by Betsy Robertson
A professor finds his muse
in the wilderness
They met when he was just 22 years old and looking for a purpose in life, a future that might involve a home, family and satisfying work. Their introduction lacked drama, and although the attraction was instant, at least on his part, the pair remained apart more often than not, separated by 2,000 miles and the things that often get in the way of great love affairs: the business and busy-ness of living. Most of the time, there were children to parent and a wife to care for. There was his work as a communitycollege economics professor, which paid the bills, and household chores, and a million insignificant decisions, like which tie to wear and what to have for lunch. And he knew that some of these things were important, but all the while, throughout the days, weeks and months, there was a tiny, insistent tug on his heart, and he could never forget his love, or ever truly leave her. This is a love story about a man, Orville Euing Bach Jr. ’69, and a place, Yellowstone National Park.
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Orville “Butch” Bach has just returned to ranger headquarters from pedaling his bike around the south section of Yellowstone’s Upper Geyser Basin, which includes the famously frequent Old Faithful and other hot springs collectively known as “thermal features.” It’s a pleasant, 68-degree June afternoon, and hundreds of tourists are jockeying for the best viewing positions on the benches surrounding Old Faithful’s crusty cone, which spews a river of near-boiling hot water into the sky about every 80 minutes. At the appointed time, steaming waves begin to lap over the lip of the funnel, and the people perched on the sidelines lean forward, anticipating the blast. The earth sizzles, growls, then roars, water and steam belching upward in a vertical stream nearly 200 feet high. The crowd issues a collective gasp, and then it’s over, nature once again having beaten her chest and charged. In the last three decades, Butch Bach has seen as many as 10,000 of these explosions. He never tires of waiting for and watching them, never
gets too busy to marvel over their beauty. “I guess you would say this is one of the most beautiful creations of God on the planet, all this, here in Yellowstone,” says Bach, contemplating the view from a boardwalk that snakes between geysers dotting the banks of the Firehole River. “We haven’t harmed it. It’s completely in the same natural condition as it was when the first native American Indians saw it. It renews and revives your spirit, lifts you up, makes you excited. “It’s just such a gorgeous thing.”
Bach’s affair with the world’s oldest national park began innocuously in 1968, when he took a summer job as a “sanitation supervisor” at Canyon Village near the waterfalls of the YellowSummer 2006
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stone River. At the time, the Montgomery native was inches away from graduating from Auburn University with an economics degree. He’d never traveled any farther from Alabama than the Great Smoky Mountains and was already planning to marry his hometown sweetheart, Margaret. That’s when he saw her: the Other Woman, personified by the stacked hills and buff valleys that would become his passion for the next 38 years. He fell in love overlooking the brink of Yellowstone’s Grand Canyon, a 23mile river valley formed 640,000 years ago by a colossal volcanic eruption and the violent collision of three glaciers.
spread interest in Yellowstone’s oddities, a natural freak show that invited the public’s awe. Captivated by the prospect of protecting the land from private development, U.S. President Ulysses S. Grant in 1872 officially set aside 3,500 acres to be placed under federal protection, and a volunteer superintendent was appointed. Yellowstone National Park was born.
