So to understand my appreciation for Mike Bezemek’s nonfiction book Mysteries of the National Parks (2025), you need to realize I’m a sucker for so-bad-it’s-good B-movies and books that don’t quite fit any category but are a joy to read. One that comes to mind is Yasunari Kawabata’s elegant short novel The Lake (1954). In Kawabata’s case, it’s a story about an extremely nerdy teacher guy who gets into trouble for romance with a student . . . if you can call it that. (It’s oblique and understated: They appear to have met secretly a few times, which caused a scandal.) But it’s one of my favorite novels. It violates many principles often taught in creative-writing classes: The main character is not likable. He’s kind of a mumbling, bumbling anti-hero. Nothing really happens. He visits a lake resort and attends an outdoor festival. That’s about it. (And nothing is resolved about his quasi-romance, if it is even that, with the student. She doesn’t even seem to particularly like him, either.)
Hardback of original American edition
Which is all to provide context for my praise of Mike Bezemek’s Mysteries of the National Parks (2025). First off, it’s a kooky book. Its subtitle is “35 Stories of Baffling Disappearances, Unexplained Phenomena, and More.” But it’s really more like, “Here are some kooky things I decided to write about that connect very loosely to some national park, somewhere.”
It’s not the parks that are mysterious
Consider Chapter 11, one of my favorites: “How Was Heaven’s Gate Named One of the Worst and Best Films of All Time?” What exactly does the infamous Michael Cimino bomb of 1980 end up as a National Park mystery? Well, apparently some of the movie scenes were shot in and near Glacier National Park. Or what about Chapter 1: “Did Kenneth Arnold Spot the First Flying Saucer?” That took place somewhat close to Mount Ranier in Washington State. I do take issue with the “Yellowstone” story, which is Chapter 10: “Is Murder Legal in the Zone of Death?” There’s no actual murder, and no actual death zone. Perhaps a better title/subject might be, “Why do tourists taunt the bison and get thrown in the air?” Or perhaps the historically accurate: “Why did the tourist parents pour honey on their baby’s face and hold it out the car window for the cute black bear to lick off?” Answer: So they could get an awesome photo.
I have to hand it to Mike Bezemek, whoever he is. (Full disclosure: I know nothing about the guy.) It’s not so much about the mysteries of national parks as more of a humorous glimpse into one man’s odd obsessions that somehow, often tangentially at best, relate to national parks. Seen from that angle, you nailed it, Bezemek! I’m reading the whole book. Even if some of the chapters are pretty sketchy, such as Chapter 16: “Who Left Behind the Forgotten Winchester?” Someone forgot their rifle, leaning against a tree. End of story.
So last weekend my wife and I drove to Utah to spend a week kayaking the San Juan River. It’s a beautiful, relatively easy float—typically a calm river with many rare Native American petroglyph sites. It rises in the San Juan mountains of southern Colorado, winds its way west/southwest until it crosses into Utah, south of Blanding, near the tiny town of Bluff. We stayed at a great, quirky hotel called the Recapture Lodge. But the El Nino we’re now experiencing seems to have thrown a monkey wrench in the weather gears. The San Juan usually flows at around 500 cfs (cubic feet per second). When we arrived on Saturday (for a Monday launch) it was at 8,000! The river was many feet higher than usual, filled with brown silt. By Sunday it was 8,300 cfs. The banks were flooded into willow trees. We were lost in the Great Utah Flood of 2026! It looked like this:
Flooded San Juan River bank near Bluff, Utah
Kayaking a flooded river is certainly not impossible but rather foolish. It was full of silt, mud, and debris—mainly tree branches and whatever loose stuff could be swept away from the banks. Like drowned cows floating down the river. (I did not see any but a guest at our hotel reported a sighting of one.) And if you’re ever in the area, I heartily recommend the Recapture Lodge. It has a great location for the popular outdoor sports of southern Utah: rafting, kayaking, rock climbing, and mountain biking. Good breakfast and great proprietor, Jim. I’ve stayed there several times, and have read an essay but the terrific writer Joy Williams in which she says she always stays there when passing through southern Utah.
Our room was on ground floor behind those stairs. Very cozy and Zen-like.
We planned five days on the river. (Our own self-guided trip, not a commercial thing.) Canceling the trip was disappointing of course but we’d be slip-sliding in the mud along the banks at every place we wanted to land, then scraping mud off our boats (and probably each other) after we did. So we bailed. Plus there was more rain on the way. Instead we did some awesome early-autumn hiking in the canyon lands of Utah. Here’s a gorgeous vista from the Butler Wash archaeological site. (It features cliff dwellings similar to the Cliff Palace at Mesa Verde National Park.)
