A Moose Walks Into a Wedding…

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.

My family is staying at Many Glacier Hotel in Glacier National Park. This is one of my favorite places I’ve ever visited. For the past two years, I’ve been quietly anticipating bringing my wife and son here, trying to not to oversell it or talk to much about it. It’s my second time here, and I’d come again and again if the opportunity came up. It’s that kind of place. Designed like a Swiss Mountain Lodge (complete with red door badges with little white crosses), Many Glacier sits across from Grinnel Point, one of the most eye-capturing spots in the national park.

When we arrived, there was a large wedding party. I think the wedding happened earlier that day before we arrived. It was really cool, though. The revelers were in great spirits, and they lent a festive mood to the hotel. After two long days of hauling halfway across the US, it was a good experience to enter into.

In the evening Mrs. Bad Ass and I bought some beverages (her, a Hefeweizen, and me, a Harvester, whatever that means – it was a beer and it tasted fine). I added a cheesecake with Huckleberry sauce because you Houston isn’t your huckleberry, to butcher a line from Doc Holliday. (The H in Houston being for humidity, heat, and hurricanes, not huckleberries!)

So, we’re drinking our beers and enjoying this glorious sunset cascading over the mountains. Off to the side, the wedding photographer is taking advantage of the golden hour, too, snapping photos of the bride and groom. We’re all watching this because why not? Love is a beautiful thing, right? One of the wedding revelers in the balcony above us shouts “Hey, there’s a moose!” As if on cue, from out of the woods behind the hotel saunters this colossal moose. She crosses right behind the bride, maybe within twenty feet of her while she’s taking photos. The moose is moving as if none of this matters. Moose don’t give a shit about social constructs like weddings, and they don’t care if they’re photobombing.

Now, there’s a few way this can play out. The bride could scream and run away, or she could throw her bouquet at the moose in self defense.

Everybody (us included) laughs, though, because the bride, a true nature lover, isn’t running or screaming or throwing things at the moose. She’s pivoting herself to get photos with the moose in the background as the photographer angles around her. At one point, as the moose nonchalantly crosses toward the lake, the bride lifts the hem of her white dress and runs down to the lakeside in hope of getting another dramatic photo. I’m sure it’ll be the kind of thing that their family will talk about for generations.

“Oh, your mother and I had a wedding for the ages. Your grandparents were there, your aunts and uncles were there, and so was a moose!”

Proof that moose attend weddings. The moose is along the tree line, walking down. The bride is posing for photos behind the bush. You can see a bit of her dress and head. I think she’s still looking at the lake at this point.

For all that we do in our lives, I think most people’s stories (meaning the story of their life) is boiled down to one story, one line, moment, one personality. The further back in generations, the less of a human being we become. We fade into anecdotes. It makes me wonder what our story will be, my wife and I. Will it be that we were loving parents, or will it be that we moved to Illinois and then Houston, or will it be something entirely different that I can’t think of? I don’t know, and ultimately, there isn’t a lot I can do about it. That’s perception.

And from a standpoint of story, will this anecdote become the story that my family passes on? That one day we watched a moose invade a wedding party? There are so many stories we inhabit in our lives as characters, and there are only so many that can be passed on. It’s like my life is one giant Netflix account, with so many stories, some long television shows, some comedy specials, and others adventure movies. And like with Netflix, you can’t watch it all. You pick what you like and you pass over the rest.

That seems fair. We can’t all have 1000-page memoirs, and even if we did, I think that wouldn’t cover it. It reminds me of that scene in the new Loki show where Loki is told to sign a stack of paper that looks about ten reams tall that documents everything he’s ever said. Ever.

But back to the moose. You will be happy to know that the moose walked along the shore until she found a spot where she chose to enter the frigid waters of Swiftcurrent Lake. She effortlessly crossed the lake (her head bobbing along), then exited, shaking herself off. The wedding party cheered every moment of this crossing. As word of the moose sighting spread through the lodge, people poured out for photo ops and selfies. Throughout it all, the moose didn’t care for our little doings. They were insignificant to her. The moose had a way about its movement that reminded me of something I read last night, a passage in Faulkner’s story, “Lion:”

“As though time were just something he walked through as he did in air, to age him no more than air did.” In a place that has to be booked a year in advance, where check-in and checkout and dining hours and quiet hours determine the direction of the day, time meant nothing to the moose.

We drove almost nineteen hours in two days to arrive at this spot where we could enjoy a moose moving as if time never existed. In the coming days, I’m going to try to be more like a moose and move from a point of expediency to a moose-like vacation mode.

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