“It was like going into a great cathedral,” Bach recalls. “Everybody was just kind of whispering, you know? And it was just so spectacular. It was unlike anything I’d ever seen before.” Bach found the monumental landscape irresistible and kept returning for threemonth stints as an interpretive ranger, even fashioning a career as a businessand-economics teacher based in part on the job’s capacity to free up time for working at Yellowstone each summer. He and Margaret wed, and she agreed to live parttime in the park as well. Since 1974, the two have divided their time living in their home in Morristown, Tenn., and government-issued employee housing, typically located across the highway from the Old Faithful ranger station. The couple’s summertime digs aren’t glamorous, but for the Bachs—especially Butch—it’s the view that counts. “Some people get excited about NASCAR; other people sometimes talk about football in the South being a religion,” Bach says, reflecting. “But this is what excites me the most—this wild, untrammeled country. “Maybe I was born 150 years too late.” In an earlier time, Bach might have been charting the territory as a “mountain man”—one of the first European-American explorers of the great West— rather than instructing thousands of park visitors to stay eight yards away from the nearest buffalo and refrain from feeding the bears. Native Americans and European-American fur traders began doing business with each other in the Yellowstone wilderness in the late 1700s, and trappers first chronicled the sights and sounds of the region, including its bubbling mud caldrons and boiling water spouts, just after the War of 1812. Members of formal expeditions followed after the Civil War, spurring wideSummer 2006
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Several times a week and often over a roaring campfire, Bach’s ranger duty brings him before audiences of fair-weather campers, mostly families with children, to tell the stories of the park’s earliest adventurers. He asks them to imagine how the place looked before roads crisscrossed the mountains and the smell of exhaust fumes scented the air. But Bach knows that only a fraction of the tourists who attend his lectures will experience the soul of the place, the part of the park he most adores: the backcountry wilderness. “That’s the real Yellowstone,” says Bach, who guesses he’s spent at least 400 nights sleeping in tents or on bedrolls under the stars. More than 1,000 miles of trails meander through the forest and brush, over streams and high into the hills, far removed from the nearest ranger stations. The southeastern corner of the park bordering the Teton mountain range, known as the “thoroughfare,” encompasses the most remote point in the lower 48 states, located 32 miles from the nearest road. It’s a world where man isn’t the privileged gender or species.
cutline about photo if needed
“I never get back there enough,” says Bach of his walks through the primeval backwoods, which he details in his book, Tracking the Spirit of Yellowstone: Recollections of 31 Years as a Seasonal Ranger. At ? years old and having spent his entire adult life working in this place, Bach’s heart requires the wilderness as much as it and the rest of his organs need food and water. “If I don’t get out so many times, really, it’s just like I’m thirsty for that wild country,” he says. During the off-season, Bach and his similarly passionate friends stoke each other’s coals with tales of particularly memorable hikes. Like the time they tangled with a female grizzly after stumbling upon her cub in the Gallatin National Forest. “As the trail entered a patch of timber and made a 90-degree turn, we surprised a grizzly cub, which let out a frightened wail,” Bach writes in his Sierra Club trail guide, Exploring the Yellowstone Backcountry, first published in 1991. “Just as we had shed our backpacks, the big sow charged around the bend…heading straight for us. Luckily, we were close to some good climbing trees, and we were perched on top with the squirrels in short order…it was a harrowing, life-threatening encounter.”
Most visitors to Yellowstone will never see a bear, even the mild-mannered black ones, which are considered generally less ornery and likely to kill a person. There’s plenty of other wildlife to be seen by the side of the park’s roads, however, and it’s not unusual to see small herds of automobiles parked all askew in random groupings, gawkers straining to catch glimpses of grazing bison, elk or moose. That kind of sightseeing doesn’t interest Bach or his buddy John Dirksen, a physical-education teacher at Aims Community College in Greeley, Colo., who also spends summers in Yellowstone with his wife, Deb. The Dirksens typically camp in the backcountry for two weeks at a time, and would stay out for longer periods if they could carry enough provisions on their backs. In between hiking expeditions all over the park, the couple sleeps in their van. Like Bach, John Dirksen “discovered” Yellowstone in 1968. “I spent one summer here and that was it,” says Dirksen. “All I know is that, once I hit the backcountry of Yellowstone, I knew this was goAuburn Magazine
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ing to be my home for as long as I live. For me, this is my religion up here.”
