Squatters in Paradise

SQUATTERS IN

PARADISE

A Yellowstone Memoir

by

James Perry

vii

Squatters in Paradise

Copyright © 2012 James Perry

Cover and interior illustrations by John Roberts

First printing 2009

All rights reserved.

ISBN:  1475088337

ISBN-13:   978-1475088335

vii

Squatters in Paradise

We come and go, but the land is always here. And the people who love it and understand it are the people who own it

- for a little while.

Willa Cather, O Pioneers!

vii

Squatters in Paradise

For Jim Seaberg

Who hates Yellowstone and wants me to go to Bangkok.

ALTHOUGH I had long envisioned writing a book about the experience of working in Yellowstone, it was not until I was offered a weekly column in the Yellowstone Independent Voice that the project began to take shape. For this I must thank Liz Kearney, the publisher of the paper in which my columns appeared.  I can only hope that my literary contributions did not play a role in the early demise of her newspaper.  Chapters which originally appeared in print in the Y.I.V. include the following:  Down the Rabbit Hole, We Are the Xanterrans!, Resident Coordinator, C.U.T., My Bear Story, Service Industry, Squatters in Paradise, and Roommates.

I would also like to thank John Roberts, who provided the illustrations for this book.  As a former Yellowstone employee, he was able to imbue his artwork with just the right balance of affection, irreverence, and hostility.

I have here written a truthful account of life in Yellowstone National Park from the perspective of a long-term seasonal employee.  I have not used any real names in this book (with the exception of a few actual first names).  The events are all real, although the timeline has occasionally been truncated in order to spare the reader certain needless particulars.  If the narrative seems to implicate me in any matters outside the law, the reader should attribute such faux pas to their own misreading of the text.

vii

Squatters in Paradise

Contents

Introduction

3

PART ONE

Down the Rabbit Hole

6

The Early Years

10

Resident Coordinator

14

Pubtender

17

Squatters in Paradise

20

First Winter

25

Hosting

29

My Bear Story

32

C.U.T.

35

PART TWO

Damaged Goods

46

Service Industry

51

The Exotic Yellowstone Employee

55

We are the Xanterrans!

58

Car Trouble

61

The Backcountry

70

Accommodations

77

Roommates

80

Coffee!  Coffee!

84

Man Vs. Beast

87

Yellowstone Romances

92

PART THREE

Scott from Texas

96

Celebs

101

The Yellowstone Motorist

104

Fuck the Cooks

108

The Backcountry II

112

Hot-Potting

118

Rangers

122

Last Tango in Yellowstone

125

Sylvia

128

PART FOUR

Literary Yellowstone

136

Mr. Ichikawa

139

When the Volcano Blows

142

Los Angeles

146

Savage Days

149

PART FIVE

Snowcoach Driver

153

Gunga Ga Lunga

160

Bartender

165

Operation Maple Syrup

169

The Ones Who Don’t Make It

172

Tidbits

175

PART SIX

The Real World Closes In

190

Autumn

193

Survivor’s Party

196

The Day We Leave

199

Epilogue

202

SOURCES

205

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

209

vii

Squatters in Paradise

Introduction

WHAT do you know about Yellowstone National Park?  What images are conjured in your mind at the mention of this pleasuring ground?  Geysers?  Wildlife?  Waterfalls?  How about stone-drunk employees playing rodeo clowns to  the buffalo, or taser-wielding Type A rangers, apocalyptic cults, tourons, haunted houses, hot-potting and love among the pines?

I know about Yellowstone.  I know because I've spent the better part of the last twenty-five years living and working here: not as a ranger or researcher, not as a conservationist, not as a lobbyist for the geothermal, logging, or mineral-extractive industries, nor as a corporate shill ... but as a savage.   In Park nomenclature a "savage" is an employee, a grunt, a wage slave who works for the Park concessionaire, who drives the buses, makes the beds, serves the food and pours the drinks for those who practice the global ritual of passing their time off from work in a mad frenzy of soi-disant leisure.

This book is the story of these long-suffering troops and what it is that draws us into this particular purlieu of the American West (and keeps some of us coming back year after year).  It is an irreverent tale and also a love story, because we're not complete fools; we love this place and the community which forms within its borders each summer.  As I mention within the pages of this book, Yellowstone employees are the Park's dirty little secret, and it's time we raised our scandalous little heads.  Why?  Well, to the purpose of this book, because it makes a good story.

Since ours is a transient community it has been for the most part a community without a voice.  I believe, however, that the unusual length of my Park sojourn has furnished me with the requisite bitterness to speak with a certain authority on this adumbral existence.  So gather around the campfire, kids, and let me tell you a story…

vii

Squatters in Paradise

vii

Squatters in Paradise

Part One

Down the Rabbit Hole

THE first of my days in Yellowstone began in Gardiner, Montana, where all Park employees check in for work.  While standing in line with my two forms of I.D. and a copy of my summer contract in hand I saw that someone had neatly stenciled the words of Arapooish, a Crow chief, on the wall above me:

Yellowstone is a good country.  The Great Spirit has put it exactly in the right place; while you are in it you fare well; whenever you go out of it, whichever way you go, you fare worse.

Those words would come to haunt me as the years went by, as I returned season after season. Over twenty years passed, all of them memorable, and every time I left the Park, whichever way I went, I generally fared worse.

“Why do you keep coming back?” I would be asked by first-season employees, aghast at my tenure.  “You’ll know when you come back,” I would wisely answer, because who can explain it?

That first summer I counted myself among the dead.  I’d just graduated from college with a poorly chosen degree and no desire to jump into a career.  Yellowstone was just a place to kill some time and put off the inevitable “real job” for a few months.  It was a respite, nothing more.

As I understand it, a lot of us start out that way.

So  I was  destined  to  become  a returner;  a  somewhat disreputable label that would only become more so as the years went by.  Parents and friends would chide me at first about my decision to run off to the mountains each summer.  They would listen with crooked smiles to my odd stories of life without traffic lights or television.  Soon, however, those smiles changed to expressions of alarm as my occasional trips threatened to become a habit.

Within the Park, returning employees are appreciated, but we receive no special treatment.  In fact, unless you move into management (or at least evince an interest), you’re considered a threat.  The reason for this is because as a returner you can see, from season to season, how things are getting worse.  Normally, upper management can inoculate themselves from this kind of criticism by accepting certain potentially toxic strains of employee into their ranks, thereby rendering them inert; the same method that Colonel Korn attempted against Yossarian in Catch-22:

"We will issue orders returning you to the States - really, we will - and all you have to do in return is..."

"What? What must I do?"

Colonel Korn laughed curtly.  "Like us."

Yossarian blinked.  "Like you?"

"Like us."

"Like you?"

"That's right," said Colonel Korn, nodding, gratified immeasurably by Yossarian’s guileless surprise and bewilderment.  "Like us.  Join us.  Be our pal.  Say nice things about us here and back in the States. Become one of the boys. Now, that isn't asking too much, is it?"

In my case, however, management was never really an option.  The closest I ever came to that dark wood was at the end of my seventh season, when a friend of mine had taken a Food and Beverage management position and wanted me to be his assistant.  He convinced me that the job was a sinecure and that he would recommend me.  I was working at Old Faithful at the time and had to drive up to Mammoth Hot Springs in the north for the interview with Maggie, the head of F & B.  It lasted about fourteen seconds:

“So you’re applying to be Brian’s assistant at the Lodge?”

“That’s right.”

“Well James, I’ve always been under the impression that you think this company sucks.”

On occasion, upper management can be fairly astute.

That first day, as I stood casting furtive glances up and down the queue, I wondered if there was anyone like me in that crowd; anxious, full of questions, eager to make friends (just the sort of person religious cults prey upon).  Many of them seemed to know one another already.  They were the returners.  But I didn’t have a job that was conducive to making friends.  I’d been hired as a security guard.  I would work the graveyard shift and represent hated authority to the young crowd.  Two things made me want to stay, however: the fact that I was free of my old life in college … and a girl.  She was my first Yellowstone Romance (a category of relationship defined by a feverish intensity which does not thrive outside the confines of the Park - not unlike a virus). While the relationship lasted longer than my management interview, the results were the same; I didn’t get the position I wanted.  Nonetheless, it had the benefit of keeping me in place long enough to fall under the spell of Yellowstone.  And from that came a long love affair.

For me, the Park is sacred ground. Ever since that first summer I’ve regarded it as my own little world. A secluded enclave perched on a high plateau and rimmed by ranges of sheltering mountains; the Absarokas, the Gallatins, the Madisons and the Tetons.  Like sentries they shield this Wonderland from the encroachment of cities, protecting the animals, rivers, and geysers within.

It is also my Brigadoon.  Every  season brings a revival as employees from all over the country and around the world are thrown together to form a working community, where we dance, briefly, before the season ends and we must leave until the next awakening.

One of the saddest stories I’ve read about Yellowstone and those who loved her was the departure of Harry Trischman. He had served in the Park for over thirty-five years, from 1909 to 1945, first as an Army scout and later as a Park ranger.  On the day of his retirement he left a short note on the washstand at Crevice Ranger Station.  It read, “They won’t let me sleep in their cabins anymore.” I can picture him.  I can almost hear him.

The Early Years

I SPENT my first two summers in Yellowstone as a security guard.  It was an easy if unrewarding job.  For the most part nothing happened during the last four hours of my shift, between two o’clock and six o’clock in the morning.  The first four hours were little better as I wandered the floors of the Old Faithful Inn and the employee dormitories, making sure there were no disturbances or unlocked doors.  Most of the time was spent exploring the environs of the Inn. I had a key ring with all the master keys, giving me access to every part of what I came to regard as my personal treehouse.  The Inn is constructed almost entirely of lodgepole pine logs, and is in fact considered the prototype of the great Western lodges.  Alternately referred to as the largest log building in the world and an architectural masterpiece, for a college kid it was like being let loose after-hours in a Funhouse.  There was the stairway leading to the roof - which has been off limits to tourists since a 7.5 earthquake in1959 compromised its structural integrity - but it was to me what the subterranean passages of nineteenth-century Paris were to the Phantom of the Opera.  I would spend hours haunting the upper walkways of the Inn, watching the insomniacs and late-night carousers from my perch eighty feet above their heads.  The old boards would creak under my footfall and occasionally people would turn their gazes upward, searching the darkness for the source of the noise.  “Ghosts,” they would say, and giddily hurry on. Many nights I would unlock the metal bar that lay across the door leading to the roof and climb the steep stairs to the narrow widow’s walk with its panoramic view of the geyser basin.  On nights when the moon was full I could watch Old Faithful erupt like a slow beam of light rising out of the ground, glowing against the piney black.

On occasion I would be approached by young girls offering their services if I took them to the roof. Other times there would be surprises lying in wait for me, like the time that I stumbled across a couple engaged in fellatio in the suspended garret that had formerly been used by musicians back in the day when quartets would play each evening for the tourists (and for a brief instant thought that I was seeing the ghost of a clarinetist).

Par contre, I would sometimes lurk beneath the Inn, opening basement doors and wandering hunched-over through  dirt-floored  passages,  banging  my  head  on pipes and inspecting fumaroles that hissed under the lobby and sent angry columns of steam into the dank air.  The beam of my flashlight would disturb pine martens and mice, sending them bounding for the shadows. Above me I could hear the muffled voices and footsteps of the guests and again, if I made any noise, they would pause and wonder about the spirits housed in this 100-year old building.

