The Lord is in this place. Terrible is this place

The Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Park region of Wyoming, where I’m currently on vacation, is widely acknowledged as one of the wonders of the world. It not only contains astonishing scenery, with its cloud-high snow-frosted peaks, its fast diamond-clear rivers, and its densely packed pine forests and endless plains that stretch farther than the eye can see, but also a huge number and incredible variety of hydrothermal phenomena. As well as the famous geysers, there are giant puddles of boiling mud, opalescent crystal-filled pools with water at 75°C, and dark caves that belch forth clouds of steam and fountains of boiling grey water.

And then, a yet further gift, there’s enough wilderness in its almost uninhabited 3500+ square miles to sustain the only significant populations of indigenous large wildlife left in the USA: herds of bison, elk and moose, plus black and grizzly bears in sufficient numbers for most visitors to catch sight of one.

Yellowstone also offers a unique practical lesson in mutability and impermanence: its apparent tranquillity and unchangingness are the results of incidences of unimaginable turbulence, some in the distant past, some quite recent.

The sharp and jagged peaks of the Tetons, a mere nine million years old and therefore among the youngest mountain ranges on the planet, were hurtled up when the earth cracked along a gigantic fault line which is still active and which will produce further earthquakes sooner or later.

And the geysers and mud basins of Yellowstone are the visible evidence of several massive volcanic eruptions, the most recent 640,000 years ago. One day – perhaps quite soon, perhaps in hundreds of thousands of years’ time – the entire Yellowstone caldera, over 50 miles wide, will blow again, bringing year-round winters to the whole Northern hemisphere. Meanwhile the constant pressure of the lakes of magma just below the surface remake the landscape almost from year to year; a entire hillside is baked and all the trees scalded to death; geysers of mud subside into sullen, churning pools, while new geysers suddenly appear as if from nowhere. Nothing in our technology or mastery over nature enables us to withstand, or even to predict, any of these phenomena – we’re as helpless before them as are the bison and the elk.

So, you might think, instant enlightenment for anyone visiting this extraordinary place. All you need to do is to be here, and the rest will follow naturally – no work or preparation needed. But it doesn’t quite work like that – there’s room for everything in Yellowstone except the human ego, the motive force behind so much of what we’ve constructed and what we live for, and which we carry around with us everywhere we go. To appreciate Yellowstone requires surrender – and that’s not a familiar concept to most of us. Surrender of our personal goals, our attitudes and beliefs, our agendas and attachments – this is what Yellowstone calls for, and it’s a harder and more unfamiliar challenge than scaling its peaks or even facing down a grizzly bear.

Coming here, I find it easier as a foreigner to understand one dimension of American patriotism and exceptionalism – the idea of America as uniquely blessed and gifted – but then it’s hard to see how one gets from there to 50% of the world’s military expenditure, and a propensity to invade other countries thousands of miles away, or the right to bear guns, or the right for 4% of the earth’s population to consume 25% of its resources. And here I could veer off into a rant of my own – indulging and inflating my own (virtuous, liberal, and progressive) ego, puffing myself up with polemical self-righteousness, quite forgetting where – and who – I am.

The politics of Wyoming is probably somewhat murky – after all, its most famous living scion is none other than Dick Cheney – but one doesn’t come here for the politics; the gift of this place is the chance it gives us to surrender to and to acknowledge a grandeur which isn’t of our making, and which is far greater than anything we could ever conceive of. And who am I to say how many of those visitors and locals who respond to and receive the grandeur of Yellowstone are loyal Republicans? Such considerations are as far beneath the notice of the surrendered mind as the wildflower-dotted plains are from the remote peak of the Grand Teton.