Part sweetheart, part femme fatale, Yellowstone Park has captured the affection of innumerable suitors in addition to Bach and Dirksen, and much of the allure lies in her frequent temper tantrums. Bach’s ranger responsibilities entail occasionally reporting to work at 6:45 a.m. for “geyser prediction duty,” which requires walking around to the various thermal springs and recording the exact times of their individual eruptions. It’s one of his favorite job assignments, in part because it brings him into contact with a handful of oddly dedicated volunteers known as “geyser gazers.” These are people who find it fun to sit outdoors at near-freezing temperatures literally marking time between bursts, presumably while on vacation from their less-exciting day jobs. Back at the Old Faithful ranger station, Lynn Stephens, an accounting professor at Eastern Washington University in Spokane, performs some calculations and logs them in a big record book. She’d risen from a warm bed at 2:30 a.m., donned a puffy parka and parked her truck along Firehole Lake Drive to watch Great Fountain geyser blow its stack before the sun rose, and stayed for the eruption’s duration so she could more precisely forecast the next blast. She’s been doing this sort of thing for 19 years. “I like following patterns and trying to identify patterns,” says Stephens, glancing up from her
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figures. “Who knows? Some of us get the bug, some of us don’t.” Stephens and Bach communicate with each other in geyser-speak for a few minutes, discussing which of the exploding thermal features might shoot sooner, or later, or higher than usual, and the various conditions and scenarios affecting the whole production. Tourists are likely to ask about such things, so Bach takes detailed mental notes. Later, during the question-and-answer portion of his weekly lectures, he’ll answer a smorgasbord of questions including “Is the steam hot?” (it is), “Do the animals have free rein?” (they do) and “How large is Old Faithful’s spout?” (18 by 24 inches). A quintessentially Southern gentleman, Bach responds to each question with the patience of someone who’s done this for a long, long time and isn’t surprised by a woman pointing at the ground and asking, “What kind of poo-poo is that?” He’s even forgiving of the visitors who behave badly—hitting golf balls into the geyers, for example—mainly
because they invite opportunities to explain the importance of protecting of the park’s wildlife and natural resources. A self-described political independent, Bach has managed to meld his affection for nature with his training as a freemarket economist by applying conservative ideas about government accountability and thrift to environmental concerns. “I don’t like that word ‘environmentalist’ too much—I like the word ‘conservationist,’” Bach says. “Instead of liberal, I’d rather use the word ‘progressive.’ I’m all for the wise use of resources, and some of that is for preserving some of our resources instead of developing all of them.”
Nighttime at Yellowstone. Bach builds a campfire and chats with families from Madison campground, who’ve gathered to listen to old West yarns. Most of the adults and kids hope to have adventures of their own while they’re here, or at least spot a buffalo or two. They’ll be gone again in a week, back to work or school, back to making a million insignificant decisions, such as which tie to wear and what to have for lunch. This year, though, Butch Bach won’t be among them. His annual pilgrimages to Montana, Wyoming and environs recently led both he and Margaret to an epiphany: The couple sold their Tennessee home in May and moved permanently to the town of Bozeman in Montana’s Gallatin Valley. Their grown daughters, Allison and Caroline, relocated there years ago, and the change means the couple will no longer spend weeks each spring packing up pots, pans, clothes and kids, and driving across the country to visit Butch’s land of promise. After the summer season ends, they’ll stay put. It’s a convenient arrangement for a man, his wife and the other love of his life. “I’ve always closely identified myself with John Denver’s great song, ‘Rocky Mountain High,’ where Denver describes the young man who was ‘born in the summer of his 27th year, coming home to a place he’d never been before,” Butch Bach says. “For me, it was my 22nd year. The year was 1968.”
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‘War Eagle’ Moments
AU flag-wavers tell their best tales
You wouldn’t think a shaggy-dog story involving a bird could breed such passion. But, as most great legends do, an apocryphal yarn grew legs over time and jump-started Auburn University’s “War Eagle” battle cry. The words have been uttered at football games, in passing on city streets, during church services and, on at least one occasion, from a patient on an operating table. Although the tradition may have been born as a way to pep up crowds of spectators, “War Eagle” has evolved into an all-purpose greeting among AU fans, like “aloha” in Hawaii. The phrase can mean “hello,” “goodbye,” or “@&#% the Tide,” creating an instant bond between pairs of total strangers. According to the folklore, the battle cry was first uttered about the time the institution was founded. A wounded Confederate survivor of a Civil War skirmish stumbled across the battlefield and discovered an injured eagle. The soldier, upon later joining the former East Alabama Male College as a faculty member, brought the bird to campus, and it became a de facto mascot. When, on the day of AU’s first football game in 1892, the avian emissary soared over the field, inspired fans began shouting encouragement to the “war eagle.” In at least one version of the story, the raptor fell dead from its last stressful flight—but the “war eagle” spirit lived on.