But it wasn't just me that gave the tourists pause. On several nights while I was passing the time in conversation with the girls at the front desk they would receive a distress call from one of the rooms.  A guest would swear they'd been visited by some presence.  I particularly remember when one guest, hastily clad in a bathrobe worn inside out, showed up at the front desk and demanded to be moved to another room.  When he was told that the Inn was full he became agitated; "I'm not going back in that room, god damn it!"  He had woken up in the middle of the night feeling pressure on his chest.  Sensing something in the room he had switched on the bedside lamp. He was alone, but on the blanket over his chest were distinct handprints that he could not have made himself.  Another guest swore that she had followed the ghost of a lovely young girl in a flowing nightgown down a hallway, losing her when she headed up the closed stairs to the roof.  "Should we call the rangers?" she asked.  Even in the daytime there were housekeepers who left rooms unfinished because they were made to feel unwelcome in any number of ways; cold drafts in windowless rooms, objects thrown at them while they were alone, voices that sent chills up their spines. It all lent a certain cachet to being associated with such a place.  After all, only the best buildings are haunted.

I had far more to fear from my fellow employees.  I would often receive calls from the Resident Coordinators in the dorms asking for assistance in breaking up parties or hauling off kids who were having a bad drug experience.  If I was lucky the party would have already broken up by the time I arrived, or the addled employee would have passed out and I would simply check to see if he was still breathing and then call the rangers. During my first season, however, there was a murder.  It was the result of a fatally mismatched pair of roommates who decided to settle their score in the woods, with one bludgeoning the other to death, then heading for the hills. He was apprehended a few weeks later far from the Park, but for those few weeks he was the backcountry bogeyman, deterring employees from going on camping trips for fear that he would turn up in the night and bludgeon them in their sleeping bags.

During my second season I met Jim, a world traveler who was twice my age and had somehow washed ashore in Yellowstone as a fellow security guard.  We would pass the prosy hours in conversation until dawn brought an end to our graveyard shifts. He held me rapt with his tales of working the Alaskan pipeline, slumming with hobos in Boston, living and working abroad. Articulate and inspiriting, he was to become my mentor for the next few years as we traveled together from Europe to Asia until he dismissed me as a boring Francophile while touting the pleasures of the East.  Bangkok, to be precise. Pat Pong district, to be more so.  His communiqués left little doubt that he thought the Park was for the birds.

But enough about Jim.  I've already written his book.  This book is for Yellowstone.

Resident Coordinator

I QUIT during my third season.  I’d been hired as a Resident Coordinator, responsible for keeping the employee dormitories clean and quiet, vacuuming and handing out rolls of toilet paper. Socially, it was a step up from Night Security, but with less pay.  During the early part of the season when buses full of employees were arriving daily we would often be detained from taking our meals in order to check-in the new arrivals. After this happened three or four times my supervisor, Bobbi, called to apologize for the extra hours.

“I don’t mind,” I said cheerily.  “As long as I’m getting paid for it.”

There was a pause.

“Well…you’re not,” she said.

“What do you mean I’m not?”

“It’s considered part of your job,” she explained.

“Then I should be paid for it,” I reasoned aloud.

“It’s part of your job,” she said firmly.

“Look, I’m not working for free,” I said, and receiving no response at the other end, added, “I’m going to dinner.”

Her voice returned, alarmed.

“We’ve got buses coming in!”

“Then you’d better get over here,” I said.

I hung up and phoned the other RC’s to let them know that they were now working for free. All of them put on their jackets and left for dinner. About halfway through the meal Bobbi came into the employee dining room and charged up to the table where all the RC’s were gathered.

“I’ve taken care of all the check-ins,” she said breathlessly. Then, fixing her glare on me she added, “I’ve left a list of things you need to do on your desk.”

It was a bitch-list: scrub out the garbage cans, wipe down the baseboards in the hallway, rewrite the resident lists, etc. etc. Employee-management relations were strained for several days, but the RC’s remained firm.  Minimum wage was one thing, no wage was quite another.  Unable to cow us with extra work (during the hours we were actually getting paid), or with guilt (“There’s too many people for me to check in by myself!”), Bobbi called her superiors in Mammoth, and they sent down Patti. Patti was a tall, spindling woman who gave the impression of being somehow hurt by our request for wages. She sat us all down at a table on the third floor of the Inn and promised that we would naturally be compensated for the extra work…later. Right now it just wasn’t in the budget to pay us for all these extra hours.  If we would only show some patience for a couple of months while things got settled around the Park we would be paid for our time and then some, but let us work together as a team and do the job at hand and hear no more of this unpleasant business.  Agreed?

Agreed.

August.  Things having settled into a pretty regular routine, we decided to ask for our bonuses. The word came back from Mammoth: Patti says she doesn’t recall ever making any such promise.

There are moments, like the one following this revelation, when you know that a line has been crossed.  The world of innocence slips a little further off the map while something else, something disturbing, takes its place.  At once you feel both the need to protest and the futility of it.  In a matter of days I was packed and back on the road, driving across summertime America on my way home.  Hi mom, mind if I crash here awhile? Thanks.

It all began as an adventure and an escape and it ended abruptly with my resignation.  It wasn’t a traumatic event.  I simply went on with my life.  I even took the opportunity to travel around the world.  I don’t think that I would have considered working in Yellowstone again except that two years after I left the Park it was caught up in a huge conflagration that attracted the attention of the media and threw my old stomping grounds on the nightly news.  The fires of ‘88 made the Park impossible to ignore, and I began to feel the pull of the West again.  I felt that Yellowstone was ailing and, being a friend, I needed to be at her bedside.

Pubtender

WHEN I reapplied for a job in Yellowstone after an absence of two years I was offered a job making beds.  Luckily I still had a few friends hanging around the Park and one of them happened to work in the Personnel Department at Mammoth.  Molly told me to tear up the Housekeeping contract I'd been sent and to wait for another contract which she would mail out in a few days.  She sent me a contract for Pubtender at Grant Village, serving beer and making nachos at the employee pub.

Molly had a good heart, and she was looking out for me, but the company was trying to mold her into one of their own. The results were predictable.  Soon after my arrival, as Molly was driving to work along the Gardner River one morning, she found herself debating whether to continue up the hill to work or drive her car off the cliff into the boulder-strewn river below. She decided to quit instead.

Yellowstone attracts many employees because of its unspoiled beauty and the promise of a natural experience, but the company has a different mission; to create and increase profit.  Every now and then the company fails to properly indoctrinate these new recruits, falls short in weaning them away from concern for the welfare of the Park and toward welfare for the rich, with the result that some of these youngsters recoil in disgust and escape - or end up in the river.

One of Molly's last acts before leaving the Park - securing a sinecure for me - was an altruistic one.  It was, then, an act of rebellion against her corporate masters.

Grant Village is the most hated location in Yellowstone.  It's situated on a beautiful curve of Yellowstone Lake known as West Thumb, close to thermal features and sporting a sublime view of unspoiled shoreline and mountains. It was also built in the middle of some of the most sensitive grizzly habitat in Yellowstone, close to several important cutthroat trout spawning streams where grizzlies take much of their spring nourishment, and only two miles from an already developed area. Grant Village was built with the understanding that another location, Fishing Bridge, would be closed.  The idea being that there would be zero net growth as far as development in the Park was concerned.  But Fishing Bridge never did close and Grant Village simply took its place among Park villages like an obnoxious, uninvited guest. Thus its moniker - The Mistake on the Lake.

This was new territory for me.  I'd come from Old Faithful,  which is regarded by employees at other locations the way New York  City  is regarded by the rest of America;  with envy and loathing.  Employees who didn't  work at Old  Faithful  would often tell me that they wouldn't work there - too crowded, ugly, overbuilt, overrated and so on - while singing the praises of their locations.  Having come from the Big Yellow Apple myself I was forced to listen to a lot of this crap, but the place turned out to be a good fit for me.  Grant Village was a small location, and far from the corporate officialdom of Mammoth.  There were no geysers or waterfalls to be photographed here, no historic Inns or horseback rides. It was just a quiet spot on the unfashionable thumb of Yellowstone Lake.               Tourists would drop off their luggage at one of the nondescript hotels and then leave to see the Park.  There was nothing to keep them here.  It meant that Grant Village, perhaps more than any other location in the Park, belonged to its employees.

The employee pub however, was a dump.  Brand new, it looked from the outside like a corrugated tin warehouse and from the inside like a high school cafeteria with garish pink and blue neon ceiling lights and plastic signs which spelled out the company rules.  After a few days the employees began to complain about its lack of atmosphere.  One of them made the trenchant observation that "You come into this place and it's just four white walls with signs that say 'No! No! No!'"  The Food and Beverage manager, a wholesome southerner who saw the pub as a necessary evil, was adamant in her refusal to allow any alteration to its spartan lack of appeal.  The employees simply took matters into their own hands and showed up one night armed with crayons and grease pencils, marking the austere walls with graffiti, street art and - for the less artistically inclined - anti-establishment squiggles.

"I hope you don't get in trouble for this," they said.  "But Jesus this place is so grim."

I didn't care. I sat on the bar and blew smoke rings while the carnage went on. I knew I'd be called in to the office when word got out about the damage to company property, but a little voice inside my head kept saying, Forget it, Jake.  This is Grant Village.

Squatters in Paradise

YELLOWSTONE employees, when anyone bothers to write about us, are generally portrayed as cheery bumpkins awash in the splendor of our summer home, as in this passage from Cal Glover’s A Grizzly Death in Yellowstone:

Then there are the young people who come here to mix work with pleasure.  Free, away from home, setting their own rules, experiencing life with a revived exuberance, a charged youthful vibrance.  They will work hard eight hours a day in their new summer jobs before hiking around the geyser basin at sunset, or going to Observation Point, or maybe visiting Hamilton’s for a milkshake or a cold beer.

Or this inside look at my ilk, provided by Joyce B. Lohse in A Yellowstone Savage:

Occasionally, campfire gatherings were organized and all employees were invited.  A campfire would be built in the hills and we would gather to share fellowship, songs, and laughter.  As the sweet smell of Mother Nature wafted up with the smoke of the campfire, we were enveloped in a clannish mood of good feelings.

Gosh.  Do we hold hands and sing koombaya, too?

The truth about  us employees  is far more complex  and disreputable  than  any  such  dismissive  account  (we're  not nicknamed savages for nothing).  We are as varied as the places we come from.  We make the Park work.  But to those who employ us, who are responsible for galvanizing us into a workforce, and to the rangers who see the other side of our lives outside of work, we are the Park’s dirty little secret.

Hiking takes a distant second to the preferred recreational activity among employees, which is drinking.  And since the advent of the portable, affordable satellite dish - which has been sprouting around the employee dorms lately like a noxious weed - enjoying the outdoors is in danger of falling to third place.

[OK, here's my 5-minute lecture: there's something creepy about television.  I watched the movie Ordinary People on the tube not too long ago, which I had already seen several times and count among my favorites.  There is a scene which takes place in the psychiatrist's office where a troubled teen, played by Timothy Hutton, has an angry outburst and screams at his analyst, "You wanna know what I think?  I think you have a fat, ugly wife and you go home every night and fuck her brains out!"  In the televised version, the last part of this outburst was changed to "and beat her brains out!"  Evidently, the standards of American media deem it more acceptable to beat your wife than to make love to her.  Don't get me wrong - I’m not a Luddite.  I’m not going to take a sledgehammer to the metal monsters that bring sit-coms to Yellowstone, but I do resent their presence as being antithetical to the alternative lifestyle I’ve come to enjoy here. With so much time on our hands outside of work without any mindless entertainment to keep us on our derrieres, we tend to lead interesting lives.               Weekends are spent partying, road-tripping, swimming, hot-potting, rafting, fishing, and being chased around by wild and humorless animals.  In short, enjoying life.  My greatest fear is that we’ll become as uninteresting as Mr. Glover’s portrayal, except that instead of hiking the geyser basin at sunset, “…the youngsters will return to their simple but comfortable dormitory rooms to watch reruns of Touched by an Angel.” Shoot me now.]

