Cheating the Season Family Trip on the Yellowstone River
By Alan Kesselheim
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Our nomadic home
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I don’t know if it’s true, but it seems as if geese were calling all night. Flying overhead through the gauzy, low clouds, the light drizzle, urged south by the season, talking. Geese and coyotes. Every time I woke during the long dark hours, I heard them: geese keeping track of each other, and coyotes singing in the hills.I am first up, as usual. The family stirs when I leave the tent but settles back into the cozy nest on the gravel bar alongside the Yellowstone River, snug in the knowledge that by the time they rise, I’ll have the fire going, breakfast organized, and hot drinks ready to serve.
The sky is socked in, but the drizzle that pattered on the tent fly much of the night has stopped. The morning feels muted. The driftwood we stashed under a tarp is dry. I strike a fire, pull up a seat in the gravel next to it, start water to boil. More geese call from the clouds.
These solitary dawns on the river are moments I cherish. My space. I may do nothing but watch the flames and sip coffee, let my thoughts ramble, listen to the ebbing current slide past, see a great blue heron hunting the shallows, but it is mine, this crack in the day.
By the middle of October, most sensible Montanans have their canoes put up for the season. The rivers are down. Any day it will snow. Time to inventory ski gear, rake leaves, finish turning the garden for the year. School is in session, daylight is fleeing, everyone is mentally hunkering down for winter.
But each October, somewhere in the middle of the month, public school teachers take a couple of in-service training days and a four-day weekend presents itself. I don’t know what the teachers are up to, but for us, it’s the final window for a river journey. We invariably go to the Yellowstone.
Reedpoint to Laurel. Livingston to Columbus. Huntley to Forsyth. Pick a stretch, pack the gear, load the boats. This October we put in at a quiet bridge upstream of Hysham and will take out somewhere around Forsyth. We’ll hitchhike the shuttle. There are several possible take out spots at bridges or boat launches. These jaunts are flexible by definition. The point is not to get somewhere, but to be here.
The Yellowstone still has a reasonable flow in the fall; it provides piles of driftwood for fires, and no one else is on the water. Climate change aside, the season is a crapshoot. We’ve basked under warm blue skies that set off the flaming cottonwood leaves. We’ve had ice every morning in the water bucket. We’ve had snow squalls, rain, gusting winds.
Fall trips require a few bits of special gear and several short-day rituals. We bring high rubber boots and wool socks, for example. Typically, we’ll indulge three fires a day, at breakfast, lunch, and dinner, with hot drinks every time. Daylight is scarce, so we back off on our mileage expectations and bring a book to read out loud in the tent.
On summer trips we might forget headlamps altogether. In the fall, we all have headlamps, spare batteries, and a few candles that we set in plastic bags full of sand inside the tent. Some game invariably comes along—Yahtzee, cribbage, Scrabble, a deck of cards.
We binge on sleep. Sleep is an underrated luxury. There is nothing like the coziness of a down bag, drizzle ticking against the rain fly, and geese calling overhead through the long night. On the river in the fall, sleep is a little like hibernation, a long and deep descent infiltrated by the cadence of current.
This morning, when we push off from camp, our bellies warm with oatmeal, cocoa, coffee, the overcast persists enough that we snap fabric decks over the canoes, wear warm coats, keep rain gear close by. The canoes angle out to catch the main current. Camp slips away, an ephemeral attachment, the one and only time we will land in that spot. A place I’ll remember for geese and a muffled, solitary morning.
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The goal is not getting somewhere, but being here-Ruby, Sawyer, and Eli take 5 in the canoes.
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I’m paddling with Eli. We don’t talk. He establishes a cadence. I match it, watching his back and the fluid, thoughtless strokes that come from being on rivers since he could walk. The boat cleaves downriver, sleek and elegant as only a canoe can be.
I don’t know what it is, but there is something memorable about dreary days outside, and especially those spent on the river in canoes. You forget the sun-drenched times, the blue-sky days. Those all blur together, but a day of gray light, off and on rain, the clamp of cloud overhead like a lid on a pot—you remember that for decades. Maybe it’s the triumph of being out in the weather and coping just fine when everyone else shuts themselves in at home. Or the portentous feel of a dreary day, that brooding, edgy mood.
The last flame of season persists in the cottonwoods. The Yellowstone moves to the mantra of gravity, coasting around bends with our red canoes on its back.
At lunch we scrounge deep inside a driftwood pile to find enough dry wood to kindle a fire. We yank off rubber boots, warm our feet, drink tea from a thermos. Ruby finds an agate as convoluted as brain matter. It goes in the sack with other nuggets of petrified wood and pretty rocks for the tumbler in the garage. A bald eagle hunches on a dead branch upstream, watching us, distracted from his fishing vigil, but unwilling to move.
Stories crowd around thick along the river, evoked by the currents whispering past. Take this eagle, right here. What its life has been, where it will go when winter deepens, how patient it is, hour after hour, in the overhanging tree. Or the rock Ruby picked up—how it came to look that way, how long its journey downstream has taken, what cataclysmic event formed it.
And the human stories—steamboats and wood hawks, Chief Joseph running north against the season and against the currents of fate, Captain Clark and Sacagawea scooting downriver towards St. Louis, the native people who made their winter camps in these cottonwood bottoms, the settlers seduced west by the handbills of railroad entrepreneurs, and who, in spite of the hucksters, made the best of what they found, naming places like Froze-to-Death and Starved-to-Death creeks, Poverty Flats and Valentine Flats. Stories to pick up and examine like the rocks we bring home. Stories that shimmer in the subconscious and join the inner currents that make us the people we are.
It doesn’t take long to achieve “river time” in the fall. Perhaps it’s the lazy pace, or the long nights, or the dramatic separation from what everyone else is doing. The rhythm of water and sun and camp life takes over, and almost from the first paddle stroke “watch time” fades away.
Because we are utterly pulled in, the ends of these trips always sneak up on me. Suddenly we are looking for our final camp, upstream of Forsyth. We drift alongside the rail tracks, wait for a gravel bar on a bend away from the tracks and highway. We don’t find one until we are within a mile or two of the take-out bridge. The tent goes up on a flat, gravel platform next to a raft of flood-deposited driftwood. The sky is threatening, but we get through dinner without raingear. The kids concoct a game of teeter-totter balancing a stout stick across a cottonwood log. Before long there is an elaborate competitive element involved, whereby points are awarded for not being the first to fall off. Every campsite has its game, intense and engaging at the moment, but forgotten the next morning.
The rain starts just before dark. I take a look around to make sure everything is stowed and protected, then retreat to the tent. This storm isn’t a drizzle. If geese are calling I can’t hear them for the drumming overhead. I lie awake, worrying about leaks for a time, but the tent seems secure and dry. My children breathe deeply on either side of me, untroubled by the pelting rain. I drift off myself, rousing now and then through the long hours to the sounds of continued storm.
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Savoring the final river trip of the season.
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At dawn the clouds lift. Patches of pale blue sky break through. The ground steams. Reluctantly, we load the boats a final time, let the river bear us along to the bridge. It is still early. The kids and I spread out wet gear while my wife Marypat scrambles up to the county highway to hitch a ride. Ruby, Sawyer and Eli start up a game rolling rocks down the boat ramp. Autumn sun flickers in and out between clouds. The day is warm and chilly by turns.
I feel the embrace of the river start to loosen, the pull of civilized life take hold, like being pulled through a portal between dimensions. And the familiar tang of mourning that comes over me, every time, even after all the years full of trips.
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