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“War Eagle” moments transcend gender, nationality, race and age, occasionally generating random acts of kindness and leading to lasting friendships or even marriage. Some of our favorites follow:
Strangers on a plane Three years ago, Julian K. “Butch” Fuller ’73 was flying home to Atlanta from Los Angeles when a young U.S. Army captain, Rich Stinson ’94, boarded the plane wearing an AU shirt. Fuller bellowed “War Eagle,” and Stinson replied in kind. Leaning across another passenger, the pair chatted about the War Eagle Supper Club, Toomer’s Corner and other Auburn-centric topics. Finally, the stranger sitting between them surrendered her seat; Fuller and Stinson continued sharing AU stories during a layover in Phoenix, then rebooked the last leg of their trip so they could sit together and keep talking. In spite of a 20year difference in their ages, the pair forged a lasting friendship. Fuller, who lives in Lawrenceville, Ga., and Stinson, stationed at Ft. Hood, Texas, have since reconnected every year to attend football games, and they’re planning another reunion this fall. “I value my Auburn education and my Auburn experience, and I am proud to count Rich and his family as a part of my Auburn family,” Fuller says.
Involuntary reply While traveling from Atlanta to New York during her senior year at AU, Amy Brasell Zagorsky ’97 was thrown from her car in an accident and airlifted to Johnson City Medical Center in Tennessee for emergency surgery. In an attempt to put Zagorsky at ease before the operation, the anesthesiologist jokingly threatened to make her a University of Tennessee Volunteers fan.” At that, Zagorsky, who now lives in Gulf Breeze, Fla., mustered a last ounce of clarity before going under the knife. “I immediately screamed at him, ‘WAR DAMN EAGLE.’” On that operating table, she says, “even broken in multiple places and so near to being killed, I still knew where my heart was.”
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returned to their native Colombia and started their own company developing production technologies for an Amazon fish species that might be bred as food. In spring 1988, the pair gathered yamu specimens from their nets, treated them with hormones and observed the fish eggs under a microscope every two hours. After the second day, the two confirmed they’d created the first artificial spawn of the species in the world. “I looked directly to my wife’s eyes,” Daniel Rodriguez-Guerrero says. “Our excitement was so great—without any preparation, we shouted at the same time: WAR EAGLE!!!!!!”
Paris peace treaty Ten years ago, on a warm summer day in Paris, Jim McCrory Jr. ’60 and wife Sue Northcutt McCrory ’62 of Dothan rested on the steps of the famed Paris Opera House. Jim, wearing a blue-and-white AU visor, spied another man with the word “’Bama” in crimson across the front of his shirt. “You’re really not, are you?” Sue asked her husband. But he was: A “War Eagle” aria poured forth. The startled “’Bama” fan rushed over; he’d been working in Amsterdam and was homesick. “He told me hearing that ‘War Eagle’ was like getting a call from home,” says Jim McCrory. “Under the right circumstances, even a devout Crimson Tider will respond most positively to that cry.”
Hallelujah, amen Auburn resident Carole D. Covington, an AU library assistant, recently visited a 4,000-member Presbyterian church in North Carolina. As was customary, parishioners and visitors were invited to sign and pass a guest register in which attendees were to record their names and addresses. “I signed the book and passed it on,” says Covington. “It came back down the pew to me with a big ‘War Eagle’ scrawled across it—entered by an unknown Auburn couple at the other end of the row.”
Yes, I do Auburn resident Kim Toney submitted a favorite “War Eagle” moment on behalf of her best friend and sorority sister Diane Collins ’79. In the late 1970s while studying in London, Collins wore her AU paraphernalia on a Christmas shopping excursion to Harrod’s. U.S. Naval officer Michael D. Moran ’71, standing in line nearby, yelled, “War Eagle.” The pair eventually married and now live in Gulf Breeze, Fla.