Sometimes our lifestyle runs counter to the law, as with drug use.  But the managers are not drug-enforcement officials, nor do they want to be, and they usually allow the issue to pass with the simple caveat, “There are 2.2 million acres in Yellowstone; use them wisely.”  Most of the problems occur with the legal drugs anyway, as when drunken employees get into fights at the pub or try to prove their manhood by facing off with Mother Nature (“Yeah, Frankie!  You get on that buffalo!  You ride that bad boy! You da man!  You da… Oh shit!”).  Chalk it up to youthful exuberance.  Mouseketeers we are not.  More to the point, if the company really wanted a professional staff (as they profess) they would be paying a decent wage.  Instead they prefer to hire planeloads of Eastern Europeans and Asians who work hard and come cheap and won’t quit after seeing their first paycheck.  It’s corporate and it’s cynical, but at least it’s an improvement over their former policy of busing winos from the Salt Lake City missions in order to plug the holes late in the season.  Cynical, yes, but it follows an age-old tradition here in the West.

Western entrepreneurs have long known where to look for men who might be willing to leave the confines of civilization to strike out into the unknown, facing Indians, madness, wild animals and possible death.  They went to the saloons.  For the price of a few rounds of drinks a man could cobble together an expedition in a single evening.  All he needed was a little money up front and a silver tongue.  As Charles M. Russell wrote:

In the old times, when the world had lots of wild countries and some brave explorer wanted men to go up agin danger and maybe starvation, he don't go to the fireside of home lovers; he finds the toughest street in a town where there's music, booze, and lots of fighters - he ain't lookin' for pets.  When he steps in this joint, he walks to the bar and asks them all up.  He don't bar nobody, not even the bartender.  He starts with making a good feller of himself.  This sport don't ask nobody who he is, but while he's buyin' drinks he's telling about  others that has gone to these countries and come back with gold in every pocket, an' it ain't long till all have signed up and joined.  If there's any danger of them weakening, he keeps them drunk.  There's been many a man that got drunk in St. Louis, and when he comes to out of this debauch he's hundreds of miles up the Missouri, on a line dragging a boat loaded with trade goods for the Injun country.  If he turns back he's liable to bump into war parties, so he stays. This game is played on sailor, woods and river men. Cowpunchers were of the same kind of goods - all careless, homeless, hard-drinking men.

I won’t say that every tinhorn hustler and cat's paw who shows up in these parts belongs here, but those of us who put up with the company and put off our “real” lives for love of the Park, although we may feel like squatters in paradise, are the ones who own the place more than anyone else.

First Winter

YELLOWSTONE is different in the winter.  It’s a more relaxed work environment.  There’s a real sense of community among the small staff.  It’s fun…  These are some of the terrible lies that were told me before I worked my first winter in the Park.

From the moment I was driven into the heart of Yellowstone aboard a freezing snowcoach on a gray December day with snow blowing in the wind, I felt trapped.  I was trapped.  We were dropped off at Old Faithful and would not see the outside world for three solid months.  Employees didn't have snowmobiles - which were generally regarded as loud, filthy machines which brought "bubbleheads" into the Park - and snowcoaches were available on a space-available basis only. These latter vehicles only plied the roads within the Park anyway, going no further than the border communities of Flagg Ranch and West Yellowstone; humble outposts in the best of times.  For most of the winter, employees would be confined within what was sardonically called The Triangle; three points which referred to the dorm, the workplace, and the pub.  Beyond that was the inhospitable natural world, white in tooth and claw.

We skied everywhere.  It was the most efficient means of non-motorized transport, and the effort it took to keep a rhythm going was enough to keep our bodies warm even during the coldest of mornings.  The only part of my body that suffered from the elements was the lower half of my face, and when I arrived at work after a few minutes of brisk skiing from the dorm I wouldn’t be able to talk intelligibly for a good ten minutes until my jaw thawed out.  People with beards would show up at the door with rosy cheeks and icicles hanging off their chins.  On those seriously cold mornings when the mercury would huddle in the bowl of the thermostat we would entertain ourselves by taking cups of hot coffee outside and throwing the contents into the air, then watching as the liquid vaporized into a brown cloud. It was on one of these severe mornings that I saw Old Faithful freeze. I wanted a picture of the geyser in winter and was willing to wait it out.  The thermally heated ground prevented any snow from accumulating on Geyser Hill so I left my skis at the visitor center and walked to the viewing area, stomping around in my boots to keep warm.  When the eruption came at last it looked twice as big as it did in the summer as the superheated water touched the bitter cold air and the steam expanded like a genie billowing out of a magic lamp.  It was then that I noticed the sound of breaking glass.  Another moment and I realized that what I was hearing were chunks of ice crashing to the ground from a great height; the boiling water was freezing in mid-air and shattering on impact around the base of the geyser.  I could see individual jets shooting out of the clouds of steam like comets with smoking tails, arcing gracefully to the ground where they splintered.  The extremes of hot and cold meeting in a beautiful and violent dance.

As the season progressed, The Triangle became smaller and smaller.  We became sick of seeing the same faces day after day. The lack of privacy. The cold. People would sit in their rooms and watch the snow falling outside their windows for hours.  There were fights in the pub.  Alcoholism was rampant.  Little things irritated us. I began to understand the murderous motivations of Margaret Trischman who, in 1899 in Yellowstone, slit the throat of her youngest child with a hunting knife.  She did it because he didn’t wash behind his ears like I told him to.

I kept my wits about me that winter thanks to the calm presence of Wilfred.  He was a middle-aged Native American dishwasher who practiced the traditional ways.  He took it upon himself to look after me and Augustine, another Native American, who was young and wild, often getting drunk and finding himself in trouble.  Wilfred had a way of calming the boy down, which was good because Augustine's manager was a typical redneck who enjoyed giving him a hard time for sport, making Wilfred's counseling more difficult.  He pointed out the manager one day in the dining room and assumed a serious expression.

"He better watch out," he said.  "Or else."

"Or else what?" I asked.

"Bad things."

Later that week, Augustine's manager was caught in a blizzard while skiing in the backcountry and was forced to spend the night in a hastily fashioned ice-cave.  He arrived the following day with frost-bitten feet and missed several days of work.  When he returned, Wilfred and I were in the bar having a drink.  We watched as he hobbled past in evident pain.  Wilfred raised his glass to the obliging Spirits and gave a knowing smile.

"I warned him," he said.

Hosting

THE pilot show for the old television series TAXI opens with Alex (Judd Hirsch) explaining to a new employee that there are no taxi drivers working at the garage; there are actors, boxers, artists…but no taxi drivers.  Waiters experience the same sense of denial, and in the summer of ’93 I joined their ranks.

I'd really wanted to be a bartender, and one of the reasons I'd agreed to work the previous winter season was that I was told it would give me first crack at the choice summer jobs.  When the manager in charge of hiring for the bars refused to answer my phone calls during the winter, however, I was forced to take whatever position was available by the time I threw in the towel in the spring.  I was told that there were several “entry level" positions left to choose from: making beds, scooping ice cream, scrubbing toilets.  It was a letdown, but it wasn’t really a surprise.  I’d become jaded after my third season and had no illusions about the Company.  I ended up accepting a job in the dining room at the Old Faithful Inn as a host.  I figured it would eventually lead to a server position where I could make a decent wage for a change, and while I was right about that, I still had to pay my dues as an entry level employee - again - before I’d be let into the Big Top.

So I spent the summer of ‘92 in a vise; caught between the tourists (who see the host stand as an obstacle between them and food) and the waiters (who would charge the host stand to complain about the too-many, too-few, too-cheap, too-fat, too-high-maintenance diners in their sections).  It was a thankless job.  When Old Faithful erupted during lunchtime we’d experience a geyser rush with hundreds of hungry vacationers lined all the way across the lobby.  Invariably someone would traipse to the front of the line and stick their face inches from mine to ask, “I don’t have to wait behind all these people, do I?”  (“Oh, of course not sir!  Why, you’re special! You just ignore all this rabble and waddle right on in!”).  As long as the crowd milling in front of the host stand was small - say, less than a dozen people - things went smoothly.  Any more than that and they threatened to become an angry mob.  Their griping would gradually become more vocal, like the hissing and burping of a mud pot, until someone would fly out of the crowd like a steaming piece of ejecta and confront me with their contorted red face.

"This is unacceptable!  Who's in charge of this operation?  I demand to see a manager!"

etc. etc. etc. ad nauseam.

It was as silly as a Monty Python sketch at times, and I could imagine myself responding to these outbursts in character: "Oh, I'm sorry sir.  You want the Argument department.  This is the Restaurant.  The Argument department is just down the hall, next to the Getting Hit On The Head With A Halibut department. Good day."

It was, in the end, a good tune-up for waiting tables, and when I landed that job I made a vow never to bug the hosts.  I broke it of course, but not too often.

My Bear Story

AFTER twenty years in the Park and over a thousand miles of trails hiked, you know that I have a bear story.  You’re right, and this is it.

I had just climbed the Middle Teton in our sister park to the south and was coming down the trail in the early evening with my thoughts on a juicy cheeseburger and a large pitcher of cold water when I saw a black bear on the trail ahead of me.  I stopped dead when I saw it, about thirty feet away.  It wasn’t all that big, but it was a bear and it had claws and sharp teeth while I was a skinny human with sore feet and blisters.  It was sniffing the ground and seemed oblivious to my presence, but it kept approaching even as I slowly backed away.  After a few minutes and a few more yards lost between us I decided to make my move.  I didn’t want to run away because the rangers always tell you, “It will trigger their chase instinct, and they can run much faster than you.”  I didn’t want to stand my ground because, well, do I really need to explain this? So I looked around for a tree. I know that black bears can climb trees but I figured that I stood a better chance of fighting back if I held the high ground.  To my left was a sturdy-looking pine with a lot of jutting branches.  I hopped off the trail and scampered up the trunk.  I climbed so fast that I think I even startled the bear, who stopped to watch me with his mouth agape. When I got to what I thought was a safe height, I waited, and listened.  I could no longer see the bear below me on account of the intervening branches but I could hear him crunching in the underbrush.  Then I heard the unmistakable sound of claws tearing into bark and something heavy pulling itself up towards me.  In that instant I accepted the fact that I was going to have to fight something that was stronger than me and impossible to reason with.  I had a brief flashback to junior high school and Brian Ocks, the class bully. I hoped that this would turn out better.  Then I saw it.  The bear moved up the tree so quickly that I felt completely outclassed, but it wasn’t in my tree. It had climbed the tree next to me and was now about six feet away, staring at me across the void.  I felt a wave of relief followed by fascination: I had never been this close to a bear in the wild.  I studied its coat, which was jet-black and glistening in the sun. Its eyes were fixed on me with a kind of wary curiosity.  I smiled.  It growled. I realized that making direct eye contact was probably not a good idea as I saw again those sharp claws digging deep into the bark. I was reminded of a line from Paul Schullery's book, Mountain Time, in which he makes the observation that "being mauled by a bear has always struck me as one of those wilderness experiences where the novelty wears off almost right away." I lowered my eyes and in that same instant saw two hikers coming up the trail below me.  Before I had a chance to shout out a warning they spotted us and sprang to action - they pulled out their cameras and began snapping pictures.  The bear went down the tree like a shot, hit the ground and charged them.  The hikers, a man and a woman, took different tacks.  The man stood his ground and waved his arms, shouting at the bear.  His companion shrieked and ran. The man’s courage lasted about four seconds before he, too, bolted for the hills with the bear on his heels.  I lost sight of them and realized that I was suddenly all alone.  I slowly climbed back down the tree and dusted off my pants before going on my way. I remember thinking that I should probably be concerned about those other hikers, but to be honest, I only wished that I had their pictures.

C.U.T.

A FEW miles north of Gardiner, where we check in for work each season, is a small but well-funded religious community that calls itself the Church Universal & Triumphant.  It’s a New Age cult that turns up in the local papers every now and then, usually getting bad write-ups because of their penchant for weapons procurement and building fallout shelters under their sprawling compound (from which they plan to emerge following the apocalypse).

