The Epic Immensity of Yellowstone and Grand Teton

EAST BRUNSWICK, N.J.—I love the word "epic." I don't know about you, but the mere sound of that word suggests something on a grand scale. And in art, I have a tendency to immediately embrace works that dare to paint a visual/aural picture across a broad canvas, however sprawling or messy the end result may be. (But hey, who needs neat and tidy in art, right?)

But I honestly don't think I've ever quite gotten that same "epic" feeling in my own life experiences as I've done in three days of exploring both Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks.

Spend an extended amount of time in these areas, and you can practically feel yourself getting drunk on not only the park's multitudinous natural splendors, but the sheer overwhelming size of the park that contains all of these splendors.

You know that sense of spirituality I spoke about in this recent post? At certain precious moments, I found those out west at Yellowstone and Grand Teton. It didn't even matter that my mother was still as irritating as ever, and that she and my father almost drove me crazy with their bickering. In the face of such expansive and awe-inspiring views of nature, such personal matters seem utterly trivial.

As I came to discover during our three days of exploration, a mere point-and-shoot camera like my Canon PowerShot SD400 can't even come close to capturing the full breadth and majesty of the images I saw with my own eyes. My camera doesn't have a panoramic setting, either, which would have helped immensely.

But I sure as hell have tried, as this sample of photographs I've taken will hopefully attest:

Yellowstone National Park

Grand Teton National Park

What these digital photographs lack in width, I would like to think they make up for in height.

And on rare occasions, I felt so frustrated by the limits of mere still photography in capturing the grandeur of these sights that I resorted to using the video-capture component of my camera, taking some video, and waiting 'til I returned home last night to add some appropriate musical accompaniment.

To wit, then: a full view of the Teton Range, set to a selection from Herbert von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic's great 1981 recording of Richard Strauss's great and undervalued Eine Alpensinfonie (An Alpine Symphony), a piece which I mentioned in my previous post:



If any cinematic subject demanded the all-enveloping IMAX format, Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks are it; hell, maybe one could even go so far as to resurrect Abel Gance's three-screen Polyvision technique from Napoléon (1927)!

But you know what? For once, I say, forget the movies. Who needs 'em? Here, at Yellowstone and Grand Teton, are real-life epic spectacles worth witnessing and savoring.

A Quick One, While I'm Away—and Awake

PERRYSBURG, OHIO—I was trying to fall asleep in the RV tonight, and finding myself failing miserably at it for the first time during this vacation, until I remembered that I hadn't blogged in a few days and figured some of you readers may or may not be interested in what has been going on since my last post. So I am using my sudden attack of insomnia to do this little bit of blog housekeeping.

So what has been going on since my last post? Well...not much and quite a bit, it turns out. In the past three days, my family and I have been making the long trek back home...and boy, has it really felt like a loooooong trek home, not helped much by the fact that the past two campgrounds at which we have taken shelter at to rest for the night have lacked sufficient internet access, preventing me from being able to, among other things, update this blog. (This is where my non-smartphone's recently activated mobile web has come in handy, so at least I can keep up with emails and very occasionally check Facebook and Twitter.) Not that I have been terminally bored during these long days of cross-country driving; my iPod's shuffle function, James Joyce's Ulysses—which, for all its difficulty, I'm actually kinda loving—and Twin Peaks have all been keeping me reasonably distracted.

But our third and final day in Yellowstone was spent exploring Grand Teton National Park, which, it turns out, is even more awe-inspiringly beautiful a place than Yellowstone. (Jim Emerson, you were right!) As I tweeted at the end of that day, as I gawked at the view of the Teton Range and hiked on one of its mountains, I found myself desiring to do two things: listen to Richard Strauss's Eine Alpensinfonie (An Alpine Symphony) and watch Renny Harlin's Cliffhanger (1993) on an endless loop. Yes, you read that right: I just lumped Richard Strauss and Renny Harlin in one sentence. Hey, that's how my highbrow/lowbrow mind works.

I won't say much more about my trip now; I'm saving that for a summary post after I return from vacation, which will most likely be later today. Oh, and there is also one other development in my life that faithful Twitter followers will probably already know about, but which I haven't gotten into here at My Life, at 24 Frames Per Second. It's a pretty earth-shattering development for me...but again, I will save it upon my return.

For now...just wish me luck in getting some honest-to-God sleep tonight! (So this is what insomnia feels like, huh?)

Not-Wild-Enough America?

WEST YELLOWSTONE, MONT.—Among the many sights I've seen at Yellowstone National Park in the past two days have been those of wild animals prancing around in what I guess one could call their natural habitats. To wit:

A bison...