Arch at Butler Wash archaeological site.
After hiking to sites in Utah we pivoted east to Mesa Verde National Park, one of my favorite places in the world. There’s a zen spiritual mystery to the mesa and the canyons. We stayed at the Far View Lodge, and had good views of the sunset.
View of Ute Mountain (center silhouette) near Cortez, Colorado, from Far View Lodge in Mesa Verde National Park
So I can’t post about the genius of Richard Yates fiction without recognizing that he is immortalized in a Seinfeld episode: “The Jacket,” Season 2, Episode 3. I stumbled upon this in a Wikipedia post no less. The story goes that Seinfeld co-creator and writer Larry David once dated Richard Yates’ daughter Monica and had a similar dinner experience as the one in “The Jacket,” in which infamous tough-guy actor Lawrence Tierney played Elaine Benes’ father.
Seinfeld stars look so young
Why was Richard Yates so grouchy? He was a terrific writer but his books did not sell. (It happens to the best of us.) There’s a figure quoted that none of his books sold more than 12,000 copies. And what’s worse, his novels were out of print late in his career! That’s adding insult to injury. While the two other writers I compare him to—J.D. Salinger and John Cheever—each had their bestsellers and popular acclaim, Yates languished in the publishing doldrums. I’d be pissed too. It makes Larry David seem a bit like a Forrest Gump character, the naif who stumbles his way through history.
So I’ve just finished reading my third Richard Yates novel—in this case, A Good School (1978), about a dying prep school in Connecticut, in the 1940s. It’s touching, raunchy, and slightly weird in its gritty depiction of an all-boys school during WWII. Cut to 2026: In this bizarro-world era in which we live most fiction/film concerns the fantastic, unlikely, or impossible. Witness the many stupid-hero movies and books featuring ghosts, demons, vampires, and wizards. To some extent, that’s fine. People like fantasy. I’m all for imagination. But at times it seems to seep into the culture at large. People believe in lies and liars and factual accuracy doesn’t seem to matter anymore. It’s a symptom of the death of Realism.
Hardcover book jacket
I’m sure there are some excellent realistic fiction writers out there in the world writing at this point in time, but generally no one seems to be paying much attention to them. For instance, a writer I greatly admire, George Saunders, has a new novel out: Vigil. Some of its main characters are angels. Funny angels, kind of. Slapstick, even. It’s satire/fantasy. But if we go back in time a few decades, we come upon a neglected writer who is a master of Realism, Richard Yates. He’s like J.D. Salinger who has grown a pair. Or the flip side of John Cheever. All three are among the finest writers of the post WWII era.
It’s all about time and place
Revolutionary Road (1961) is a good place to start, as it was Yates’ first novel and a Finalist for the National Book Award in 1962. For whatever reason, Yates was a writer greatly admired by other writers and critics, but who never achieved popular success and readership (join the club). Supposedly no book of his ever sold more than 12,000 copies—which is meager, for a major writer at least. His reputation was revived in the late 1990s and throughout the 21st century. As an example, in 2008 Revolutionary Road was made into movie starring Leo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet. That was actually my first taste of a Richard Yates story. It’s bleak. But both DiCaprio and Winslet do a great job and make it heartbreaking, and with an early-career performance by David Harbour as a smitten neighbor.
That image looks anachronistic for the 1950s-60s
My favorite so far is The Easter Parade (1976), which is a kind of novel that we don’t seem to produce anymore: Emily Grimes, the main character, stands for something, exemplifies a certain kind of person in a particular time and place. (Sure, many novels feature characters like that to some extent, but here Yates nails it.) So does the actual parade in the novel, a lost era, time gone by. Emily is a career-minded young woman, something of a sexual free-spirit, and all her hard work in Manhattan and love affairs dry up as she approaches middle-age, when she feels washed-up and spent.
Yates is considered a master of The Age of Anxiety. Perhaps he was never quite popular because he portrays life with a healthy dose of failure and disappointment. Consider the Tolstoyan tone to this opening to The Easter Parade: “Neither of the Grimes sisters would have a happy life, and looking back it always seemed that the trouble began with their parents’ divorce” (1).
I don’t know why he didn’t achieve popular acclaim. It’s the real world. I love it. It’s not like I’m some purist, above-it-all kind of writer. I’ve often imagined the fantastic in my fiction: In my story “My Wife, the Unicorn” I described a world in which the U.S. is in a low-level Civil War and people are transforming into animals. His wife morphs into a unicorn for comic effect. It echoes Carol Emshwiller’s great little novel, Carmen Dog (1990) or William Kotzwinkle’s Dr. Rat (1976). My recent story “Camp America” features an A.I.-assisted law enforcement division. So, sure, dream away. Imagine away. But sometimes we need a depiction of the real world that hits home, that makes us sit up and take notice. Richard Yates is a master at that. If you haven’t read him, you should.