They relocated here from California, purchasing the land - some 15,000 acres formerly owned by financier Malcolm Forbes - when it became available in the early 1980s.  The federal government had a chance to snap it up first, but demurred; land acquisition for wilderness protection not being a high priority under Reagan.  The cult quickly turned heads in the region by erecting what resembled an armed camp, complete with barracks and watchtowers.  Hiking trails and animal migratory routes through their property were fenced off and geothermal wells were drilled into local hot springs in order to utilize them as a cheap energy source.  They kept to themselves and disdained contact with the local community, thus raising hackles even further by ignoring the Western tradition of good-neighborliness. Having arrived with a siege mentality, predicting the coming apocalypse, they created a local variant by alienating the established community, which became hostile towards them.

Normally very secretive and suspicious of outsiders, they were holding a summer seminar at their compound, optimistically called the Royal Teton Ranch, which was nominally open to the local community. It seemed to be a calculated opening designed to improve their image, but it was an opening that I wanted to exploit.

Most of my friends were against the idea, and a few tried to warn me off as well. “They’ll brainwash you,” they said, evincing real concern that I might return with glazed eyes and bearing pamphlets of Church literature.  Two of my friends, co-workers in the dining room, proved more adventurous.  Carolyn and Carla drove with me up to the Ranch on our weekend.  Our preparations encompassed nothing more than following Carla’s apocryphal advice to “wear purple”.  When we arrived at the compound we parked the car and checked in at the trailer that served as the welcoming station.  The man behind the counter smiled and said that a bus would be coming by shortly to take us “to the Heart.” We beamed at this welcome news and went outside to wait in the sunshine.  It was, after all, a beautiful day, and what could be nicer than a trip to the Heart?  In a few minutes' time we noticed an old yellow schoolbus rumbling down the road along the river.  It stopped in front of us and we climbed aboard.  There was no one else around and the driver soon had us on our way. We rolled through the gates and across the bridge spanning the Yellowstone River, then up a dusty road toward their inner sanctum.  After a couple of miles, however, we stopped at another compound and the driver opened the door. We looked at each other.

“Is this the Heart?” Carolyn asked.

“Oh no,” the driver answered, and made a wave toward the hills.  “It’s over there.  A beautiful place.  This is just registration.”

We got off and followed a couple into a large auditorium where giant pictures of Jesus and other divinities stared down at us with unnaturally large, all-seeing eyes.  Tables were set up along the walls and people were milling about on the floor or sitting in the common area filling out paperwork.  Except for the pictures it was just like add-drop at college; the tables had placards above them announcing a variety of seminars being offered at the Heart and people were lined up in front of the more popular venues like Macrobiotic Cooking and Building Your Fallout Shelter.

We found the registration desk and said we wanted to visit the Heart.  The woman greeted us warmly but when we explained that we weren’t members of the C.U.T. (and had not paid the $300 registration fee) she cooled noticeably and said that visitors were not allowed access to the Heart.

“I can give you a guest pass,” she said, pulling three blue cards from a stack on the desk and handing them to us. “It allows you to walk around the University and see what we have to offer in the way of classes and so on.”

University seemed a rather flowery phrase for a few rooms in a warehouse and Carolyn began to protest, but the woman remained firm.

“The Heart is for Church members only.”

Another woman came up and stopped Carolyn’s further protestations by calling away our hostess.  We looked at one another glumly until I had a brilliant idea.

“Steal some yellow cards,” I whispered to Carolyn, who was still hovering over the desk.

She gave me a quick look, smiled comprehendingly, and after making sure no one was watching, slipped three cards off the stack and into her pocket.  Most of the people milling about had yellow cards pinned to their shirts and it seemed a good bet that they were the ones who had paid the registration fee.

The woman returned to her desk and seemed agitated.

“Well, was there something else?” she said, passing a hurried glance over her desk.

“No,” Carolyn smiled.  “We’ll just look around.”

The woman watched us move off and then returned her gaze to the desktop, straightening papers and patting her stacks of colored cards.

“Do you think she saw?” Carla asked.

Carolyn shook her head.  “Her back was turned, but she might be suspicious.”

I noticed a box of plastic slipcovers for pinning the cards to your shirt.  Everyone was wearing them, and the box was unguarded.  I gave a casual glance back at the registration desk and saw the woman eyeing us darkly. I told Carolyn to block her view, and as soon as she was between us I pilfered three of the covers. Just as quickly the woman was upon us, irritation playing over her face.

“Why are you standing around here?” she blurted out.  “The brochures are all over there.”               She motioned to the common area.

“Oh, thank you very much,” Carolyn said sweetly, and we moved off in the desired direction, to the apparent relief of our hostess.

We spent a few minutes in the common area, feigning interest in the brochures and gathering up a handsome quantity of literature, before going back outside to write our names on the passes and pinning them to our shirts. It wasn’t long before a bus arrived and we joined the small crowd continuing their journey to the Heart.

Everyone was smiling and chatty as the bus turned away from the compound and headed up the narrow track into the hills. We were feeling pleased with ourselves and in high spirits.  Then a woman stood up at the front of the bus and clapped her hands.

“Let’s all join in the Count-To-Nine Decree,” she said.

Instantly the air was vibrating with the peculiar high-speed chanting that no one understands save for the initiates.  We pretended to sing along and gave each other half-amused, half-anxious glances, glances that became rather more anxious the further into the hills we traveled.  There were checkpoints along the way. Gates had to be opened by men wearing sidearms and occasionally these men would step on the bus to exchange a few words with the driver and give the occupants the once-over with business-like eyes; none of which seemed to intimidate the faithful who kept right on smiling and chanting and clapping. We were going to the Heart, and it seemed like the only concern.

The narrow track finally opened out and the bus rolled to a stop on a hill overlooking a beautiful mountain meadow.  Above the surrounding green hills stood the blue-gray eminence of the Gallatin Range.  Sunlight bathed the valley and highlighted several white tents, including a large revival tent at the center.

This was the Heart.

Everyone piled out of the bus and started down the path toward the tents, talking excitedly.  We followed them a little behind, talking in low voices.  I had the feeling I was a virus that had yet to be detected by the body’s immune system.  We were all feeling a little vulnerable and paranoid, a feeling that increased at the final checkpoint: a bridge over a small stream where another armed man was inspecting nametags.  We put on our smiles when it was our turn and the man greeted us politely, glancing at our forged passes with a quick, appraising eye. Carla distracted him with a question.

"How are you today?"

“Joyful,” he replied quickly. “And you?”

“Very joyful,” she said, giving him a beatific smile which he returned as he waved us through.

Our false smiles became real as we crossed the river.  We’d all performed admirably and now we were taking our first strides across the soft grass into the Heart itself.  In the meadow were several people practicing t’ai ch’i. We watched them and I noticed that no one was wearing purple.  It didn’t matter, though.  There didn’t seem to be any uniformity in their dress at all: t-shirts, dress shirts, saris, fatigues…  At least we wouldn’t stand out. Strolling past the small tents we paused to look inside each one. A yoga class was just finishing up and the instructor was saying, “Let’s give ourselves three I-Am-Immortals.”  Their chants were just dying away as we looked into another tent with a television set playing a recorded message from Elizabeth Clare Prophet, the head of the Church.  Heads were bowed in prayer while others knelt before her image and made the sign of the cross.

Ms. Prophet, or Guru Ma as she is also known, took over the leadership of the Church when her husband, Mark Prophet, died (or rather, ascended).  He has taken his place among the pantheon of Ascended Masters now, but Guru Ma is still in touch with him, and many others, through her ability to channel their spirits. Her Rolodex of contacts in the other world is impressive, illustrated by the number of books she has produced: the “lost teachings” of Jesus, Buddha, Saint Germaine, Lanello (né Mark Prophet), and many others, encompassing virtually every spiritual influence since Ur rose from the reeds of Sumer.  Which could, I suppose, explain why they have believers from all parts of the world.  Theirs is a spiritual stew for every palate, reminiscent of the Fosterite religion in Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land:

The New Revelation and all doctrines and practices under it are all old stuff, very old. All you can say about it is that neither Foster nor Digby ever had an original thought in his life.  But they knew what would sell, in this day and age. So they pieced together a hundred time-worn tricks, gave them a new paint job, and they were in business.  A booming business, too.

We looked into the book tent next and found several sheaves of decrees - their chants.               We leafed through the pages with interest, curious to know what it is they get excited about.  Some of the titles proved instructive:

The End of World Communism and the International

Communist/Capitalist Conspiracy

God-Control of Nuclear Energy

The Patriot’s Decree

The Judgement of Abortion and the Abortionist

And my personal favorite:

Blue Cross - Blue Flame Protection

Used, no doubt, only in emergencies, as when the fires of 1988 in Yellowstone were raging towards their Ranch.  Instead of evacuating their property as the Park Service had strongly suggested, they lined up to face the flames and chanted at them. Standing in orderly fashion before the wall of smoke with ashes falling like snow around them, they raised their voices in unison against the onrushing conflagration. The fires that consumed a third of the Park and caused enormous embarrassment for the rangers were no match for the Lotus Flame of Guru Ma and her disciples.  It began to rain and the wind changed direction, sending the flames howling in despair back into the Park.

All of which made us more curious to see the Messenger herself.  We put away the books and hurried to the main tent, where she was scheduled to make her appearance.

The tent was packed.  People sat in folding chairs placed in a semi-circle around a stage that overflowed with flowers and was dominated by huge, staring portraits. Everyone sat straight-backed with upturned palms resting on their knees or held at the waist.  They were all mumbling or humming, filling the air with a vibrating drone.  Every now and then someone would let out a yelp as though they’d been administered a small electric shock.  If I closed my eyes I could imagine that I was sitting inside a great whirring engine that kept sputtering and hiccupping.  We took our seats as three women took center stage.  They positioned themselves around a large globe and held their hands over the North Pole, then led the congregation in a high-speed chant that had the exact rhythm of Blake’s “Tiger, tiger, burning bright, in the forest of the night,” which I began to chant.  This went on for about an hour and the three of us were stealing glances at our watches when the chant suddenly ceased and there were cries of “Mother!” coming from all sides.  And then she stood before us, Guru Ma, radiant in a white bathrobe.  Beaming at the audience with her round cherubic face, she began pumping her fist and brought the gathering to its feet with a rousing rendition of “God is my Victory!  Victory!  Victory!”  We were sitting off to the side and near the back, but a battery of TV sets kept us apprised of the action on stage.  As she sang, camera crews ensconced in cranes swooped over the crowd, filming enraptured faces and small groups who had begun to dance with joy.  All the while the aisles were being patrolled by clapping women in uniform who regarded the faithful with unsmiling scrutiny.  We’d positioned ourselves near an exit and I glanced back at the opening for reassurance, but saw instead a row of guards, arms folded, blocking the way. I turned my eyes forward and continued to sing the victory song, suddenly realizing that I was looking at an empty stage.  The cameras still showed a gleeful audience, but Mother had slipped away.  Then I spied her wandering near the wings.  She was sipping from a glass and watching the proceedings with a bored smile.  Now and then she would resume center stage, joining in the chant, but only until she seemed to forget the words or lose interest and wander off again.

“Is she drunk?” I asked Carolyn.

“Shh!”

When the chant was finished the Messenger sat down at a desk that had been placed at the front of the stage and began her sermon.  The audience was rapt as she adjusted her robe and fixed her eyes on the notes before her. She spoke for only a few minutes and most of what she said was lost in a mumbled delivery.  I strained to hear but only caught a few words: “the Illuminati… the Great White Brotherhood…,” and something about lepers. When she finished speaking the tent emptied in a mad rush for the cafeteria hut.  Guru Ma had melted quickly into the wings as soon as her sermon was over and the three of us exchanged disappointed looks at this rather anticlimactic appearance.  Still, we’d seen enough and decided to call it a day.

There were buses waiting on the hill and we climbed on board. No one sang on the return trip and the checkpoints were passed without fuss.  I began to feel sleepy.  I’d been guarded and tense all afternoon and now I could feel my body begin to relax.

