Last summer I went to Yellowstone National Park with my girlfriend. If you haven’t gone, you should seriously consider it. It’s one of the most amazing places in the world. There are buffalo, elk, hot springs and this place called the Grand Canyon of Yellowstone, which, although it is not the actual Grand Canyon, it’s still pretty grand.

The finale of our trip was a stop by Old Faithful, which erupts every hour and a half so we had to wait a while. We sat down on one of the benches surrounding Old Faithful; not really speaking because after two weeks of driving around in a rented Honda Accord with the woman you love all you want is never to hear her voice again. Every possible topic of conversation has been exhausted and one more comment like, “The Native Americans must have thought this place was full of spirits,” or “Take another picture of me with the buffalo,” and I would have loaded her into Old Faithful like a cannonball. The amphitheater around the geyser started to fill with a decent crowd of late season tourists in the light rain…It was then that a quiet mumbling began from over my left hand shoulder. I turned my head to see a little Native American girl in a wheelchair, just mumbling away in her own language. I couldn’t tell if she was just physically disabled or mentally as well, since the impression that she was forming real words was vague at best.

She was there with her white mother and her white father. I figured these two must have been her adopted parents barring some freak Native American milkman accidental impregnation scenario. The mother would have been like “No, no…It’s not what you think. I have a little Cherokee in me.” The father’s would be like, “You mean the milkman?”

The girl in the wheelchair was dressed in the exact same outfit as her white father: jeans with elastic ankles, and a matching jean jacket with a fluorescent green shirt underneath. Fluorescent green I think so that in case the girl was abducted or got lost in a snowstorm she would be visible by helicopter. The mother wore something else entirely and I wondered if she was mutinying against the family dress code.

I looked back at the girl in the wheelchair and she was now pointing at me, mumbling the whole time as if she thought she could transmit what she was trying to say through the air and into my brain. I figured she probably couldn’t speak after all so I began to daydream about a world in which I was the only person who could understand her and would serve as her personal interpreter. That would be pretty cool. She and I could go on tour together, appear in science and nature magazines, Letterman, the Daily Show, I could help her compose those symphonies she’d been banging around in her head, maybe some fanmail to George Clooney or maybe she’d just want to tell her mom that her mac and cheese sucks.

But as I kept staring at her, I began to feel like she was trying to tell me something; so the least I could do was stick with her and try to figure it out. And just as I thought she was pointing to the fuzzy baby blue winter hat I was wearing, something blocked her from my view. This something said, “What the fuck are you doing?”

This something, of course, was her father. Apparently, he thought his daughter’s mumbling signified some sort of discomfort on her part, the source of which, she appeared to point out, was a scruffy 20-something that he caught staring at his wheelchair-ridden adopted Native American daughter with a look that was, to him…patronizing? Threatening maybe? Pedophilic? I stared at the father for several seconds as I rewound and reviewed the previous minutes in my mind, searching the frames for any offense that I may have perpetrated. It’s exactly the experience when someone refers to your actions or comments from the previous night of heavy drinking; except it’s like that for me all the time.

So, I’m up to speed now but he’s still standing there and he can’t tell if I’m rude or maybe a little slow myself. “Do you realize how rude it is to stare like that?”

My response was, “Oh. No. I mean, I think she likes my hat.”

“Well,” he said, “I think you should MYOB.”

“Listen man,” I said. “If she wants to point at my hat, I think that our business, ok?” At this point my girlfriend stood up and left. That’s her little way of telling me that I’ve probably taken things one step too far, and she will lovingly stand by with first aid.

“Your business,” he chuckled, as if the idea of her and I having any sort of legitimate business to conduct were an utter impossibility. He found it so absurd he said it again. “Your business! Do you see what your “business” has done to my little girl?” and he swung his arm around to show me what I had done. For some reason, she was crying now, but it was clear to me that this grand gesture of his was just to get the crowd involved, inviting the late season tourists to enter their judgment into this developing drama. About 30 people started to watch and a Russian guy began filming me. I became acutely aware that anything insane I did in next few minutes would probably end up on the Internet and could seriously jeopardize my fledgling acting career. I’d come back to New York and meet with an agent and he’d be like, “You’re great….but aren’t you the guy who went apeshit at Yellowstone?”

So I just sat there, handcuffed by outrageous fortune, the Hamlet of Old Faithful. The crowd continued to stare at me, waiting for an apology or an explanation or even better, some violence. I looked around for a little help maybe but none came. My lady had left, the old people in the crowd thought I was a troublemaker, the 30-somethings remembered themselves as 20-somethings; smoking pot and tormenting the retarded, and I’m sure they figured I was getting my just desserts. A concerned park ranger passed nearby and he could tell I was the epicenter of some minor sociological earthquake. I could feel his eyes looking me over for Yellowstone contraband; weapons, drugs, maybe a smuggled pine cone or two; anything so he could swoop in and take me to the lodge for a good tongue lashing or maybe even a 25-dollar fine.

Ordinarily I would have apologized to the father in a second and slunk away, but for some reason, this had become larger than myself–it had turned into some ethical / theological test of wills. I felt blameless under the circumstances but also understood and even appreciated this white man’s rage. Confrontations like this one are so rare in my life that when they do come up I need to focus my energies, take my time and make it right so that when God plays back the tape at the end of all things, He will pat me on my back with his giant hand and say, “Good one, Mike Lavoie.”

So I did not apologize. I did not cry or even tell him to go shove something inside himself, his wife or another man. I simply said nothing, and sat there absorbing attention while trying to radiate a sense of benign martyrdom. The blood slowly drained from the giant hard-on this moment had become and the audience seemed disappointed by the anticlimax. We had given them a great deal of foreplay and then fell asleep. Old Faithful began to come to life and the crowd turned its collective attention to the geyser, and even the father returned to his family without a glance back. I heard my girlfriend’s camera firing away behind me before she sat down on my lap. I knew I would have to give her the blow by blow later and I wondered if I could purchase the video from the Russian and save myself the trouble.

The girl had stopped crying and she watched Old Faithful with fascination. I sat there for a moment and tried to enjoy this majestic landscape that my forefathers had appropriated from hers. But I wasn’t sure if her father would come back for a few final words, so, not wanting to chance it, I left it all behind. I walked back to our car, found some dark chocolate in the glove compartment and started to dry off my hat. In the distance I saw a buffalo eat some grass and then take a shit and I wished my life could be as simple and that. Where did all my well-meaning human intentions get me? Sequestered in a Honda. As reclined my seat all the way down, so I could hide from anyone who might try to find me, I closed my eyes and hoped that spirits of the girl’s ancestors had been watching today. I figured, if anyone could empathize with a kind but tragically misunderstood soul like mine, it’s probably them.

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