[Note: This personal essay was originally published in the Superstition Review, Spring 2016 issue. It was a terrific online lit magazine published by Arizona State University. Unfortunately the Superstition Review is no longer with us, so I’m reclaiming the essay, a decade later, and giving it a new life here, by popular request.]
My daughter cohabits with approximately 427 stuffed animals. If this were like the early days of The Book of Genesis and the skies were to open and deluge us with forty days and forty nights of rain, we could repopulate the Earth with our own Noah’s ark of stuffies. Only they wouldn’t be alive, technically.
That’s actually a moot point. For my daughter, these animals are alive. She has an elaborate Invisible World that is populated with stuffed and make-believe beings, friends, and furniture. In this Invisible World, the animals rule. If a Great Flood were to come, she’d be ready, with her entire troupe. I can imagine her drawing up the plans for her animal boat, although she’d want to know exactly what a “cubit” is.
It would be called Lili’s Ark, in honor of its namesake. Names are important. My daughter knows this. She has named each and every one of her stuffies.
Our most recent adoptions include a kangaroo mother with her joey—Rosa Parks and Little Baby Washington. These were rescued from a gift shop at the Smithsonian Natural History Museum in Washington, D.C. We also adopted a Giant Squid (James Earl Faster) and a Honey Badger (Hamilton), who was my choice. One of her dragons (we have several) is Jo-Jo SillyBilly, who makes a strange gargling growl if you squeeze his paw.
I confess my favorite of all is a rather large penguin named Aquatica Mortimer. He’s the handsome fellow in the center of the photo below:
Aquatica Mortimer and Friends
He was adopted into the family at a SeaWorld amusement park in San Antonio, Texas. On the day we visited, as far as I could tell SeaWorld was merely a rather elaborate, land-locked, water-themed, gigantic gift shop. The killer whales—one of the main draws, like lions at a safari park—were on break. We couldn’t see them, but I imagined them in a back room, smoking cigarettes and doing tequila shots. Talking about which trainers they’d like to hold under the water just a little too long.
Lili loved it. Her idea of vacation is an endless stream of gift shops. As long as they are well stocked with stuffed animals. We have visited Yellowstone National Park many times in her eight years of existence (the first time before she was two). She has backpacked there several times, including more than once hiking six miles on her rather short, little-girl legs, doing a good job of keeping up with the grown-ups.
One of her most memorable moments: While we were making dinner around the campfire in the Imperial Geyser Basin, not far from the famous Firehole River, a large Buffalo (or American Bison, okay?) walked right through our camp. It was almost close enough to touch. We didn’t know what to do. We didn’t even see it coming until it was there, upon us. We looked into its eyes and froze. It kept walking.
After it was fifty paces from our camp, it lay on its back and squirmed, scratching its back, like dogs do. Lili was thrilled, and still talks about it to this day. She keeps trying to tell the story the right way, again and again, in various journal entries. Most of them involve some form of the sentence: “A buffalo walked through our camp!” She calls an exclamation point a “gusto mark,” and uses them liberally.
Our bison friend
All these gifts shops and stuffed-animal buying come with an emotional cost. Once, in Glacier National Park, at the Two Medicine Lodge (we loved the name) gift shop, Lili clamored for a little stuffed-animal Lynx, which I didn’t want to buy for her. We’d already bought her a number of stuffies on that trip and at the moment I thought it was one too many. She pouted and sulked. It wasn’t expensive—five or eight dollars, I believe—and I gave in. Then I became angry with her for not saying, “Thank you.” On the return to our camp, I pouted and sulked.
I still feel bad about that. Yes, I should not spoil her, in principle. I don’t want her to become another Veruca Salt, that pretty brat from Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory—who is, by the way, one of Lili’s favorite characters. But she’s not. She can pout and sulk and get over it within minutes. I can too. But I realize I shouldn’t let anger get the best of me, shouldn’t pout or sulk like an eight-year-old. It’s my role to be mature.
When I’m angry I feel like William Hurt in Altered States (1980)—that Eighties cult film, an adaptation of a Paddy Chayefsky novel (1978). In Altered States Hurt starts as an anthropology professor who messes around with sensory-deprivation tanks and does hallucinogenic drugs (a kind of handsome Carlos Castaneda, as it were), so much that he undergoes a kind of reverse evolution. Eventually he becomes an apelike creature, a Homo erectus perhaps, terrorizing the zoo and one comely graduate assistant in his bed (well, he doesn’t actually terrorize her). He just grunts. That’s what I feel like when I lose my cool, with its commiserate guilt/remorse.
