“It’s late September, for cryin’ out loud,” I wonder in exasperation, “where have all these tourists come from, and where are they going?”
With a shock of recognition, I realize that they have all come from the work force, and are going into active retirements. Looking around at gray heads matching my own, it dawns on me that we’ve all gotten the same impulse at the same time.
Visiting with some of them as we aim our cameras at the buffalo herd, I hear the same scenario: Summer’s over, the kids are back at work, the grandkids are back in school, the weather’s still good – LET’S HIT THE ROAD!
Even as snow begins to dust the highest peaks, there are still NO VACANCY signs in hotels and campgrounds ringing America’s first national park. Restaurants still warn there’ll be a two-hour wait for dinner without a prior reservation. White water raft trips, horseback rides, chuck wagon cookouts and guided fishing expeditions are booked days ahead.
Economists monitoring Baby Boomer trends have long compared it to watching a mouse move through a boa constrictor. From 1946 to now, Boomers progressed through education into employment, marriage into parenthood, middle age into maturity. In the past decade, we’ve been scrambling to secure our retirement.
Now, like Yellowstone’s chipmunks popping out from behind rocks to lift their faces to the autumn sun, the first wave of Boomers isn’t just coming, it’s here – and there, and everywhere.
Not surprisingly, for a generation raised on Dinah Shore’s “SEE THE U.S.A, IN YOUR CHEVROLET,” we are hitting the road.
“Boomers hate flying,” said Kris Hauck, co-owner with her husband John of the El Western Motel in Ennis, MT., on the western side of Yellowstone.
“When they check in, they often mention how glad they are not to have to fly on business anymore, and how much fun they’re having seeing the country close-up, on their own schedule.”
In gas-guzzling SUVs, crew-cab pickups pulling fifth-wheelers, bus-sized RVs, luxury sedans, and a smattering of environmentally correct hybrids, my generation is on the move, seeing new sights and revisiting old haunts. As the oft-seen bumper sticker says, “WE ARE SPENDING OUR CHILDREN’S INHERITANCE.”
It is fitting that the most mobile generation in history is also the most peripatetic, planning the next trip before the current one ends.
“I didn’t really want to leave home right now, but my husband insisted,” a trim Ohio woman in new white tennis shoes, with a Brillo-pad hairdo to match, said on a recent rafting trip. “He came here with his first wife when his kids were young, and he wanted to see it again. He’s got the wanderlust so I guess I’ll tag along; we’re going to Florida next.”
All of the 11 others with me in the big rubber raft floating down the Snake River through Grand Teton National Park were retired and on extended Yellowstone country vacations. Although I am still working fulltime, my job gives me the freedom to roam from time to time, and my retired husband likes to travel with me.
Like the Ohio wife, my spouse was taking his first raft trip down Snake River and loving it.
“It’s wonderful to try new things,” said a fellow traveler from California. “I went up with a parachute behind a speedboat in Mexico last year and it was thrilling; can’t wait to do it again.”
What would our grandparents think about these Boomer grannies and poppas?
The young boatman steering us away from sandbars and pointing out moose lurking in the willows said his employers were turning away customers far later this autumn than ever before.
“It’s amazing,” he said. “The phone is still ringing off the hook.”
Friends in Appalachia, New England, the North Woods, Napa Valley, the Ozarks, and the Rockies report the same crush of touring Boomers in their back yards this first week of fall. The financial impact of my post-World War II generation on the travel industry is no longer being eagerly anticipated, it is being warmly welcomed.
As we savored the sight of yellow aspen and burnt umber birch trees silhouetted against a turquoise sky, two couples and a bachelor friend were all taking off on separate vacations in China. All are middle-class Boomers anxious to explore a larger world than the one that restricted them through four decades of diligent hard work and steady employment.
Americans’ pursuit of happiness is linked to a historical desire to see what’s over the next hill. Beginning with the Monroe Doctrine, continuing into Manifest Destiny, and culminating in today’s unprecedented global mobility, we are intrinsically an itchy-footed people.
My immigrant ancestors set out from Virginia following Daniel Boone through the Cumberland Gap, and settled in Missouri. From there, I have roamed four of the seven continents and landed – perhaps temporarily – in Hawaii, the farthest western state.
Yet iconic American symbols, such as Yellowstone, continue to lure me onto the open road, as it did my forbearers. My late father came into the country as a 14-year-old, camping here for three summer weeks with his mother and step-dad during the height of the Depression.
On that trip, a handsome teenager in riding jodhpurs and knee-high leather boots posed for a Kodak moment on a partially submerged tree stump. A generation later, I posed on that same stump for dad’s Polaroid during our family’s sole Yellowstone vacation.
This trip, I found the log again.
Yellowstone is an eternal, yet ever-changing.
In 1988, fire consumed nearly 800,000 acres, or 36 percent, of the park, and a half-million more acres surrounding its park’s boundary. As terrified wild animals fled the flames, smoke billowed so high it was visible from space.
As a journalist, I spent more than a month recording the phenomena. From that mid-August to late September, I witnessed the most amazing natural event I’ve seen in my life. Twice nearly trapped by flames, I sometimes wondered if the fires would ever go out.
But 19 years ago this week, autumn’s first snows finally began to fall; by Thanksgiving, the flames were gone and the blackened moonscape’s rejuvenation had begun.
Many of the tourists with whom we mingled this week remember Yellowstone from their childhood and from visits with their own children. As we filled up paved overlooks to watch for bear and exchanged greetings in crowded parking lots, we all agreed it was wonderful to see the millions of new trees sprouting from a still-charred but fertile landscape.
For all us aging Boomers in a big hurry to get everywhere, the vibrant green seedlings rising from Yellowstone’s ashes are comforting reminders that even if we won’t always be around to see it, the earth abideth forever.
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