“Well, I don’t think they’re going to be another Waco,” Carla said as we got back in the car.  “They don’t strike me as fanatical.”

Carolyn fired up the engine and jammed it in gear.  “They give me the fuckin’ creeps. I’m glad we’re leaving.”

“What do you think?” Carla asked, turning to the back seat where I’d begun to stretch out.

“Dunno,” I answered through half-closed eyes. “They could be harmless…or they could turn out to be the Mother of all cults.”

We had our first laugh since arriving, then started for home.

Part Two

Damaged Goods

"But I don't want to go among mad people," Alice remarked.

"Oh, you can't help that," said the Cat: "we're all mad here.  I'm mad.  You're mad."

"How do you know I'm mad?" said Alice.

"You must be," said the Cat, "or you wouldn't have come here."

Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

YELLOWSTONE is a haven for damaged goods.  It can seem like we’re all living on the Island of Misfit Toys (you’ve all seen Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer, right?).  We end up here because no one else will take us.  We’re kids who haven’t worked anywhere else and need job experience; we’re recovering alcoholics who’ve blown all our other chances; we’re hiding from the law; we’re dreamers who can’t find our niche in capitalist America; we’re good ole boys who like the simple life of fishin’ and drinkin’. What we have in common is the shared sense that we lack an important component that makes for a Solid Citizen. You can hear it in our laments at the employee pub:

“Who wants an accountant…with dyslexia?”

"Who wants a waiter...with a prosthetic leg?"

“Who wants a               manager…with a record of sexual harassment?”

Here comes Yellowstone, here comes Yellowstone, right down Yellowstone Lane…

*               *               *

I’ve often heard comments from people that I don’t look my age, which I answer with, “It’s living in the mountains that does it.”  But working in Yellowstone doesn’t keep you young so much as it keeps you immature. I remember getting red-faced with anger once because another waiter criticized me for not putting raisins in the bowl of oatmeal that I was bringing to a table.  “Yeah? Well only assholes put raisins in their oatmeal!” I shot back.  After this exchange I went to the bathroom and put my head in my hands and thought, “Oh my God.  I just lost my temper over a bowl of oats.”

As the summer progresses and staffing becomes thinner, the pressures of overwork and life in a small community begin to take their toll.  It must be a part of the brain's defense mechanism to revert to childishness under stress.  The warning signs are easy to spot: tempers flare easily, humor becomes silly or cruel, objects are thrown in the kitchen and guests are in real danger of eating things that were never meant to be ingested.

It’s comical to see a manager trying to apply June standards in September.  Torn between his knowledge of how the restaurant is supposed to be run and what he can reasonably expect of his shell-shocked squad, he sometimes makes a poor decision. “Pat, you’re not wearing black socks!”  The waiter turns to him, fingers twitching around his corkscrew, smiles and says, “Yeah. I shouldn’t be allowed to wait tables today.” He rises to go and the manager, glancing at his section chart with several names already crossed out, waves him off.  “No, no. That’s all right.  You can wear your bunny socks.”

Another manager - let's call her Pollyanna - tried to re-instill a passable work ethic in us late one season by plastering the walls of the kitchen with dozens of motivational placards with sayings like, There's No "I" In Team; If You've Got Time To Lean, You've Got Time To Clean; and, SMILE!. They remained on the wall in front of the waiter's pre-check area for weeks until no one even saw them anymore.  They became like wallpaper, a part of the background, until the day my friend Audrey and I decided to give them a makeover.  We cut out some placards and added our own sayings, surreptitiously replacing about a third of the old signs with these forgeries.  No one even noticed until a couple of weeks later when a waiter happened to read one of the counterfeit placards out of boredom and was startled out of his stupor.

"'Kill Your Mother'!!?"

The managers figured it out about a week after that and down came all the signs exhorting the staff to use drugs, steal, and masturbate.  Adolescent perhaps, but we were never again subjected to Maoist-style sloganeering, and the new manager, having used up her meager bag of motivational tricks, became an office shut-in.

The managers, who try to remain composed, usually lose it in September and start sobbing openly in front of the remnants of their staff, who sit impassively with circles under their eyes watching the funny man go wah-wah.

Once, during a particularly cruel summer, I remember staggering up to a manager during a brutal lunch.  She was at the host stand trying to control the chaos. “I need eight separate checks,” I said slowly.  She looked at me and the color drained from her face. We were the walking dead at that point, and looked it.  She handed me the checks and something like compassion came over her face.  “Why are you still here?” she whispered.

It's the same every summer.  Come August, the employees start dropping like British soldiers in Flanders fields. But I not only finished the season, I returned the following summer and the summer after that & on & on.  My loyalty was strange considering the amount of abuse I put up with (and if one were to put any faith in my many end-of-season vows never to return). I wasn't always sure of the wisdom of my choice when I showed up in Gardiner each spring, either.  At times I compared myself to the main character in the allegorical Japanese film Woman in the Dunes who, duped into working in a pit where he must shovel sand all day, he spends his time contemplating and arranging his escape.  After several unsuccessful attempts he finally pulls it off and finds himself standing above the pit where so much toil has been unfairly wrung from him.  However, instead of fleeing, he returns to the pit, telling himself that he can escape another day. You see, he was not alone down there.  There was a woman in the dunes.

Or maybe the woman was the dunes.  It was an allegorical film, after all.  The point being that I seemed to be listening to a siren song that drew me off my path and put me in the weeds. I usually only felt this way during particularly bad lunches, though.

Service Industry

WHAT is it about the service industry that makes it such a soul-destroying enterprise?  It doesn’t have to be, but it has that (deserved) reputation in the Park.  Part of the problem is being forced to live a non-assertive life at work.  We must treat the tourists with deference, even when they act like children, and as any parent of a two-year old can tell you, appeasing the monster only makes it worse. So the guests throw tantrums and get free desserts in the dining  room while their waiters try to remain agreeable, suppressing the urge to spank the snotty 60-year old.

Once I actually had a woman leap out of her chair and scream in my face, “What do you mean you ran out of polenta? I came to Yellowstone specifically for the polenta!”  An image came to mind of the glossy cover of a Martha Stewart magazine showing lovely custard-colored squares of polenta peeking over a tastefully decorated hand-thrown ceramic dish. Below, in quotes, would be the words of the lady herself, “If you’re like me, when you think of Yellowstone, you think of polenta!”  I’d like to think that this woman went to bed in tears that night because she realized she’d blurted out something shamefully stupid in anger and regretted every word - but I doubt it.  As a friend of mine once told me, “Food is an emotional subject.” And so it is. How else to explain someone who allows their entire vacation to be “ruined” because they had to wait twenty minutes for their appetizer?

“So, Bob, how was your vacation in Yellowstone?”

“It sucked.  My steak was overcooked.”

There is a wonderful passage in the book Praise by Australian author Andrew McGahan which nicely sums up the service industry for what it is:

Working in pubs ... was at best a dreary and mindless existence. To be merely competent at it - to refrain, say, from abusing forty or fifty per cent of your customers - often took a soul-destroying effort.  To have enthusiasm demanded of you, that was more than the job was worth.

Or this passage from Gregory David Roberts, another Aussie, who wrote in Shantaram:

If you want to curdle the milk of your human kindness, or turn your compassion into contempt, get a job as a waitress or a cleaner.  The two fastest ways to develop a healthy loathing for the human race and its destiny is to serve it food, or clean up after it, on the minimum wage.

And speaking of wages, there are invariably the people who can think of no worse execration than "There goes your tip." They are the ones who measure the success or un-success of their vacations by how much free shit they can finagle.  They're the same folks who randomly come up to you and say things like, "You guys could make so much money if you'd only [fill in the blank with chintzy money-making scheme]."               Never mind the fact that that's not the reason Yellowstone was created as a national park and preserve in the first place, these people are appalled by the fact that they're not being screwed enough by corporate America.

Another part of the problem is having to shoulder the burdens of the special needs people who land in your lap.  I’ve had customers hand me cards that read, “I have a food allergy.  If you serve me anything prepared with peanut products I will die a horrible death.” I don’t need this.  I want to hand them back a card that reads, “I make $3 an hour. Why are you putting your life in my hands?”

When things get too bad in your section, you can always retreat to the kitchen for a little commiseration. The noisy, crowded, safe zone in the back-of-the-house becomes the scene for impromptu group therapy sessions.  They’re models of efficiency, too, because no one has the time to listen:

“Asshole at table twenty-three!”

“Table thirty-one stiffed me!”

“I just got triple-seated!”

“I’m in the weeeeeds!!”

But all this drama is short-lived. Most people, I’m sure, forget their dining experience the moment they leave the restaurant. What was of life-threatening importance a few minutes earlier (getting that third refill of iced-tea, for example) fades into the inconsequentiality it deserved in the first place.               Leaving the dining room is like emerging from a dream.  People’s bellies are full and perhaps they feel a twinge of regret for having called their 18-year old waitress “incompetent,” but then they jettison the entire experience,  leaving only the emotional  scars on the kids who are simply trying to enjoy a summer in America’s first national park.

The Exotic Yellowstone

Employee

ARE we really exotic?  The tourists seem to think so.  I’ve heard on many occasions from vacationing Americans that working in Yellowstone is something they’d often dreamed about and how lucky we are to be working here.  Maybe they’re right.  So many people go straight from high school or college into a career that they experience very little else in the way of alternative lifestyles.  It’s only after their routines have become fixed and comfortable that they wonder, Well, did I ever really consider my options? And in a driven society like ours where taking the time to smell the roses is the equivalent of taking a five-minute break during a 100-yard dash, it’s an apposite question, especially for someone who thinks that working in a national park is just about the oddest thing that a person could do.

“What do you do when you’re not here?” people ask, as if this job is something I’m doing on a lark when I’m not being a respected teacher of Law at Stanford.  That this could be my main job and source of income strikes most people as quaint, if a bit suspect.  Since it differs from their own experience they want to know more about it.  Like Bill McKibben says in The Age of Missing Information, "We're starved for impressions, curious about how people live their lives who don't inhabit the great suburban sameness."  While most of the visitors who quiz me on the ins and outs of park life are genuinely interested and polite, there are the inevitable snoops who insist on giving me the third degree - something you simply tolerate as a waiter in order to preserve your tip.

I recently had a young married couple in my section who double-teamed me with a rapid-fire interrogation: “How did you get a job here?  Where do you live?  What do they pay you?  Are you married?  Did you go to college?”  One question overlapping the other until I felt like holding up my hand to say, “Hold it!  This is a bit personal, isn’t it? I mean, all I know about you is what salad dressing you like!” As far as I know, people in professions outside of the service industry don’t have to put up with these intrusions.  Imagine, for example, the Turkish president addressing George W. Bush as the American president tries to talk him into supporting the war against Iraq: “Yes, yes, Mr. Bush, that is all very interesting.  But tell me, does your wife wear lacy undergarments, hmm?”

As bad as it can be sometimes, these episodes are becoming less and less frequent thanks to the recent influx of numerous Eastern Europeans and Asians as seasonal help.  Now the tourists grill them because they’re far more exotic than I am (“Ooh, you’re from Poland!  Are you a communist?  Do you live in a hut? Do you want to defect? Say something in Polish!”).  It's not unusual for up to 50% of the staff to hail from abroad these days, and sometimes the tourists get confused by all this cosmopolitanism:

"And where are you from?"

"Illinois."

"Well, your English is perfect!"

But the fact of the matter is that more and more often now when people look at my nametag, which also shows where I’m from, they look disappointed: “Oh, you’re from here.” And that’s the end of that.  I may be less exotic now, but it’s really just one less hoop to jump through for my fuckin’ tip.

We Are The Xanterrans!