The animals help when I reach this stage of devolution. I confess that I sometimes buy forgiveness with the purchase of stuffed animals. I know this is wrong. But still, I think, it’s not that wrong. If it’s a sin, it’s pretty minor. A venal one at best. I feel remorse for letting anger get the best of me, but seriously (as Lili is wont to say), remorse for buying her another stuffed animal? Not much.
It’s been a constant chore, teaching her to be polite, good manners and all. To say her please and thank yous. Friends and even strangers will remark to us how polite she is, and my wife and I are like, “You don’t know the half of it.” Discipline for us has been an on-going task, fraught with turmoil and guilt and general success. I wish I could say I’ve never raised my voice. I wish.
We don’t spank her, thank god. I can’t even imagine the guilt that would haunt me if I did. Once I asked married-with-children friends of ours if they ever spanked their children and the mother replied, rather haughtily, “We never hitour children.” Touché! And persuasive: Who wants to be the parent who proclaims, “When my child doesn’t do what I ask, I hit her!” So we don’t. Instead we reprimand. We nag. We repeat ourselves. A lot.
Lili is an only child. I don’t really like that term, but it’s accurate, I guess. There’s an implication of being spoiled (probably, in a way), but also of somehow pampered, unrealistic. What is realistic? There are lots of “only children” in the world now. Many if not most of Lili’s friends are also “only children.” Back in the day (say, Kansas during the Dust Bowl years, living in a sod house, covering the faces of the fifteen children with gauze masks to keep out the dust) this was a rarity, when maybe tuberculosis was a common cause of death.
But seeing as she doesn’t have other siblings to spend time with, she’s gravitated to the Animal World. She crawls around the floor daily, impersonating one animal after another. Yesterday she was a wolf pup. “They’re so cute!” she exclaimed. Variously she has assumed the personalities of honey badgers, duck-billed platypuses, and black-footed ferrets. She believes it is wrong to hunt or to kill animals in any way. (We are, after all, animals ourselves, as she likes to point out.) Perhaps she does take this to an extreme degree: She hides flyswatters, won’t even let me use ant powder. Given her druthers, she prefers animals alive, up close and personal.
As she pointed out during our recent trip, the Smithsonian’s Museum of Natural History is really a dead zoo. The Louvre of Lost Animals. That’s where we adopted Rosa Parks and Little Baby Washington, two fine members of our 672 stuffed animals (we’ve purchased some new ones since I started this paragraph).
Thankfully, most of our stuffed animal encounters do not involve reprimanding, feeling guilty, or forgiveness. Mostly they involved cuddling. And sometimes minor heroics. Quests, no less.
Like the time we drove ninety miles to rescue the lost Billy NannyGoat. We were on a road trip, where many of our mishaps occur—passing through Colorado Springs, en route to Wyoming. After visiting an AutoZone, we had a picnic lunch on the grassy knoll beside a busy avenue, under some trees. Is this crazy or what? A picnic lunch beside a busy avenue? Well, the timing was right: We’d already been driving over an hour to get there, and the avenue wasn’t that busy. The sky was blue, the air fresh. We enjoyed ourselves. Lili sat against a tree and at the outset of the picnic, Billy NannyGoat was in her lap. Life was sublime.
An hour later, approaching the outskirts of Denver, Lili burst into tears. What’s wrong? Billy NannyGoat! He’s gone. “I left him on the ground. He’s all alone! He doesn’t know anyone there!”
I’m driving: Interstate 25/speed limit 75. I’m doing 80 no doubt. It’s the Law West of Wherever: Always add five miles an hour to whatever the speed limit, and you’re cool. Lili is weeping inconsolably in the backseat, beside her aunt (my sister), who had given her the stuffy—that day. A brand-new stuffy, left on the roadside, for any thug to come along and steal. An exit appeared. At that speed, I have microseconds to react. “Are you sure he’s there?” I asked. Lili nodded. “I put him behind my back, to keep him warm. Right against the tree.”
Note the particularity—the specificity, if you will—of her memory. I try to teach my writing students this mantra: Be specific. Lili’s specific memory was convincing. I flicked the turn signal. “You’re not doing what I think you’re doing,” said my wife.
The atmosphere in the car was tense. Each of us locked in our own imaginary scenarios. What if we drove all the way back and no Billy NannyGoat? What if someone had stolen him? True, he was a handsome little goat. But kidnappers? Really?