Birthrights
Hero worship
After graduating from the College of Agriculture in 1979, Daniel Rodriguez-Guerrero and wife Consuelo
Jamey Vella ’94 and Traci Owen Vella ’93 of Birmingham were honeymooning in Rome and had not heard a word of English
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in more than a week. As they exited the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel amidst a throng of solemn fellow tourists, Jamey donned an AU cap and immediately heard someone cry, “War Eagle” from across a courtyard. The Vellas naturally returned the yell. “The crowd laughed,” recalls Traci. “Everybody seemed to get a kick out of it.”
that a suitable heart had been located, all three nurses entered Cude’s room and “began to sing the Auburn fight song, ‘War Eagle fly down the field, always to conquer, never to yield…’ It was a truly inspiring moment for me and one that I will never forget. It led me into a successful heart transplant surgery, recovery and rehabilitation that has been nothing less than phenomenal.”
Across a crowded room
Cracker jack
Caught in an early Grand Canyon snowstorm in October 1994, Carol Blevins Aldy ’67 was desperate to learn the score of a close AU-Florida football match. Huddled before a fireplace with a hundred strangers, husband Joseph predicted there’d be no way to find out what was happening 1,500 miles from the Southeastern Conference. “Watch me,” Carol said. Staring across the crowded room, a man inexplicably drew Carol’s attention; she asked if he’d heard any college football scores. His answer: “I know the only score that matters. Auburn beat Florida 36-33.” The moment was magical. “For a split second we looked at each other in disbelief and then, as if on cue, we yelled, ‘War Eagle’ together,” Carol remembers.
J.S. Black ’95 of Hazel Green and his college roommate caught a ballgame at Chicago’s Comiskey Park in September 1991. Adoring fans in the crowd had tried unsuccessfully to get the attention of two White Sox superstars, Bo Jackson and Frank Thomas, both of whom were former AU athletes. Black yelled, “WARRRR Eagle,” and both professional baseball players immediately returned the greeting. “Before long, there were about 500 people yelling ‘War Eagle,’” recalls Black. “Many asked what ‘War Eagle’ meant, and I happily told them. I taught those big-city folks something they will never forget.”
Under arrest Kinsey Hansel Snell ’03 of Loganville, Ga., stopped her car at a traffic signal and danced in the driver’s seat like nobody was watching. “I heard the policeman behind me chirp his siren,” says Snell. “I looked in my rearview mirror and wondered what I had done wrong. He was smiling, and then he said, ‘War Eagle’ on his loudspeaker. (I have an Auburn sticker on the back of my car.) I rolled the window down and yelled it back. It made my day.
Protective measure A year and a half ago, U.S. Army Major Steven G. Shepherd had just arrived in Afghanistan and was about to lead his first combat patrol. He soon learned that the two helicopter pilots supporting the mission were AU grads. Neither Shepherd nor his radio operator attended Auburn, but both were huge Tigers football fans. “So every time we needed to use the phrase ‘roger’ on the radio, we’d say ‘War Eagle’ and the pilots would respond. It really made us feel safe to know that those guys were overhead covering us. And, 7,000 miles from home, those words, ‘War Eagle,’ meant the world to us,” Shepherd says.
And last but not least: A bum rap for ’Bama Since our compilation of War Eagle moments began with a recounting of the battle cry’s dubious origin, we leave off with another seemingly unlikely story. Not that we question the truth of the tale: Gulf Shores resident Bob Grant ’75 dragged a University of Alabama alumnus along with a couple of AU buddies to a golf outing in Nashville for the Tigers’ meeting with Vanderbilt several years ago. The “Bammer” was haranguing the AU alums about the battle cry and admitted he was puzzled by how enthusiastically their “War Eagles” were returned by total strangers. The trio tried to explain the mystique of the War Eagle moment to no avail. Annoyed, their ’Bama-loyal friend spied a derelict in an alley and yelled, “War Eagle” to the bum. “You ain’t gonna believe this,” says Grant, “but without hesitation, the poor old guy hollered back “ROLL TIDE!!”
Home is where the heart is In Nashville, Carl A. Cude ’72 was a heart-transplant candidate awaiting a donor organ. Three of his nurses also were AU grads, and the trio had swapped “War Eagles” with Cude throughout his hospitalization. Finally, on the day his surgeon notified him Auburn Magazine
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