SOMETHING new greeted us when we checked in for work one recent spring: the company previously known as AMFAC had become Xanterra.  When I asked if the old company had sold off its interests I was told that, “No, Xanterra is still AMFAC.  They just changed the name for the Park-end of operations.”  When I asked how they had come up with the new name she said, “It’s a combination of Xanadu, which means ‘beautiful place’, and terra, which means ‘earth’.  So it means, uh, ‘beautiful earth place’.”  Evidently one of the lads at corporate headquarters in Denver decided to make use of his half-semester of Latin to produce a bastard word for us folks here in Yellowstone.  It could have been worse, though.  We might have been called Utopeons (which would be bastardized Greek for “low-wage workers in the middle of nowhere”).

*               *               *

The employees who arrive before their locations open to the public have an advantage over their counterparts arriving later in the season: they go through a leisurely week-long training period before dealing with a single tourist.  The later arrivals are generally thrown to the wolves after a perfunctory orientation.  This is especially unnerving for restaurant employees who are not prepared for the chaos of a lunch at the Old Faithful Inn. Two or three hours following around a “seasoned” waiter suffices for these late-comers, and their first solo experience is generally the stuff of nightmares.  I don’t mean to overstate the efficacy of training however, because it’s ninety-percent worthless.  During training week we’re subjected to one "Awareness" program after another: the Bloodborne Pathogens Awareness program, the Slips, Trips, & Falls Awareness program, the Fire Safety Awareness program, the Alcohol Awareness program, the Sexual Harassment Awareness program, the Hanta Virus Awareness program, etc. etc. After each sleep-inducing session (during which not even exciting visual aids such as latex gloves and vomit bags can keep our attention) we are given a paper to sign that basically says, “Yes, I have received training on how to identify a fire/drunk/dead rat.”  At the end of the training period the company has a mountain of signed disclaimers to cover its ass in virtually any eventuality, but the employees know precious little about how to do their jobs.

Training also has the collateral effect of boring the staff to such a degree that the prospect of getting to work, even washing dishes, can seem like a blessed relief. The real advantage of arriving early is that business is slow so you have time to adjust to the new job and you get to make those early-season friendships that become so important later on when bus tours start slamming into Old Faithful at the rate of six or seven a day.  By then you have a support group to help you through the stress of dealing with irate packs of high-maintenance tourists who’ve been fermenting in a hot bus for several days.  But I jump ahead.  In the early season most of the employees are still starry-eyed and looking forward to a season filled with hikes, parties, raft trips, drug trips, and sex. Some of them will realize their dreams and take away sweet memories of a once-in-a-lifetime summer, while others - like me - will decide to stick around beautiful earth place for a while longer.

Car Trouble

SOMETIMES my Yellowstone adventure would start a thousand miles before I even reached the Park.  Driving cross-country would often involve perils far outstripping those encountered on a hike through bear-infested woods. When my parents lived in Colorado it was only a ten- or twelve-hour drive from home to the Park, which I would accomplish in a day. One summer however, my parents moved to the east coast and my seven-hundred mile day-trip ballooned into a twenty-four-hundred mile multi-day odyssey of marathon turns behind the wheel and uncomfortable naps taken in rest stops, curled amongst my belongings while listening to the growl of truck engines late into the night.

My first trips were marked by sightseeing.  Having been released from home and college I viewed my car as a spaceship, able to take me to all the odd spots in the universe of Rand McNally's Road Atlas.  Place names like Hell's Half Acre would send me veering off my path and into hysterics as I stood smiling with my camera in front of the tackiest Americana the west could offer.  I never did understand the concept of the "Rock Shop" and their prevalence made me wonder if they weren't an important part of Wyoming's economy.  After all, there wasn't much else in Wyoming until you reached the northwest corner, where Yellowstone and the Tetons rose up like twin Cinderellas in a stepsister state.

Crossing the vastness of America for the first time as a young man I was inspired by the barrenness of it.  Driving across Wyoming, with dimly perceived ranges of mountains in the distance that never seemed to get any closer, gave me an appreciation for the pioneers who covered this same track in lumbering wagons.  I wrote a letter to one of my friends back in Colorado while stopped for the night in a pullout.  By the light of an overhead bulb I sketched a love song for the open road, nursed to poetry by the silence and solitude and the unmoving clock.  Later, when I saw my friend again, all he could say about my opus was, "Yeah, that was weird, man."  But I didn't mind. I understood  that  we'd  become  different  people,  my college friends and I. I knew the road now. I was free.  Sometimes I would be driving in the middle of nowhere and there would be a town, without any break in the landscape to indicate a reason for its existence.  Cars would appear, people, schoolbuses, traffic lights... and then it would all be gone, fading to nothing in the rearview mirror, just like that. And always I would think, people are in love back there.

Later, when the journey became Homeric, I would just grit my teeth and shoot across the blacktop until exhaustion drove me into one of the asphalt eddies to pass a few hours of sleep.  It was during these extended trips that I encountered problems, and they weren't always because I'd pushed myself or my poor car too hard. The first incident I remember occurred in the arid plains just east of the Park.  I'd made it all the way from Massachusetts to Wyoming without incident when, after having just fueled up in Casper, my Datsun sputtered and died on a lonely stretch of highway in the middle of the night.  I managed to fire it up again but it only went a few hundred yards before dying again.  I could see a light in the distance and continued the routine of driving until it died, waiting, driving a little further, until I reached the source of that hopeful light.  It took me a couple of hours but it turned out to be an all-night gas station/convenience store. The problem was that it was Memorial Day weekend and all the mechanics were gone for the next two days. I bought a coffee and sat forlornly in a plastic chair, trying to conjure up the devil so that I could sell my soul for 300 miles worth of travel.  Instead, I got an angel.  He was a lanky, 80-year old man with a face full of creases who came into the store at six a.m. for a chat with the lady behind the counter.  She tipped him off about my predicament and he came over with a kindly, inquiring smile.

“Hear you got a problem with your vehicle,” he said with the bedside manner of a country doctor.  “Mind if I take a look?”

Soon he was halfway inside my engine, poking around under the hood with relish as he told me his life story.

“I used to work full-time as a mechanic, but I figured when I hit sixty I didn’t need to have a boss no more. I just like tinkerin' around cars and I can do that in my spare time.  I’m too old to worry about showin’ up on time for work in the mornin’s. Not that I’m not an early bird.  I don’t sleep near as much as I used to... Whoah!  Looka here!”

He held up my fuel filter and then sniffed it.

“That don’t even smell like gas,” he said.

He walked over to his pickup and returned with a piece of rubber hose and a clear plastic container.

“I got a suspicion,” he said, opening up my gas cap and inserting the hose.

He started to suck on the other end and then gagged as the contents of my tank came into his mouth.  He dropped the hose into the container and spat several times before he spoke.

“You see? That’s nothin’ but water.”

He lifted the container for me to see.  There was about an inch of gasoline at the bottom, the rest was clear liquid - water.

“Where’d you fill up last?” he asked.

“Casper,” I said.  “Just before I conked out.”

He nodded.  “Those folks in Casper got into some trouble over this awhile back; sellin’ water instead of gas.  They know better, but some of ‘em still do it.  Makes me mad.”

He drained out the last of my tank and told me to fill up with gas at the station.

“And put some Heet in there. That’ll help ‘cause you still got water in the lines.”

When my car was running again - coughing and sputtering occasionally, but running - I turned to my benefic mechanic and said, “I really appreciate this.  What do I owe you?”

He scuffed the ground with his shoe and drawled, “Aw, you don’t owe me nothin'. I’ll just keep that bit o' gasoline I got outa your car when I siphoned ‘er.”

I protested, but the most that he would accept was fifteen dollars, which he took with some embarrassment.  As I drove away from this lonely oasis that had been my only hope during the night, I felt a certain comfort in the knowledge that this harsh open range could be home to such obliging souls.

*               *               *

I had a different experience in Rapid City, South Dakota.

It was night - these things always seem to happen at night on lonely stretches of highway - when my headlights began to dim. It got so bad that I started looking for a pullout to pass the rest of the night, but before I found one the engine quit.  I steered my silent car onto the shoulder, crunching over gravel to a stop. There was nothing, absolutely nothing around me.  But it could have been worse; I was only ten miles from Rapid City.  So I grabbed a flashlight and stood outside, waving the light at the few cars that did come by. Most of them not only didn't stop, they veered away from me into the far lane as if I might reach in their windows as they passed and yank them out of their vehicles. Finally I was offered a ride by an older couple that had seen me earlier as they were going in the opposite direction.

"We said, 'If he's still there when we come back, we'll give him a lift.'  It was a long time, though.  Thought you'd've been picked up by now."

They dropped me off at a gas station in Rapid City where the night crew was gathered in the garage, looking bored.

"Yer how far down the road?" asked one.

"About ten miles," I said.

He whistled.  "Won't be cheap."

The others laughed.

"Well, c'mon then," he said, lifting his ungainly self out of the chair.

We got in the tow truck and set off. He didn't strike me as the type who'd make interesting conversation, but I thought I might as well pick his brain as long as I was making this unscheduled stop.

"So what do people do in Rapid City with their free time?"

He shrugged.  "Drink."

I was trying to think of another question when he suddenly made a detour, having spotted the flashing lights of a police cruiser down a side street.

"This'll just take a minute.  Gotta check this out."

He pulled alongside the cruiser and leaned out the window. "Anybody need a tow here?"

The patrolman shook his head. "Just some drunk kids."

They talked for several minutes about the state of youth in America while I pictured my car, abandoned on the prairie, discovered by some bored locals with tire irons.  At length we moved on, but he was going the wrong way down the highway.

"I'm east of here," I said.  "You're going west."

This irritated him.

"Don't you even know where your car is?"

He grumbled all the way to a turnaround and gave a mock sigh.

"Well, it's your money."

My car was discovered and brought back to the garage. They decided the problem was the alternator and replaced it.  When I got back in the car, several hundred dollars poorer, I noticed the alternator light was still on.

"Oh, don't worry about that," one of the mechanics said.  "There's just somethin' wrong with the light.  You can have it replaced at yer garage back home."

I drove off, but my headlights began to dim again.  Before the car died I turned around on the highway and sped back toward Rapid City. I didn't quite make it, but the car went silent within walking distance of a phone booth, where I made an angry call to the flunkies at the garage.

"Send your truck east of the city - that's east - about five miles.  And I don't expect to be charged for the tow."

The truck arrived and we returned to town without exchanging a word.  I found that the night crew had scattered in my absence and been replaced with nominally more adept day workers. They at least fixed the problem.  It turned out that the night crew had taken out my alternator, then put it right back in, mistaking it for the replacement.  When the mechanics finished with my car they left it on the far side of the lot, as though to distance themselves from the embarrassment it had caused them.

The whole sorry episode made me think of the movie Badlands in which Martin Sheen plays a serial killer who goes on a bloody road trip in 1950's America from South Dakota to Montana. When he finally leaves the Dakotas he says, “If the Communists ever drop the atomic bomb, I wish they'd put it right in the middle of Rapid City."

Amen.

*               *               *

This next incident could have easily drawn the final curtain on my travels.  I was driving to L.A. to see my brother after a winter season in the Park when - at night, on a lonely stretch of road in the Nevada desert - my vehicle exploded.  I was driving a small pickup and my first thought as I spun sideways down the highway with sparks flying over the hood and the acrid smell of burning rubber filling my nostrils was, "What did I have in the back that was combustible?"  I'd been thrown forward over the steering wheel which I gripped with both arms, twisting it hard to keep the truck from rolling over.  When I came to a stop I had a sudden image of the cab bursting into flames so I bailed out and ran toward the median, almost getting nailed in the process by a car that swerved onto the shoulder to avoid hitting my truck.

When the initial drama was over I looked back at my vehicle, or what was left of it. The entire back end was gone.  It looked like a huge metal insect that someone had squashed and left to die.  It didn't seem real.  My clothes, books, stereo, gifts for my brother...everything lay scattered on the road or tangled in the twisted metal.