Maybe she had not left him there at all. Maybe we would make it back to the AutoZone and no Billy NannyGoat. His disappearance would become a Mystery. Like Sasquatch or a Chupacabra.
Nobody said a word. Lili quit crying, but she didn’t smile. She sniffled a little, looked worried. “He’s all alone,” she whispered, more than once.
And he was. All alone.
By the time we neared the AutoZone (rhymes with all alone), I was steeling myself to move on, counsel Lili about what we lose in life, how it wasn’t her fault, and so on. It was an hour out of the way on a day of driving that was already close to five hundred miles distance even without this stuffed-animal-rescue detour, but oh well. Traffic was brisk. The AutoZone parking lot was mostly empty. And there, beneath the tree, in clear view out our windows, sat a small stuffed animal, Billy NannyGoat, waiting patiently for the family who had driven off without him. Lili smiled. “There he is. Just like I said.”
Billy NannyGoat, waiting patiently on the Avenue of Lost Stuffies
That was the first day of a two-week vacation to Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks—a trip in which almost everything seemed to go well. I like to think we were blessed by Billy’s rescue. That if we had not returned, we would have been cursed. Logically, perhaps, there’s no connection. But what is logic to do about a little girl with fat tears in the backseat, weeping for the goat she left behind?
So as Season 3 of Silo hurtles towards its finale mysteries are being revealed. I’ll try to avoid spoilers but anyone watching this season knows by now that A.I. is part of the equation. The emergence of no less than Tom Hanks’ son (Colin Hanks) as Per Stenson, the billionaire creator of the silos, illustrates how we’ve now reached the Ur-moment: Back in the misty past of, say, 2027-8 (near future, anyone?), the U.S. is at war with Iran and things are going badly. (Sound familiar?) Along comes the White Knight in the form of a billionaire dude who designs self-sufficient silos that will house a half-million people and save humankind from extinction.
Silo poster
Here’s where the A.I. (named Legacy) comes in: Legacy is apparently in charge of maintaining the silos and will do anything—including killing all the citizens of a silo—to preserve order. This is clever in its own way: Although assigned with preserving humankind the A.I. entity enforces a rigid order that ensures misery and, possibly, catastrophic destruction.
I’m glad to see the dangers of A.I. cropping up in pop fiction and film. I’ve used it myself, in such stories as my most recent, “Camp America” (available here). We need to be aware of these dangers. I’ve blogged about some A.I. books I’ve read. One of the most disturbing details about A.I.: The experts and originators of it admit they don’t exactly know how it works. That fuels imaginary scenarios as in the terrific film Backrooms. It’s not explicitly about A.I. but works on a metaphorical level. Back to Silo: And then of course there’s the Vitamin D+ drug that causes mass amnesia. But that’s another story.
So I’m a late convert to the Apple TV series Silo. There are so many post-apocalyptic movies/shows that they’re a bit overwhelming and, let’s face it, somewhat cliché. Yet the series is streaming Season 3 so I gave it a try. Now I’m hooked. Silo portrays a neo-Medieval world in which survivors of some yet-to-be identified apocalypse live in a gargantuan “silo” that has over a hundred levels, scavenging and recycling lost technologies and materials, ruled by a bureaucratic overlord known as Judicial. It has a great sense of mystery about the creation of the silo—or silos, plural, because apparently there are 51 of them, each housing some 10,000 people, although by start of Season 3 we know of only two of them, Silos 17 and 18.
Silo promo poster
Rebecca Ferguson (of Mission Impossible fame) stars as Juliette Nichols, an engineer of sorts, who is determined to reveal the lies of the Silo overlords. But one reason the series is so watchable is its atmosphere of stubborn decline. The Silo world has very little color. Almost all the visuals are of muted tones, grays and browns and hybrid earth colors. It recreates a Medieval world vibe. Everything seems a bit run-down and moth-eaten.
One thing to note about Medieval cultures/eras: They usually follow periods of progress and learning that culminate in some destructive war, usually a fight over territory: the Bronze Age collapse followed the warfare of the Trojan War era, and the Fall of the Roman Empire ushered in the European Medieval era. There’s often a religious element, a sense of blindly following some belief system. In the Middle Ages the Catholic church in Europe followed such a pattern, including devolving into corrupt forms of “worship” or religious behavior, such as the infamous “indulgences” of the Medieval Catholic church (which paved the way for the Reformation).
