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HERMAN SHOOK ME awake when the first hints of dawn shown in the upmost windows of the timbered lobby, whispering, “Up and at. Outside we must get before hotel people come around.”
After peering cautiously into the canyon of the lobby to make sure a different desk clerk had come on duty, we headed down, with Herman saying, “Leave to me. We must go out like kings.”
Or freeloaders to be arrested on sight, I thought to myself.
As we approached the obstacle of the front desk again, I tried to appear as prosperous as royalty who went around in Blackfoot moccasins, meanwhile hoping the clerk would be impressed by a matching suitcase woven out of willows.
Striding as if he genuinely did own the place, erect as the timber of the lobby and his nose in the air, Herman gave the clerk the barest of nods and a guttural “Guten morgen.”
“Ah, good morning to you, too. May I help—”
“Checked out, we already are,” Herman growled impatiently, throwing in some more gravelly German. “How you say, grabbing early bus.”
“Wait, your room number is—?”
Herman threw over his shoulder some rapid incomprehensible number in German and a farewell wave. “Auf Wiedersehen.”
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WITH THAT, we were outside in the fresh Yellowstone morning, fresh enough to make my teeth chatter.
“Lived through the night, hah, Donny?” I could see Herman’s breath as he made this pronouncement.
I simply looked the real question to him: Now what?
A whoosh growing louder and louder in the still air, Old Faithful percolating out of the mound again, spared him from answering that. “Notcheral wonders we are not short of, anyways,” he stuck with, gazing at the plumes of hot water shooting skyward.
Yeah, right. Stranded and broke in a natural wonderland was still stranded and broke. Stiff and sore and tired of Old Faithful butting in every time I pressed Herman for some way out of the hot water we were in, I was feeling out of sorts. Doubly so, actually. Because along with our predicament, something about Yellowstone itself kept tickling my mind, to put it in Herman’s terms. One of those itches in the head that a person can’t quite scratch. Some out-of-this-world fact from Believe It or Not? Something digested way too deep from a Condensed Book? But whatever the teaser was, it kept refusing to come out from behind the immediate matter of Herman and me being the next thing to hoboes and maybe even having crossed that line.
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AS IF to rub it in, the tourist world was comfortably coming to life, people moseying out onto the deck from breakfast, while my stomach was gnawing my backbone, and tour buses were pulling up in front of the Inn with baggage wranglers busily piling suitcases into luggage compartments. I watched the buses with envy, another gnawing sensation, longing for a Greyhound to take us somewhere, anywhere.
Herman read my mind. “Better look for a safe harbor, hah?”
“Right,” I said crankily, “let’s go see where we could go if we only could.”
Trying to appear like travelers actually able to buy tickets, we hefted our baggage over to the loading area, skirting a line of chattering tourists boarding to see mud volcanoes and other sights, as we made our way to the extensive bulletin board where in routes of red sheeted over with weatherproof plastic, THE FLEET WAY once again was promised.
“Guess what, Donny,” Herman began as we approached the map, waggling his fingers piano-player fashion to encourage mine, “time for you to—”
“Huh-Huh-Herman!” I gasped. Unable to get out the actual word. “Look!”
I pointed an unsteady finger, not at the map but toward the opposite end of the bulletin board.