The Grandmother on the Old Faithful Bench

I wrote back: Grown-up stuff, sweetheart. Grandma Sandy needs a trip more than I do right now. You be extra nice to her. Have the best time.

She wrote back one word. Okay. Then, a minute later: It’s not fair though. I didn’t answer that one. I didn’t trust myself to.

I left Thursday at six in the morning, with the sky just going gray over the grain elevator. Lowell stood in the driveway in his slippers and his Carhartt coat holding his coffee. He leaned in the window and kissed my cheek.

“Both hands on the wheel in the mountains,” he said. “And if anything feels wrong with the car, you pull over and call me, even if it’s a noise you only half heard.”

He tapped the roof twice, the way he used to tap a county truck when it was clear to back up, and I pulled out.

I went west on I-90 past the Corn Palace and crossed the Missouri at Chamberlain with the sun lighting the bluffs pink.

I called Lowell from Murdo, and from Wall over their five cent coffee. He answered on the first ring both times.

I pulled into Gillette about three, Mountain time. The motel sat by the interstate with coal trucks going by all night. Before bed I called Lowell. “Three hundred ninety-one miles,” I said. “Your envelope was off by one.”

“I’ll take it,” he said. “Proud of you, Joanie.”

He has said that to me maybe four times in forty-nine years. I lay in the dark with the coal trucks going by and held onto it.

Friday I got gas in Sheridan, called Lowell, and turned onto Highway 14 up into the Bighorns. I had never driven real mountains by myself. The road climbs in switchbacks, and every so often the whole world drops away beside the car.

I kept both hands on the wheel. Near Granite Pass there was old gray snow in the ditches.

I pulled over and looked back at the plains, gold and flat and forever, and thought, I came from way out there, by myself, in a Buick.

Going down through Shell Canyon I caught myself riding the brakes. I remembered Lowell and put it in a lower gear the way he showed me, and the car settled down, and so did I.

I had lunch in Cody, then drove fifty miles up the North Fork of the Shoshone between red rock walls to the east entrance of Yellowstone.

The ranger in the booth was a young woman with a braid. I asked for a lifetime senior pass. She said eighty dollars and asked for my license. She looked at my birthday. “Oh, it’s tomorrow,” she said. “Happy early birthday.”

“Thank you. I’m going to Old Faithful for it.”

“Eighty dollars for the rest of your life,” she said, handing me the card. “At seventy, that’s a pretty good bet either way.” I laughed so hard I had to wipe my eyes before I could pull through the gate.

Along Yellowstone Lake, a bison bull stood in the middle of the road like a man waiting for a bus. Nobody honked. He stood there twenty minutes by my dashboard clock, and I rolled the window down and listened to him breathe.

When I came to the turnoff for Old Faithful, I could see steam rising off to the left in the late sun, white against the dark trees.

I drove right past it. I had decided that somewhere in Wyoming. I’d waited sixty-one years.