In Silo their “bible” is The Pact, supposedly written/created by the Founders, four centuries before the start of the series action. But in Season 3 there’s a new wrinkle: an A.I. Superintelligence that controls the silo and appears to be both protecting and threatening what’s left of mankind. It’s also become quite relevant/timely: While the plotlines involving the present-day Silo people are taking place roughly four centuries in the future, there’s now a plotline that appears to be set in roughly present-day contemporary times: In the series we are at war with Iran, as we are now—though the way TV series are made this was written and filmed much before the present war started. To make matters worse, Iran has detonated a “dirty bomb” in Washington D.C. We then retaliated and encountered strange technology or bio-warfare. This is probably the opening salvos in some WWIII imagined scenario that ends in nuclear destruction. Lord help us!
So I’m a sucker for Scandinavian horror films, having spent an idyllic month in Norway many years ago, falling in love with the fjords and the people. Although cult classics like Midsommer (2003) and The Ritual (2017) have come and gone yet bask in streaming glory, we now have a new entry into the genre: Nightborn, from Finland with love. It stars Rupert Grint of Harry Potter fame as Jon, the clueless (and fussy) British Dad, with Seidi Haarla (love the name) as Saga, his wife, soon a new mother. And last but not least, there’s a very hairy baby who is pretty much the center of attention and plot. He/it’s a charmer. I’ll just note that once he starts crying, you want him to stop. (“Please. Now I’m begging. Make that baby stop!”)
Movie poster
Nightborn begins with a drive into the Finnish countryside, down a narrow dirt road into a forest. In the car sits a happy couple, smiling and joking as they arrive at their new/old house, which was apparently inherited by Saga, as it’s the country house at which she would spend her childhood summers. These appear to have been quite some time ago. A Finnish fixer-upper, it’s a mishmash of rotten boards, cobwebs, and abandoned, mossy squalor. A tree grows from the floor of one room—Saga’s old playroom..
In this world, trees are quite important. And persistent. Jon cuts down the tree in the playroom and later it reappears, growing through a hole in the floor. One of their first acts in their new home is making love against a gnarly, venerable tree of some sort (looked vaguely oak), with Saga inviting Jon to “make me a mother.” And wouldn’t you know it, lickety-splitly a month later she’s pregnant, and before long the baby—um, er, “it”—is born.
Any couples curious about childcare should probably avoid this movie. Mom calls the baby “it.” She’s certain there’s something wrong with it. Dad and the doctors all seem rather blithe about the baby’s . . . peculiarities. These include a) it bites off the tip of its cousin’s finger; b) it smashes its grandfather in the head with a jar; and c) most importantly, it has rather bizarre feeding habits. For instance, it chews Saga’s nipples bloody when it tries to nurse. Not a fan of mother’s milk, instead it prefers bloody meat. While Saga recognizes “That boy ain’t right” Dad and the others insist just give him some time/it’s all perfectly normal. As if commanded to by the forest, Saga names the baby “Kuura,” which means “frost” or “hoarfrost” in Finnish. Cold iron burns like fire when it touches Kuura’s skin. (Perhaps because iron axes fell trees?)
By the end the audience agrees with Saga: Kuura is not perfectly normal. The final scene is deliciously over-the-top, both gruesome and funny. Although at times Saga struggles to accept her son, by the movie’s end she’s developed quite an outlandish coping mechanism. Essentially she gives in and becomes attuned to the forest world while Jon remains clueless. When they first arrive at the house he wonders about all the rusted vehicles and machinery that line the property. Later Saga discovers this is purposeful. Her grandmother is said to have explained it’s to keep the evil forest spirits at bay, a protective wall of rusted stuff. Urban-fussy Jon has it removed and the property “cleaned up,” with disastrous consequences.
Nightborn appears to be based in part on a Finnish folktale. As a writer who has used folktales in his contemporary fiction, I’ll note it’s harder than it looks. One of the tricks is making the folklore/supernatural elements seamlessly jibe with the contemporary, “realistic” elements of the story. For the most part, Nightborn succeeds: At times we the audience can question the seemingly supernatural elements of the story and wonder if they’re all just figments of Saga’s post-partum imagination. But by the end, the film crystallizes its mayhem. It’s not fuzzy. And not just “metaphorical.” Something dark and sinister lurks in the Finnish forests. Perhaps conceiving a child against the rough bark of an oak tree is just asking for trouble.
So I caught the new “fantasy-disaster” movie The End of Oak Street, the second one in a week. It echoes Netflix’s The Last House. Both feature cutesy nuclear families with well-behaved kids and put-upon parents. Both feature impossible scenarios involving some very unlikely natural or unnatural disasters happening to said “average” American family. Oak Street trumps Last House in star billing: It features Ewan McGregor and Anne Hathaway as the parents, an A-list cast if there ever was one. For my money Oak Street is quite a bit better, even if it’s high implausible, to say the least.