...an elk...

...and a couple of moose

Don't get me wrong; I've been as gratified by the sight of these animals—creatures I certainly don't usually see in my neck of the central New Jersey woods—as much as the next guy. Still...a part of me, while fully taking part in the gawking and photographing of these creatures, thought back to Ric O'Barry, the impassioned dolphin trainer who, in the Oscar-winning documentary The Cove (2009), believed that Flipper was smiling on the outside but crying on the inside while in captivity. Not that these particular creatures my family and I glimpsed were literally smiling, mind you (just look at the photos)...but I couldn't help but wonder if these animals were at least somewhat conscious of their place in Yellowstone National Park as essentially objects of show for us vacationing human beings. Do any of these creatures cry inside as we snap snap snap our cameras, giving them the kind of attention similar to the way paparazzi photographers give celebrities?

Or am I simply thinking like some kind of extremist in the PETA-as-depicted-by-South Park mode?





I have to admit, though: seeing these creatures up close was still pretty cool. I mean, look how close a shot I got of that bison! Awesome, ain't it?

The Glory of Old Faithful: A Video That is Worth a Thousand Pictures

WEST YELLOWSTONE, MONT.—As the cliché goes, "A picture is worth a thousand words." As I have discovered recently, one could also add, "A video is worth a thousand pictures."

Case in point: Today, my family and I decided, on our first full day in the Yellowstone National Park area, to go see the one thing everyone will inevitably ask if you've seen when you come back from a vacation in Yellowstone National Park. That's right, we went to see Old Faithful.

But, as I and a massive crowd of people eagerly awaited Old Faithful's scheduled eruption at around 12:17 p.m.—it eventually spouted off at around 12:30, in fact—I began to feel that mere photos, however well framed, couldn't quite do justice to the however-brief majesty of Old Faithful's eruption. I had to capture it as a video.

And so I did. Consider this as standing in, for now, for our day, since this was the clear highlight. It's basically just Old Faithful erupting...but stay 'til the last 10 seconds or so, when I try to pay halfhearted tribute to the final upward tilt to the heavens that concludes Toy Story 3 (okay, I made that up just now, but for those who've seen that film, maybe you'll see what I mean).

Enjoy:

On the Road, With a Trailer—and My Mother—in Tow

EAST BRUNSWICK, N.J.—By the time you all read this, I will most likely be on the road, traveling with my family to the first national park ever established in the world. That's right, we're going to Yellowstone National Park!

Actually, my enthusiasm for going to this U.S. landmark is a bit more tempered than the exclamation mark in the previous sentence might indicate. Why? Not because of the venue, certainly; I, for one, have never been there, and am eagerly looking forward to the chance to see Old Faithful, among other sights, up close and personal. (Yes, my friends, there will be photographs.) No, my lack of unadulterated excitement for this trip stems from pretty much one fact and one fact only: I'll be spending 12 straight days in the presence of my mother. For those of you who follow me on Twitter, you know what that means: the potential for lots of barely suppressed tension. As usual with family getaways, this trip is completely her idea, and for the next 12 days, the rest of us are basically at the mercy of her whims. Let's just say, that prospect fills me with less sit-back-and-relax-forget-about-Mars Attacks! satisfaction than it used to inspire.

Nevertheless...as Ludwig van Beethoven famously added to his setting of Friedrich Schiller's "Ode to Joy" in the finale of his Ninth Symphony, "Oh friends, not these tones! / Rather, let us raise our voices in more pleasing / And more joyful sounds!" And so I will try my best to take my mother's advice, for once, and put myself in a more positive frame of mind as my family and I embark on the long drive out to the other side of the country. Besides, if I'm being honest with myself, I probably could use the break from work anyway. (On the other hand, my cinephilia will be taking major hits as a result of this trip: I'm missing Dial M for Murder and House of Wax in 3-D at Film Forum in the coming week, and completely missing Film Society at Lincoln Center's Eric Rohmer retrospective while I'm gone. Believe it or not, Mom, I actually do make personal sacrifices for family time!)

So if you notice that posting is light for the rest of month at My Life, at 24 Frames Per Second, then that is why. Supposedly the campground at which my family and I are staying when we get to Yellowstone will have wifi, so I won't be completely offline. And I may not be completely deprived of filmed entertainment either: Maybe this is a good time to finally tear through Twin Peaks beyond the first five episodes, the last of which I watched maybe a couple months ago. And oh yeah, a friend of mine did give me her copy of the first season of Lost, didn't she...?

My name is Kenji Fujishima, and I am an entertainment addict.