Maw's Vacation: The Story of a Human Being in the YellowstoneHough, Emerson
General
Maw's Vacation: The Story of a Human Being in the Yellowstone
Hough, Emerson
American wit and humor; Camping; Tourists; Yellowstone National Park
"And they do the funniest things," nodded Maw. "I was saying I thought
this park wasn't practical, but some ways I believe it is. For instance,
they told me about how when they was making the new road from the Lake
Hotel over to the Canyon the engineer run the line in the winter time,
and it run right over on top a grave, where a man was buried. There was
a headstone there, but the snow was so deep the engineer didn't see it.
Come spring, the road crew graded the road right through, grave and all.
When the superintendent heard of that he come down and complained about
it.
"'Now,' says he, 'you've gone built that expensive road right over that
feller, and we've got to take him up and move him.' There was an Irish
foreman that had run the road crew, and he reasons thoughtful for a
while, and then he says to the superintendent, says he: 'Why can't we
just move the headstone and leave him where he's at?' So they done that,
and everybody is perfectly contented, his widow and all. What I don't
see is why don't the yellow cars stop there and point out that for a
point of interest? But they don't. I believe I'll speak to the
superintendent about that."
As to the latter personage mentioned by my friends, one must search far
to find a more long-suffering man. As a boy the superintendent was wild,
and during a moment of unrestraint he slew his Sabbath-school teacher
while yet a youth. The judge, in sentencing him, said that hanging would
not be severe enough, so he condemned him to a life as superintendent of
a national park--a sentence barely constitutional.
The park superintendent is a study in natural history. During the open
season on superintendents, some three months in duration, he does not
sleep at all. For one month after the first snowfall he digs a hole
beneath a rock, somewhere above timberline, and falls into a torpor,
using no food for thirty days. Then he goes to Washington to meet the
Director of Parks, after which he gets no more sleep until next fall. It
is this perpetual insomnia which gives a park superintendent his haunted
look. He knows he ought not to have killed his teacher, so he suffers in
silence.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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