It was then that I noticed the SUV lying on its side on the other side of the road.  It was still dark, but the lights of passing vehicles illuminated its hulk.  I watched as two figures crawled out of a window and crossed the highway toward me.  It then dawned on me that my truck hadn't exploded, I had been rear-ended by this vehicle, which must have been doing well over a hundred.  The two came closer, they were just kids, and the first one gave me a smile.

"Dude! Are you okay?"

The other one, probably the driver, hung back and regarded me warily.  A few cars had stopped and one of the drivers who had a cell phone called in the accident.  As the sun rose the police arrived and laid a ring of flares around my truck, waving along the cars which slowed to a crawl, revealing excited faces pressed against windows and children with mouths agape.

It had finally happened - I was a tourist attraction.

The Backcountry

AUDREY and I decided to hike the Gneiss Creek Trail in May.  Audrey was my new best friend since we’d both been through wrenching love affairs the year before and had commiserated with each other like the wounded animals we were. When she returned for another season I knew that Yellowstone had gotten under her skin (though she tended to regard it the way Woody Allen regarded life in his film Annie Hall: "Full of loneliness and misery and suffering and unhappiness, and it's all over much too quickly"). Most of the spring hiking in Yellowstone is done in the north, which is at a lower elevation than the rest of the Park and usually dries out first, but it had been a warm spring and we decided to take a chance on this trail which was a relatively short drive from Old Faithful.  So we drove to the trailhead, just beyond the Park's western boundary, and set off under cloudy skies.  The trail would take us back into the Park through rolling meadows and pine forest. Our plan was to hitch-hike back to the car when we came out at the opposite end, fourteen miles away.

There was something unusual about this hike.  It felt odd to be exploring this area of the Park so early in the season, while the distant mountains still retained a lacework of snow and the ground sagged under our footfalls like a wet sponge.  We knew that we were the first hikers of the season on this trail and we breathed in the virgin scents of the earth like stone-age migrants crossing the land bridge between Asia and the Americas.  It was easy to lose oneself in reverie out here, especially when one's conversation trailed away and nature took the microphone.  We wandered through an ancient stand of dead pines, long ago denuded of their branches and whitened by the sun.  They now stood tall among the debris of their fallen comrades and clacked together in the breeze.

"Like bamboo wind chimes," Audrey remarked, breaking a long silence between us.

We came across the remnant of a large, recently burned tree that resembled a giant human form.  Audrey posed beside it in the same position so that it looked like her elongated shadow. The eeriness of the place began to sink in as each step brought us deeper into the enchanted forest.

Then the trail disappeared ahead of us.  In its place was a swamp.  Water that was snowpack only days before covered the trail as far as we could see.

I stood at the edge of this shallow lake and looked for another way around, but the water seemed to be everywhere.  We decided to pick our way as best we could by leaping from fallen log to fallen log. It was slow going and I had to retrace my steps several times because a promising piece of deadfall had led nowhere. Then I saw Audrey wading ahead of me in water that sloshed up to her shins.

“Isn’t that water freezing?” I asked.

“It’s  not  so  bad  once  you  get  used  to  it,”  she  said nonchalantly.

So I hopped in.  Icy water poured into my shoes like angry jellyfish and stung the shit out of my feet. I cursed Audrey under my breath as I sloshed ahead, wriggling my toes to make sure they hadn’t fallen off. But she was right.  After a few minutes of pain my feet felt fine again.  The water trapped in my boots was warmed by body heat and it insulated my feet from the cold. We plopped along until we reached higher ground, then removed and replaced our sodden socks.

We enjoyed the speed of hiking on dry land again and made good time until we came across the reeking carcass of a bison.  It was right in the middle of the trail, and the ground around it was spattered with white droppings from scavenger birds which had been picking at it.  The odor was overpowering and we hustled quickly past.

“That stench is going to bring every grizzly within ten miles,” I said.

“They might already be here,” Audrey said reassuringly.

That was the point where the trail simply petered out.

In front of us was an impassable jumble of fallen logs while the view on either side of us held nothing but virgin forest.

It could have been a moment right out of The Blair Witch Project, when the young hikers begin to realize they’re in mortal danger and start blaming each other for their predicament.  We were, in fact, supposed to have had three people on this hike, but Robert hadn’t shown up at the meeting place so we’d gone ahead without him.  It was a blessing.  Robert was a fun guy to have around until things started to go wrong.  In the dining room he could keep half the staff in stitches until he got triple-seated, then he became Mr. Hyde and lashed out mercilessly at his co-workers, management, God.  If he'd been with us on this hike, this would have been the moment he'd have snapped. Screaming, he would have wound his fingers around my throat and Audrey would have had to brain him with a piece of deadfall. Instead, the two of us sat down on a log and studied the topo map until we found the secret passage out of the labyrinth, then made tracks away from the Minotaur.

When we reached a large meadow we were faced with a different problem - live bison.  Lots of them.  An entire herd blocked our passage as we came into the clearing.  A few of them turned their wooly heads to glower at us and emit displeased grunts.  There was no way around them.

“What now?” Audrey asked.

I saw that the herd was split into two groups. There was a gap of about fifty yards between them.  The trail was just beyond.

“We could go there,” I said, indicating the gap.

“Right in the middle of them?!”

“I don’t think they’ll bother us,” I said, trying to sound persuasive.

“Well...ok.”

So we set off, leaving the security of the woods and exposing ourselves to an open meadow filled with large prehistoric animals which regarded us with hostile eyes.  Off to one side of the meadow we saw a herd of elk which we hadn’t noticed before.  As soon as they spied us they ran off; a bull elk holding his antlered head aloft as he pranced away as if trying to maintain his dignity in retreat.  The bison, on the other hand, never moved an inch. They simply swayed their horned heads to follow our progress until we could see their bellies jerk with the annoyed grunts they gave at our approach.

I felt like I was walking a knife edge.  I simply did not know how these animals were going to react to our presence.  My sphincter opened and closed involuntarily as we drew closer to the herd and finally stood between them.  The trail was only a few yards ahead of us, but in front of us was a stream I hadn’t seen from the other side of the meadow.  As I tried to gauge whether or not we could jump it I heard Audrey let out a cry.

"Uh oh!"

I looked up to see a bull bison walking toward us.  He had detached himself from the herd to our right and was following the stream in our direction.

“Jump!” I shouted.

We both took a few steps back and then ran up to the stream, launching ourselves over the clear running water and hitting the ground in stride.  We made the woods and instinctively dove behind the first tree we reached, panting and peeking around the trunk to see if there was a ton of agitated beast on our tails.  The bison had stopped to watch us, but demurred at pursuit.

From this point we marched onward like single-minded soldiers through miles of wooded trail, over deadfall and through rivers that had overflowed their banks.  We had ceased to talk or notice our surroundings.  Our bodies had begun to ache and we pressed on because to press on meant the hike would be over sooner.  We consulted the topo map more often and thought of food - hot food, and lots of it.

We reached the top of a hill and dropped to the ground, spreading the map on the grass between us.  Below us was a meadow, and beyond that was a small ridge, and just over that was the Madison River and the end of the trail.  We gathered up our gear and started down the hill, then stopped.  The meadow was swarming with bison.

Audrey and I exchanged exasperated glances and flopped back down on the grass.

“Fucking bison,” she muttered.

Then it began to rain. It had been alternating between cloudy and sunny skies all day, but now the clouds became darker and droplets began to pelt the ground around us.  We put on our ponchos and sat in silence, watching the bison roam the meadow below.  It was just a passing rain, sprinkling here and there, and we were warm and comfortable in our ponchos as we watched the Lewis & Clark scene unfold for the two of us. When the rain stopped and we got back on our feet, I felt revived.

“How many people in America do you think have passed a rainy afternoon on a hilltop watching a herd of bison?”  I wondered aloud.

Audrey was too busy choreographing the bison from her hilltop perch to answer, swinging her arms like an inspired conductor.

“You there!  Move to the right!  You've had enough grass! You!  Get up! Don't make me come down there!"

The herd slowly moved on and we passed unmolested through the final meadow.  At the top of the far ridge we found ourselves looking down into the Madison River valley.  In our haste to reach the road we charged into a gully and startled a couple of bison who initially ran away but then turned to face us.

“Uh oh!”

Human and bison squared off in a frozen moment.  Man and beast exchanged appraising looks and, finding ourselves lacking, we slowly backed away, edging toward the sanctuary of some nearby trees.  As we did so, we whispered bison-honoring mantras under our breath to keep the brutes at bay:

Venerable One.  Do not charge the puny humans you see before you.

We wish only to pass through your Noble Wallow.

Do not gore us with your Mighty Horns.

Do not trample us beneath your August Hoofs.

Then we darted into the woods.

Below us was the road, and when we saw the sun glint off the metal surface of a passing car the spell of the wild was broken. The hike was already history and we talked happily about our past adventures even as we skidded down the dusty slope.  We were alive.  We were so alive.

Accommodations

THE accommodations for employees are varied, but only within the narrow parameters of communal living.  Which is to say, they run the gamut from dormitories to trailer parks.  The vast majority of Yellowstone employees live in dormitories, while those who live in their own self-contained  RVs  are generally retirees or young couples who want a little more privacy than the dorms afford and, in keeping with our looking-glass  world,  are  regarded as having  the classiest digs.  There are the rare exceptions of course, such as the dishwasher who slept in an ice cave during the winter because he didn't like his roommate (and who kept moving his den every couple of weeks in order to keep the rangers from discovering his lonesome and illegal hideaway).  We don't commute from outside the Park, either.  The nearest town is thirty miles away and the nearest city - that can be called a city - is more than two hours' drive away.

The worst dorm at Old Faithful is Laurel.  It's the oldest, noisiest, most poorly appointed flophouse on location.  If you're a first-year employee, you're probably going to be put in Laurel.  It was constructed (or rather, re-constructed) from the remains of the Fountain Hotel, which had been built in 1891 as a first-class tourist lodge and boasted electric lights, steam heat, hot spring baths, and luxurious balls where ladies in silk dresses could dance with soldiers from the nearby Fountain Soldiers' Station.  All this elegance came to an abrupt end in 1915, the year that cars were allowed into Yellowstone.  Since the Fountain Hotel was built at the terminus of a day's stagecoach ride, it became superfluous with the advent of the automobile, which made it possible to reach the geyser basins in a matter of hours.  Bypassed, the hotel closed the following year and was torn down in 1927, whereupon it was refashioned into Laurel dormitory at Old Faithful (minus any residual grandeur).

The one advantage of this dorm is that it's located right behind the Old Faithful Inn, whereas the other dorms require a fifteen-minute walk to get to work.  So you can sleep for an extra couple of minutes if you live in Laurel and still make it to work on time, which is a real benefit because it's hard to get any sleep at all in that place.  There are other dorms on location which are in the same shabby category as Laurel, but they lack its reputation for being a party dorm, which has persisted over the years (and I don't think any of the other dorms can match Laurel's record for drug raids and arrests).

I live in Larkspur.  Larkspur is uptown as dorms go. It's the newest residence and offers the most spacious rooms, all with their own bathrooms - as opposed to the wretched community bathrooms of the older dorms - as well as vanities and locking closets.  It looks more like a hotel than an employee residence. Still, the rooms are cubby-holes that have to be shared with a roommate and come with a long list of restrictions concerning things like candles, smoking, noise, cooking, wall hangings, and etc.

The funny thing is that I've been living in dorms for so long now that I wouldn't know what to do with all the space of an entire house.  One summer I decided to check out the local real estate market to see if there were any affordable houses near the Park, and while I found several I rejected them all after a short walk among the rooms thinking,  "I don't have enough stuff to make this place looked lived in."  I imagined inviting friends over and standing around the bare living room with its one papasan chair, holding our drink coasters in our palms as our voices echoed in the sterile space.  I did find a small one-bedroom condominium that was already furnished and which was small enough not to scare me off, but it would have been too much like a dorm room where the only way to put a personal stamp on one’s surroundings is to alter the arrangement of the furniture.  In the end I realized that my reluctance to buy any of these properties had more to do with location than anything else. That is, none of them were in Yellowstone.  There's a big difference between the Park and its outside environs.  The border towns lack the magic of the Park, and its residents tend to regard the Park economically as a roadside attraction that brings money into what would otherwise be a string of ghost towns.  Settling in to one of these gateway communities would be like Humbert Humbert marrying Charlotte Haze in order to be close to his beloved Lolita.

