You have to understand, I just don’t know how to convey this to you. I want to, I’m trying to, I’m giving it all I’ve got. But we thought we were going to see dull geysers, still stumbling around cranky and exhausted from freezing-cold-camping-induced sleep deprivation the night before, and somehow we stumbled into seeing this sort of thing.

Bleary. Getting sunburnt around the edges of our layers. Mike in a hoodie, as you see. But astonished at what we’d found.

As Lisel Mueller wrote, “I tell you it has taken me all my life… to learn that the line I called the horizon does not exist and sky and water, so long apart, are the same state of being… What can I say to convince you the Houses of Parliament dissolve night after night to become the fluid dream of the Thames?”

And then, then, let us go to one of the deep green places of the world.

I kept wondering why so many trees were down, everywhere we looked. I later learned part of the complex answer – huge fires, blowdowns, pine beetles, the way forests change over time. But not the whole story.

The best is yet to come.

We walked a long, curved road through icy winds and hot steam towards the Grand Prismatic Spring. It felt like the hot springs in Costa Rica, where I spent a day alternating between searing my skin under a pounding hot waterfall and standing out under a light, stinging shower of cold rain. Like alternating between a hot sauna and a cold pool. The walk itself was a luscious physical sensation. Even now, the thought of it fills me with a deep sense of peace and joy.

And as we approached the spring, it certainly didn’t hurt that when the winds blew the thick mists away, we saw this:

It looked like a watercolor painting in real life, too.

One of the most incredible places I have ever seen. And yes, those colors were real, right in front of my eyes.

Mists and mists and ORANGE! and mists and mists and GLORIOUS WATERS.

Layer upon layer.

Can you see the blue in the mists over the center of the spring? When you look at it from above, you can see that color in that section of the waters. But even from the side, the color rose up.

And then we left. The rest of the world seems drab in comparison, sometimes.

(That’s when it’s time to get the paints out, or turn on the torch!)

I took a ton of photos in Yellowstone. I really didn’t expect to – Mike kept telling me that Yellowstone is overrated, and anyways, geysers sounded boring. Frankly, geysers are boring! They look like fireworks without the colorful explosions up above, and without that grotesque and marvelous smell. (I have very fond memories of lying on my back in an amusement park as a teenager dangerously close to where the fireworks were being set off, thrilled by the gunpowder stink washing across my face. Probably sounds disgusting when I describe it now, but it was incredible at the time.)

But oh, somehow I wasn’t expecting the prismatic pools and the colorful layers of thermophilic bacteria and such..!

First, something of interest only to me! This tree was right next to our campsite. I spent my bleary morning trying to identify precisely what kind of pine it was. Those proto-cone looking bits were soft and squishy and released pollen when flicked – fascinating!

Old Faithful dissolving into the clouds:

I expected to see dinosaurs chasing me around these pools near Old Faithful:

Or maybe witches:

I kept falling in love with the layers of color and texture of the heat-loving microorganisms near those pools by Old Faithful.

Mike kept asking what I thought the texture would be like if we touched them.

Not soft or hard, I’d think…

In fact, my best guess is that they would feel a lot like mother of vinegar.

Some people eat mother of vinegar, you know.

Can you imagine? And doesn’t this stuff look like modern art?

I don’t even like most modern art, and I thought this was beyond beautiful. I expect to be inspired by it in my glass work for ages to come.

What, no penguins?

You can see why people have that idiotic urge to wade in this stuff.

Again, the color textures!

Like rust bubbling up out of the earth.

Pools of it.

The water looked deceptively cool and refreshing.

This geyser only erupts when it has examined its priors and executed a cost-benefit calculation and determined that it is rational to do so:

On our way through Washington, we followed the advice of Atlas Obscura and made our way to the Dry Falls, over by Coulee City.

We thought we might be in the right place when we found ourselves driving along this, but we weren’t sure:

But wait, no, that wasn’t right. A bit later, we found ourselves at the official viewpoint!

Whoa. What WAS this place? Oh, phew, there was an explanatory sign right there!

And an illustration of what it must’ve looked like, back in the day:

I just thought it was the prettiest place. I used my wide-angle lens, I tried my damndest, but there was just no way for me to capture the HUGENESS of what we saw and experienced there. It was the first of many moments on this trip when I just felt tiny and humbled and awed and grateful to have this one moment left where these things still exist and I still exist and we can come together before everything crumbles and changes again.

An enormous tub, dribbled nearly empty. Relatively speaking.

Where the earth meets the sky, and squeezes out the waters between.

Splashes here and there.

We stopped by Olympia to visit a few friends on our way up from Portland to Seattle. They had galloping chickens, and friendly goats.

Goat beard!

They were very playful.

And eager for treats!

Goat treats.

A little too eager, perhaps.

I find it hard to get bored of eager goat photos.

My friend Erica in Colorado just told me where the phrase “got my goat” comes from. Apparently racing horses often had (or have?) goat companions to keep them calm, so years ago competitors would steal other racer’s goats so that their horses would be too upset to race to the best of their ability. Thereby getting their goat!

They didn’t seem to mind everyone grabbing their horns to move their heads out of the way as needed. Sadly, I forgot to try to wrestle with one of them while I was there.

Are goats legal in NYC? I need to look into this! I want a pygmy goat in the back yard. I’d put it on a leash and take it for walkies in the dog run in the park. It would be awesome!

Thanks, guys! It was great to see you and your extended charming companions!

I haven’t done much non-bee blogging here yet, but my roadtrip this summer seems like a great place to start. I’m driving around out west with my friend Mike this month, visiting people and national parks and exploring a good double-handful of states I’ve never visited before.

Before road-tripping officially began, though, Dave and I flew into Kansas City on July 5th to visit his great-godmother Marge Webb and my cousin Jen and her family.

Marge took us on a tour of her family’s part of Missouri. We saw my favorite kind of hay – marshmallow-shaped bales of it, all in a row!

We saw Marge’s ancestral barn.

It actually gave me flashbacks to our trip to Thailand a few years ago!

Can’t you imagine Dave as a farm boy?

He headed back to Portland for work a few days ago, and I miss him terribly already.

Marge was a delightful host and a pleasure to visit. She’s truly one of the most charming, interesting, and kind people I’ve ever known.

Here she is, with her ancestral barn.

She showed us her family cemetery, in Miller community, Missouri, in the midst of her acres and acres of farmland. She’s picked out her plot already.

“If you decide on the Midwest as your burying place,” she told us, “there’s space here for you, too!”

We learned that all our families have ancestral post offices. Marge has a building that’s still being rented out by a post office now. My grandmother’s old house in Hungary was turned into a post office after she was forced to flee the country.

And apparently Dave’s family has some historical connection to Turner Station, with its mercantile shop and its post office.

Dave went into the store at Turner Station to inquire about his family history. I was skeptical, but of course it turned out that they had a big book of Turner genealogy lying around to show him. He couldn’t find his great-grandparents’ names in it, but he saw some name he recognized.

So, it’s still a bit hazy on whether there’s a real connection there or not. But still.

Does everyone have an ancestral post office? Is this a thing? Before there were taxes and death and stew, there were post offices in the muck.

On July 8th, we flew off to Portland, Oregon. More photos to follow next time I get some decent internet along the road!