From where I live in Montana, Yellowstone National Park is my backyard. Equipped with my annual pass, I usually go into the park at least once a month. I hike, watch the animals, and seek out spaces that are so silent, my pulse sounds like a drum in my ears.
The park is beautiful with its lodgepole pines, grunting bison, wide grasslands, and swift rivers. It is also strange—full of spitting mud pots, mineralized hillsides, unexpected tremors, and unpredictable spouts of hot water. The park offers consolation by offering reminders of the strength of the earth and the almost everlasting nature of season cycles and life and death.
Alongside that comfort, the park also warns about the risks and dangers of the present. The destruction of previous fire seasons is, like other effects of a changing climate, a reminder that even unintended harm can take generations to heal, if healing is even possible. There is no spot so peaceful in the park that it is possible to forget this lesson.
