The Grandmother on the Old Faithful Bench

I could wait sixteen more hours and see it the first time on my birthday, sitting down, with a cup of coffee, the way I’d always pictured.

I got to West Yellowstone a little after five, ate a cheeseburger across the street from my motel, called Lowell, and went to bed at eight thirty like a farm girl.

They had left Mitchell at four that morning. I lay there and thought about them twenty-five miles away in Idaho, the kids fighting over the top bunk, and Sandy putting her suitcase down on the bed in the second bedroom. My bed.

I prayed for her. I want that said. I prayed the trip would do her good, that she’d sleep, that she’d laugh at something.

I prayed my son would find a way to be all right with himself. Then I prayed for me, that I’d behave myself in the morning.

I woke at five forty, before the alarm, the way I have since I was a girl doing chores. I lay there in the dark and said, “Happy birthday, Joan Peterson. You’re seventy.” It felt like sixty-nine with a sore neck.

I put on my good jeans and my blue windbreaker over a sweater. I filled my thermos at the motel coffee maker, and I scraped the frost off the Buick with my Hy-Vee card because I’d left the scraper at home, which Lowell would have had something to say about.

I drove in the west entrance and up along the Firehole River, with the sun coming up gold through the steam and elk standing in a meadow with their breath showing.

I got to the Old Faithful lot about eight fifteen. It was nearly empty, that early and that late in the season.

Inside the visitor center there was a sign by the windows with the next predicted eruption written in marker: 9:12 a.m., plus or minus ten minutes.

An older ranger with a gray mustache saw me reading it. “First time?” he asked.

“First time,” I said. “I’ve been waiting since 1965.”

He didn’t laugh. He nodded like that was a reasonable time to wait for something. “Front bench, right in the middle,” he said. “Best seat in the house, and you’re early enough to get it.”

I walked out to the boardwalk. The cone was closer than I’d pictured, a gray mound of crust with steam lifting off it soft and steady, like something asleep and breathing. The benches curved around it in a long half circle.

I sat on the front bench, right in the middle. The wood was cold through my jeans. The sky was that hard blue you only get up high, and the thermometer on my key chain said fifty-one degrees and climbing.

I poured a cup of coffee and held it in both hands and watched the steam come off the cone and off my cup, and I thought, well, this is it, Joanie. You made it.

Then my phone buzzed. It was Lowell. I put him on speaker.

“Happy birthday, Joanie. Are you there?”

“I’m on the bench. Front row. It’s supposed to go at twelve after.”

“Well, when it does, you tell that geyser I said hello.” He cleared his throat. Lowell does not make speeches. “And Joanie. I should have taken you there forty years ago, before the hips. I always figured there was time. I’m sorry I didn’t.”

He hung up before I could answer, which is also Lowell. I cried a little into my coffee, the quiet kind, where you just let it run and wipe it with your sleeve. A couple from Germany two benches down politely looked the other way.