’t know if he even understood or cared about the meaning of this divide.  He just knew it was something special since everyone seemed to stop and take pictures of it, so he was beaming as he stood next to his grandchildren for the picture.

 The first time I heard of Old Faithful Geyser, I was an eleven year-old student in an English class in Vietnam.  I had a hard time understanding all the words in the short story in the  book “English for Today” describing the geyser and its activity.   This week, as I explained how this geyser was formed, my father’s eyes were opened wide, probably the same way my eyes reacted to the passage describing the geyser when I was younger!

 As I was working on this blog, I was interrupted by the children’s screams in the living room where they spotted thirteen elks leisurely roaming behind the house.  On our walking path every day, we saw marmots, bison and different birds.  My brother missed a grizzly bear in the park today by just thirty minutes!  Nature is just beyond one’s doorstep here.

 As I watched my father gingerly stepping into the boat today for a scenic and educational tour of Jenny Lake, I realized how important it is for us to be physically strong to enjoy the marvelous world around us.  On this trip, unlike many people who were younger but  heavier than him, my father didn’t even need a walking stick.

 My father has played tennis since he was 17 year old. He told us how, in a poor village, he and his Vietnamese friends who did not have any racquet, would wrap their hands with towels and hit the old tennis balls left by the foreigners. They also had to walk or run everywhere, unlike us rich Americans who learn to drive to the supermarket just a few blocks away as soon as we turn sixteen.  Most of people I know prefer to take an elevator instead of climbing sometimes even a single flight of stairs to their office.  I know it is easier to wait for the elevator up or down, but then we deny our leg muscles the chance to stay strong and firm so that we can use them in our later years.  Also, unfortunately, all the beautiful places around the world and in this area of the Grand Tetons and the Yellowstone geysers, walking is a big part of  sight seeing.

 Jackson Hole, as many of you have heard, can be a very exclusive area for many people in our “upper” society.  I heard it is among President Clinton’s favorite get aways. I can see from this rented house and all those in this Spring Creek Resort that only the very wealthy families can afford to own vacation properties that cost millions of dollars to build, that the backdrop of these incredibly beautiful mountains can be seen from every window of the house. But, as I travelled to the parks and the town of Jackson, I realized even the “normal” or average people can also enjoy this scenic area.

 There are many camping sites and modest lodgings all over the Jackson Hole area. The national parks’ admission fee is just $25 for a week and one pass is good for all parks in the area including Yellowstone National Park. The grocery stores here, unlike in Vail, Colorado, are as big and not more expensive than in our Washington/Maryland suburb areas. The locals here are superbly nice, relaxed and welcoming to the tourists like us.  There are so many Europeans roaming around this area and I bet they would find it so cheap to travel here. In Europe, there are very few places where one can spend less than $20 a day for food. To climb a few steps to the top of L’arc de Triomphe to see the streets of Paris below cost David and me about $!5 each.  For $25, on the other hand, the Europeans can roam around two enormous national parks with more than a thousand miles of beautiful trails for a week!  

 I am so glad that we decided this year to travel to the West to witness such enormous beauty.  For years, our vacations were to travel all over the world and I now understand why one of my patients once asked why I would not consider traveling around our beautiful country to see different sights. Sandy and his cousins have been able to forget their gadgets and are eager to set out for another adventure everyday. The roads here are wide open and almost empty. One morning, on the way to Jenny Lake, we stopped at one of the scenic areas along the Tetons and the children hopped out and took a 45 minutes hike up one of the smaller mountains. They were ecstatic when they came back to the car, and my niece gave me a small bouquet of wild flowers. They begged for another hike the following morning.

 Every evening when we drove back to our rented home, we would see herds of bison crossing the streets, jumping the wooden fences along the roads.  About a few feet from these herds of bison were “herds” of tourists with iPhones, iPads, cameras and videos following the bison. It was quite entertaining for us to see a line of Japanese tourists standing on a hill aiming at a giant bison grazing the grass in front of them. These wild animals seemed to get used to the paparazzi around them.

 On the plane to Wyoming, I was reading the Washington Post and noticed an obituary of a handsome 14 year old boy named Bennett, who was killed in an accident several hours after he graduated from middle school. He, together with a few friends, climbed the wall of his school, not knowing that there was an electric wire submerged in the rain water and was still connected to the wall. One of his friend got an electric shock and fell off the wall. Bennett, when trying to help his fallen friend, got himself entangled with the wires and was electrocuted. He died in front of his friends.

 in the obituary column written by his family, Bennett was described as athletic, intelligent, kind and adventuresome.  He handed his parents his straight A record several hours before he died.  I loved the way he was known to his family and friends:

 “…He did not limit himself into a clique of like-minded, but befriended a broad range of fellow students, from bookworms to jocks…

He was a doer, and always seemed to have plans for this or that. The photos affixed to the family refrigerator show his adventuresome spirit…He loved life.”

 Don’t we all like for our children to be known this way? After all, don’t we all want to be remembered this way, like Bennett?

 This week, all the boys who are with us probably act like Bennett when he was still here, running wild in the meadows, hiking the mountains not on the regular well marked trails, but through the Sage bushes and dense roots of the dead barks on the ground. They were fascinated not by the brilliant colors of the wild flowers in the meadows, but by the thousand of dead trees from a forest fire in Yellowstone National Park , sparked by lightning. Boys will be boys!

 I was nagging at them at first, but as I watched them play and heard their laughters, I realized how their adventuresome spirits will forever make them remember this summer.      They were mesmerized by the images of the majestic Grand Tetons against the blue sky, the wandering one thousand mile Snake River, and the sound of Old Faithful geyser as it emerges from the ground, the sound of the summer. 

 I am glad Sandy and his cousins have their good days of summer, unlike Bennett who, as his family stated “ was looking forward to turning 15 on July 8, the beginning of another beloved summer…” 

 We all should enjoy our beloved summers, for all the summers left in our lives!

“We were, fair queen,

Two lads, that thought there was no more behind

 But such a day tomorrow as today,

 And to be boy eternal.”

         The Winter’s Tale — Shakespeare