Movie poster
My thumbnail summation: It’s like JurassicPark meets Poltergeist. Set in a middle-class suburb circa 1982, it features a family that resembles the cast of Poltergeist, except there’s no youngster who gets spirited into the TV to hang out with the “TV people” who happen to be ghosts. JurassicPark because, well, unlikely as it may seem for 1982, there are dinosaurs. At times it seems a homage to the iconic suburban-set horror films of the 1980s like Poltergeist and Goonies, but once the dinos show up, it’s Action-Adventure time. Ewan McGregor plays the Dad well, being a bit down-on-his-luck and desperate, and Anne Hathaway plays his wife, a wannabe writer, who ends up playing the most important role in the drama. At some point one of the kids asks, “Is this the end of the world?” Answer is No. Not that complete. It’s just the end of Oak Street.
So for the third year in a row we traveled to Yellowstone near the summer’s end for a back-country trip: In 2024 we kayaked Yellowstone Lake and in 2025 Shoshone Lake. For 2026 we backpacked to Heart Lake. This year was extra special: our 25th wedding anniversary. As should be obvious, we love Yellowstone backpacking. Don’t believe all those media stories about how overcrowded it is. If you get into the backcountry you often find yourself alone. Oddly enough, all our Yellowstone adventures begin and end in the Grand Tetons, just to the south, in the Colter Bay cabins. The cabins have charm and glorious views of the mountains, exemplified by this sunset photo taken at the marina.
Grand Tetons from Colter Bay
Our destination for this five-day backpacking trip was Heart Lake, a few miles south of Yellowstone Lake. As per its name, it’s heart-shaped, kind of. It looks more like a heart from the mountain pass a few miles north of it, when you see it in the distance.
We were there in 2017, got snowed on in July, and loved it so much we tried to get back several times. One thing or another always foiled the trip. It almost happened again: We tried to switch our final night campsite several times and visited the backcountry office to speak with the rangers, to no avail. But on our last unsuccessful try another ranger gal showed up and both she and the ranger guy we’d been dealing with were all up in arms about the firesmoke from Utah. They warned of air-quality alerts, that you shouldn’t be “exercising” outside: I think carrying a 35-pound pack 10 miles counts as exercise. They kept fiddling around with forecasts on their fancy computer screen and trying to dissuade us. I wasn’t having it. I’m not dying to hike in choking smoke conditions but then again it wasn’t that bad and we had planned the trip for months. I wasn’t about to cancel it on a whim. (Now that all is said and done, that would have been a foolish decision.) Here’s what the lake looked like on the first day, soon after we passed over the saddle:
Heart Lake from main trail
Turns out the smoke wasn’t . . . horrible. It was bad enough. A few times I was coughing. Our mouths were really dry and parched on the trail and we had to keep sipping water. Which leads to the most memorable and difficult moment on the hike . . . .The last few miles of our 9.5-mile hike to the Beaver Creek campsite on Heart Lake were the hardest.
To reach the Beaver Creek site, which is on the East side of Heart Lake, you have to hike along the sandy/gravelly shore of Heart Lake the first half mile. It’s like walking or running on a beach with soft sand. Then when we reached the end of the lake shore the trail headed uphill on a series of ridges until curving around to the Beaver Creek site, situated nicely on a rise above the lake, with a great view. (I think the total elevation gain for the day was around 1,400 feet.) Here’s our view:
Heart Lake with Mt Sheridan
That’s Mt. Sheridan across the lake, at 10,308 feet the tallest mountain in the area. As you can see it’s clear early, haze comes later. We were there by 4:30 and immediately set about getting camp in order. We were out of water and I discovered my filter was clogged. Backup plan was a one-liter Katadyn BeFree squeeze filter and a JetBoil. Both worked okay but the boiled water was hot and the squeeze filter (hereafter known as the Squeezer) was hard to force the water through the filter. (It got better as time went on.)
Then strangers showed up: Around dusk I’m outside the tent putting everything in order for bear policy and in case of rain or wind. I hear voices. Our camp is a half-mile off the main trail so that’s odd. Suddenly a group of about six people, teenagers led by a thirtysomething tattoeed guy, walk into our camp, calming to be “exploring.” They seemed to want to camp there. It was the strangest encounter I’ve ever had in a national park: Usually people are respectful of the campsite protocol, the permits and policies. “In full disclosure” said the leader, implying he had not been honest with us to begin with, that they were looking for some place to camp. I advised them to head back down the trail, find a flat spot, and camp there. It was almost dark, the sensible thing to do. They did. The next morning we found their campsite about 50 yards away. But they had been quiet and did not disturb us, so all’s well that ends well. Still . . . it was weird.
