Old Faithful Is Moving Back Home

I might try to pin a new name on Old Faithful, like maybe Old Fickle. If faithfulness means staying with one who loves you, then faithful Old Fickle ain't. Being fickle, though, means you're not too sure who you want to be with. Instead, anyone who bats their eyes at you.

But to call Old Faithful by this new name -- Old Fickle -- might be doing it an injustice, since, it's clear to one and all it is not a living creature but just an incredibly complicated machine. Rather, there are machine components around it, while it is a series of tubes, spigots, knobs, and gauges. Just add water and it's good to go. And fire. It's like a TV dinner, just heat and serve. If you know how to boil water you've got a geyser.

I simplify, of course. There's a lot of know-how that goes into working a geyser. Especially if it spews on schedule like Old Faithful. You've got to have someone in the belly of the beast monitoring the gauges, keeping the flow of water coming, stoking the fire, and manning the bellows. Plus, think about it, there's lot of other things to work out, like getting various government permits, qualifying for tax breaks and incentives on your water bill, fire department inspections, and so on.

So at first I was ticked off when I got the notice, but now maybe it's for the best -- that Yellowstone Park wants "their" Old Faithful back. "Excuse me, but it's my Old Faithful now," was my first thought. But it was patiently explained to me that the guy who signed off on the papers and gave it to me was not properly authorized under the circumstances, something about there not being the legal steps necessary for his actions, that Old Faithful has a whole board of directors, supervisors, captains, and assorted hangers-on, and there are legalities involving quorums, the publishing of the board agenda in advance, and a thousand different things like that. In short, I didn't have a legal leg to stand on and would need to "cede any claim to said Old Faithful without delay."

I did have them on one point, the fact that their monitoring of the geyser seemed very lax, as they had not missed it for the last couple weeks. That was something they were embarrassed to admit, but of course it didn't have any bearing on their legal rights. They did promise to keep track of it more diligently in the future, to which I gave a sober nod, not wanting to rub it in any more than that.

The last few hours they were busy at the south end of the half acre packing it all up. The trucks are now loaded, the holes are filled in. And it's getting late in the day, so the drivers have gone off to stay the night in a motel.

I hope I have a good night. I might not sleep that well, knowing my dreams are sitting on the back of three semis. You know, the trucks are running. They always leave these trucks running. It would really be a bad thing, I suppose, were someone to drive off with one ... or perhaps all three. But how do you drive off with three trucks? It'd be like that one chick, the one who rides six white horses when she comes. She can really spread her legs -- I gotta tell ya -- to ride six white horses at once. That'd be someone worth meeting.