Memoirs of a Worker

Buffalo at the Tank

Dedicated to my brother Gary who spends countless hours in Yellowstone with his family.

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Sometimes people can learn important life lessons from some of the animals they encounter in Yellowstone National Park and I would like to share two. The first is why you should not put your finger into a bear’s mouth, and the second is why you shouldn’t throw rocks at buffalo.

My first lesson came early one morning. My summer job just out of high school that year was as a stock boy at the Market Center grocery store in West Yellowstone, Montana (West Yellowstone is the west entrance to Yellowstone National Park). The first customer of the day was a man that had his right hand bandaged up and it wasn’t hard to notice his index finger was missing and replaced with gauze and white tape. The man said he had just come from the clinic and needed some pain medication.

“What happened to your finger?” I enquired.

It was obvious he was in pain by the way he held his hand up to his chest, just past his heart. The stub of the index finger was very noticeable.

“You’d never believe me,” the man answered.

“Oh come on, give me a try.”

“Ok, but it’s kind of embarrassing.” He looked around to make sure no one else could hear so I knew it must have been awkward for him. “We were driving through Yellowstone and we spotted a bear. We pulled off the road and watched it. The bear circled the car and my wife said, ‘Feed the bear.’ I looked at her and said, ‘We can’t feed the bear, it’s against the rules.’ She kept prodding me, so I finally picked up a doughnut, shoved my finger through the hole, opened the side vent window and stuck the doughnut out to the bear!”

In 1980-81 I worked in Yellowstone National Park building a new culinary water system for the Old Faithful area. The work consisted of constructing a small dam across the Firehole River, building a water treatment plant, a 1.6 million gallon concrete water storage tank, and 7 miles of mainline water pipe to all the service areas in and around Old Faithful.

Stumbling upon wildlife in Yellowstone National Park is a common occurrence, especially for those who work there on a daily basis. I learned my second very important life lesson while I worked on the water tank, and from a buffalo of all things!

The buffalo lesson happened like this: I finished my lunch down at the base camp and decided to go back to work at the tank before the rest of the crew got there. We had a problem with some of the concrete forms and I needed some time alone to figure out what to do.  

My pickup bounced along through the trees winding its way to the top of the hill where the tank was located.  I rounded the last bend and spied 2 massive bull buffalos at the entrance of the tank, right where I needed to work.

I drove right to the side to them and honked my horn. The huge beasts turned and looked at me with what seemed like contempt, and then nonchalantly walked three or four steps and stopped. “How brazen of them,” I thought.

(Sometimes I have been known to have a slightly distorted, unconventional idea. At times my thinking process seems to have been confused by other folks as irrational, or to put it in their terms, “Just plain nuts!” I prefer to think that one of my brainwaves got cross wired or shorted out for a moment that day, than the “Just plain nuts,” theory. Whatever the case, I had a thought, and in my defense, it made perfect sense at the time.)

I got out of the pickup and shouted at the buffalos, but they didn’t move. You’d a thought I was speaking in a foreign language to them. It was at that precise instant that I acted upon the thought in question. On the ground I spied a nice big rock about 3 inches in diameter and I smiled as I hefted it. The rock flew from my hand with lightning speed and hit the larger of the two buffalos, right on the ribs!

At the exact split second of impact I realized just how agile adult buffalos can be. I barely had time to dive into the bed of the pickup and roll out of the way before the buffalo slammed his body into the side of the pickup. I almost bounced out the other side at the moment of impact!

His massive head stretched inside the pickup bed, his mouth opened and he snorted and bellowed at me. In another instant this same buffalo was on the opposite side of the pickup, snorting and raking his ginormous head at me, trying to get me with his horns. I barely had time to roll out of his way to the other side! Even then, his head was only inches from me!

Up until that time I had never noticed that buffalos can open their mouths extremely wide, and they have (or at least this one had) really bad breath. You know that little thing that hangs down in the back of your throat? The buffalo was so close that I could have reached my hand in his mouth and given that thing a good hard yank! The thought came to me to do so . . . but due to the situation at hand, I resisted the urge.

Sometimes in life, situations arise where we do some quick soul searching and realize that what we thought was a good idea at the time was in fact not a good idea at all, but one that teetered on the verge of insanity, or perhaps even, “Just plain nuts.” This was one of those occasions.

Being mauled to death by an irate buffalo (that was intent on taking out his revenge on me) was not the way I wanted to leave this world. Come to think of it, there was no way, in particular, that I wanted to leave this world; but especially not by an enraged buffalo that wasn’t thinking rationally and wanted to stomp me into dirt! (After all, it was just a rock!)  

At the moment when it felt like the pickup was going to be pushed over and I would be crushed to death by both the pickup and the buffalo, was when I started making promises to the Lord.

Most rational people would make promises like, “I promise to never swear again,” or “I promise I’ll go to church every Sunday for the rest of my life,” or “I’ll be a better neighbor and donate to the poor,” or something along those lines.

I promised the Lord that I would never throw another rock at another buffalo as long as I lived if He would just make this one go away (It happened to be the only thought that came to me at the time), and I would try to not act on all my “questionable ideas.” I am happy to say that the Lord made the buffalo go away, and I have lived up to my promise . . . at least with buffalos!

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