Day 2 we hiked to the Heart River campsite, about 4.5 miles. Despite the warm temperatures and no rain while we were there, the wildflowers were gorgeous.
The Heart River is a mild, shallow river with its headwaters on the southeastern side of Heart Lake. It feeds into the Snake River a few miles southwest of the lake. We set up our kitchen in the trees beneath the bear pole and found it lovely and cozy, here:
“Kitchen”
One of the odd things at this site was the location and height of the bear poles. There were two: I used the lower pole, which was still quite high, but on which my bear-bag ropes reached, each of them being about 35 feet. But in the trees there was an older and even higher bear pole, maybe 5-10 feet higher it seemed. My rope wouldn’t have reached! Here’s a pic:
Bear poles
Heart River turned out to be my favorite campsite. The river was pretty and shallow, with good birding. Ospreys and bald eagles flew by. Mergansers and grebes were in the lake. Kingfishers kept swooping over the river, and bright red dragonflies buzzed the marshy banks. One of the best aspects of the site was the kitchen, beneath the bear pole. The water was right there. The area was flat, shaded, good for cooking and hanging out: We put our packs against the trees and then our seatpads on the ground to make comfy backwoods chaise lounges.
We tried hiking south along the Heart River trail. Then gave up: After coming upon the second river crossing in a span of minutes we decided not to bother. We’d already decided we didn’t want to hike all the way to the hot springs marked on the map because it would be another 6 mile hike and we’d already done 4.5 at least.
Throughout the hike and nights spent in our cozy tent we were listening for Great Gray Owls and never heard one. Or any other owl for that matter. E said she heard coyotes.
Day 3 was our Layover Day. We had aches and pains in knees and legs and wanted to rest and recuperate. But that didn’t stop us from having fun. After lunch we hiked northeast from camp and came upon the East Shore campsite (8J6). It’s a gorgeous site right off the lake shore. E found a knife.
I set up the MSR water filter and was happy to discover that it worked again. We had boiled water the night before and that morning but if we kept that up we might have run out of fuel for our JetBoil. It felt empty by the time we were finished using it Saturday morning but the scale says it still has 20%.
Keeping us supplied with purified water was a chore, as was charging our multiple electronic devices. I had bought a new (smaller) solar charger and it worked like a charm . . . as long as the sun was high in the sky. I charged my watch, E’s phone, the camera, the power bank, and the NightBuddy with it. But the sun keeps moving across the sky and it’s a bother to keep repositioning the charger and devices to make sure they keep getting power. I kept trying to get a good photo of the red dragonflies. Here’s my best:
Red Dragonfly
While Yellowstone is famous for being “overcrowded” we had the Heart River all to ourselves, went swimming. It felt great to be relaxing in the middle of a wilderness known for grizzly bears, bison, elk, and moose. The water was relatively warm for Yellowstone, which even during this hot, smoky period got down into the 30s in the morning. We had to bundle up with all our warm clothes to get out of the tent of a morning. But by afternoon the temps would be in the 80s and the sky would turn hazy from firesmoke, like the image below from the East Shore site.
Day 4 we hiked about six miles to the Witch Creek area when we noticed a trail splitting off the main trail and heading into the forest nearby. I did a quick recon hike and discovered we had struck gold.
At the end of the trail we found Witch Creek, in cool forest shadows.
Witch Creek
Day 5 began with an ankle injury: Before breakfast when I went to get our food cache and hopped off a log, sprained my ankle when I landed badly. It hurt but I walked it off, made breakfast and saddled up to hike out. At first I didn’t notice it much but by the time we reached the saddle that marks the divide between Heart Lake and the approach trail it was starting to get stiff and painful whenever I stopped, even for a few minutes. We kept hiking. We made it to the car before 2:30. No sooner had I dropped my pack and opened the car than the ankle went from achy to severely painful/can’t walk on it.
The funniest moment was at the Colter Bay cabin rental office: I could barely walk, even with the help of a trekking pole. I open the office door and a clerk (Allie) is all eager and polite there to help me, but it takes a few minutes for me to shuffle and hop on one leg over to the counter. She was patient. E got a bag full of ice. We made it to the cabin and I iced my ankle, settled down to rest. E was planning to order takeout but after icing the ankle for a while I said No, I didn’t want to stay in the room. Instead we went to the John Colter Ranch House, had margaritas and good burgers, and finished the day on a high note.
Now that’s the way you celebrate a 25th Anniversary.