I decided to keep it simple and continue to let someone else worry about electricity, maintenance and repair.  Besides, the only real drawback to dorm life is that you often don’t know what you’re going to get in the way of a roommate, which brings me to my next chapter...

Roommates

MY first roommate in Yellowstone was a pot-head.  He used to work as a roadie for various rock bands and he’d gotten paid in weed – only the best: Maui Wowie, California sinsemilla, the occasional hashish.  He’d gauge the success of his summers not in cash but in kilos (“’80 was my best year, man.  Aerosmith.  Five primo kilos!”).  He worked as a room attendant and was fired halfway through the season for blowing off too many shifts.

The following summer it was Daryl, a ladies’ man.  It wasn’t enough for him to get a girl into his bed, he felt the need to put girls in my bed, too.  He’d often bring a couple of willing young demoiselles back to the room and try to pawn me off on the one he was least interested in.  Daryl was fired halfway through the season for coming to work drunk.

I was a Resident Coordinator my third season and had a room to myself.  I missed Daryl.

Hector Francisco Velasquez Rodriguez was roommate #3. He was full of himself.  “It’s all about machismo,” he would say. “American men are wimps.  I don’t know how women can stand them.” I told him that I was gay just to piss him off.  “Man, don’t tell me that!  You’re kidding, right? You ain’t no fag.  I can’t be livin’ with no homo, man.  That ain’t macho!”  Hector quit halfway through the season because he said that his boss, “a degenerate,” kept touching him.

I was assigned my own cabin for the next two seasons since I was running the Grant Village employee pub [although they tried to give me a roommate, once sending an errand boy to surreptitiously ready my cabin for a new arrival while I was in the shower.  I heard the racket as my belongings were being thrown about and stormed out of the bathroom wrapped in a towel to chase off the toady].

Back at Old Faithful I shared a cabin with Derek, who was working at the Inn front desk.  I was working at the host stand at the restaurant and we would often stay up late into the night sharing stupid tourist stories: “Listen to this! I had a guy tonight who said that if he wasn’t seated in the next five minutes he was going to call his Senator!  Yah ha ha!”  Derek fell in love with a co-worker, saw the affair go sour, and quit.

Roommate #5, Tom, was gay. He was studying Shiatsu massage with a view to giving comfort to AIDS sufferers in his adopted hometown of Chicago.  He said that I was the best roommate he’d had in the Park because, unlike previous cohabitants, I didn’t come home drunk and pee on him while he was asleep.

Carolyn was roommate #6.  My first female roommate.  She was a fiery liberal with a strong sex drive that often got her into trouble.  Once, at the motorcycle rally in Sturgis, she confronted a racist in a bar full of toughs who was collecting signatures on a petition to "keep niggers out of Sturgis."  She chased him out of the bar, shaming him with an admirable drunken eloquence, then left with one of the hot young bikers that caught her eye. When she woke up in his tent the next morning she saw with horror that they’d been sleeping under a huge Nazi flag. Carolyn, a survivor, made it to the end of the season.

Brian just wanted to be left alone, but he was too good- looking to get his wish.  A quiet, thoughtful guy who eventually joined the Peace Corps and served in Bangladesh, he was stalked and seduced by a lovely, unbalanced girl who kicked his ass in a fit of jealous pique during the Survivor’s Party at the end of the season.

In ‘96 my roommate was Phil.  That’s all I remember about him.

Scott was my roommate for the next four seasons. He’d done way too much acid in his teens and was now interested only in sex and exotic drug experiences.  One night he got his hands on some Amazonian tree frog excretion (don’t ask me how) and smoked it in the room.  I left him alone for a few hours so that he could experience his “visions” and when I returned I found him prostrate on the floor lamenting  that he’d just finished  a two-hour vomiting jag.  His only vision was that he saw me as a friend, which I never forgot. He was eventually removed from his position as a tour bus driver because of his penchant for running into things (once knocking out the power to an entire location when he backed his bus into an electrical transformer).

Doug was always angry and never cleaned the bathroom.

Dale would crawl into bed with his laptop after every shift and masturbate to The Brady Bunch on DVD ("Marsha! Marsha!! Marsha!!!”).

My last roommate was Pete.  He was a Food and Beverage Manager who decided to demote himself to waiter, preferring to make more money and not have to answer to anyone about his off-duty drinking.  He bought a satellite dish and brought television into the room, for which I never forgave him.

If I ever buy my own house, it will be for these reasons.

Coffee!  Coffee!

AFTER a few months in Yellowstone, especially if you don’t have a car to get you out of Dodge once in a while, you become a bit starved for the simple things one takes for granted in the real world.  Pets, for example.  If a tourist happens to bring his dog to the Park - not as common an event as one might think due to all the strictures against domestic animals - the poor creature is virtually assaulted by cooing employees stroking the bewildered canine with hands that long for pets left at home.  To us, dogs and cats are as remarkable as bison and elk are to the tourists. It's all a part of our looking-glass world.  Take cities: most people leave the city in their leisure time to explore more natural settings, while Park employees head for them.  We feel a bit like hillbillies loading up the old jalopy for a rare and exciting trip to town.

"I'm gonna buy me some socks!"

Staying too long in the Park without venturing out occasionally can be too much of a good thing.  To walk into a department store after a summer sequestered from the barrage of advertising that forms the background against which we live in a capitalist society can be dangerous for vulnerable waifs like us who haven't been jacked into the matrix for a while.  I think of Robin Williams in Moscow on the Hudson playing a Russian defector who stands transfixed before the vast selection of coffee in an American supermarket.  He claws at the tins in disbelief, crying "Coffee!  Coffee!  Coffee!  Coffee!  Coffee!"

An oft-heard refrain coming from employees back from a trip to Bozeman, Montana, or Jackson, Wyoming, on their weekends is, "I just blew my whole paycheck." It's so easy to do. The gift shops in the Park are a poor substitute for the malls of the real world, although you can still find us poking around the aisles like glum children, hoping to find an article that isn't stamped with the word Yellowstone or decorated with an anthropomorphic bear.  My family finally let me know after suffering many years of gift shop presents for birthdays, Mother's Days, Father's Days, etc. that they'd had enough:

"No more Yellowstone-themed gifts, okay?"

I should have realized it myself sooner, since every visit home revealed a curio cabinet that resembled more and more the dusty "Old Yellowstone Artifacts" cabinet in the West Yellowstone bookstore.

We're suckers for Walmart.  We enter the store the way a dehydrated cowboy in the movies approaches the horse's trough in town: plunging head first and gulping great hatfuls of filthy water.

"Aaah!  Just what I need - a fern for my room."

"A breadmaker!"

"A bean-bag chair!"

It's a madness, and soon our cars are filled with junk we wouldn't look at twice in the real world, but which somehow connects us to that world we left behind.

The next step in detox is when we realize that there's nothing we want in the trough.  The first time that I wandered through a department store without buying anything - without even being tempted to buy anything - I knew that I'd become a dangerous person.  I had come to the epiphany that awaits all those who spend time in quiet places: we don't need all this shit.  The last thing a consumer-based society needs is some prophet coming out of the hills with that message.

Fortunately, when the season ends and we return to the real world, couches in front of television sets all across America are re-occupied by former prophets laughing at sit-coms and eating Cheesy Poofs.

Man Vs. Beast

THE crowds were gathered around Old Faithful as usual, waiting for the eruption with cameras poised.  But this afternoon there was a bonus.  A bull bison was grazing nearby, moving slowly within range of the viewfinders.  The colorful line of tourists, forming an aureole around the geyser, shifted their gaze from the steaming vent of Old Faithful to the slow advance of the picturesque beast. Several people abandoned their posts in order to snap a photo of the bison, but most held their ground, hoping that the animal would be thoughtful enough to situate itself within the frame of their cameras just as Old Faithful erupted.  But as the geyser began to preview its eruption with a few preliminary splashes, the folks at the far end of the boardwalk realized that they were not well-positioned to capture the shot of a lifetime, so they emigrated en masse and began swelling the ranks of those closest to the bison.  The boardwalk, being too narrow to accommodate such a concentration, soon overflowed with tourists (now become tourons) who sought a better vantage by abandoning the boardwalk entirely.  Each step encouraged the next as people inched closer and closer toward the placid herbivore until, with a low grunt, the animal charged. Everyone scattered.  Everyone, that is, except for the unfortunate old man confined to a wheelchair.  Unable to go beyond the boardwalk, he had been relegated to catching glimpses of the animal through the crowd.  As the last of the tourons cleared out of his line of vision he was treated, briefly, to an unobstructed view of an iconic American symbol bearing down on him in full fury. Untouched by the man's obvious handicap, the bison lowered its head and tore the occupant from his seat, tossing him headlong into a ditch and callously trampling his wheelchair underfoot.

The moral of the story being, of course, a curt nod to Darwin's theory of natural selection.  It is the old and the weak who are most often culled from the herd.

*               *               *

An acquaintance of mine who had gone to the backcountry office at Old Faithful to pick up a camping permit told me the following story:

There was another backpacker ahead of him in the ranger station when he arrived, so he was passing the time studying a trail map of the Park when the radio behind the desk crackled to life.  It was a ranger calling in a traffic jam in Hayden Valley.

"Might be a bear jam," came the voice.  "There's a lot of people here and they seem pretty excited."

The backcountry ranger was listening now as well.  After a minute of silence the update came in.  The voice sounded disappointed and puzzled.

“It’s just a coyote.”

The ranger shrugged and returned to his paperwork while my friend turned his attention back to the map when the voice on the radio suddenly returned:

"...with a poodle in its mouth."

*               *               *

Marmots are cute.  They resemble fat groundhogs and can be found in most rocky areas of the Park and anywhere tourists congregate. They're the size of small dogs and will often stand on their hind feet begging for scraps of food.  They accede to having their picture taken at close range and will readily eat out of the palm of your hand.  It's hard to resist their antics and sometimes people will get the idea that they're too darn cute to be wild.  This misconception  leads to much  amusement  for Park employees who know that marmots not only carry ticks that can transmit Rocky  Mountain spotted fever, but that temperamentally they more closely resemble the bunny rabbit in Monty Python's Holy Grail than any house pet.

For example.

While waiting for Old Faithful to erupt, a group of tourists was being entertained by the marmots which live underneath the boardwalk.  One gentleman decided it would make a cute picture to hold one of the furry animals in his arms.  He pretended to offer one a handful of food, then scooped up the unsuspecting rodent and smiled for the camera. In an instant he found himself holding a thrashing ball of sharp teeth and claws which shredded his just-bought Old Faithful t-shirt and bloodied his arms.  He dropped the furious animal - or at least he tried to - and found that it had sunk its teeth into his wrist and wouldn't let go. Experiencing real pain now, he began to scream and punch the miniature teddy bear until it dropped to the ground and waddled angrily away under the boardwalk.

My roommate, who worked at the front desk that summer, told me that this gentleman had turned up the next day holding his purple, swollen hand in a makeshift bandage while demanding that the rangers "put down" the dangerous beast.

*               *               *

Bats can often be seen cartwheeling around the upper reaches of the lobby at the Old Faithful Inn. The highest floor, which is a residential area for the bellhops, is nick-named Bat's Alley. To sit in the upper balcony and watch these acrobats put on their nightly show adds to the mystique of the place, as though one were in a haunted mansion.  Occasionally, one of them will dart through the second floor balcony overlooking the restaurant and find themselves circling over the heads of unsuspecting diners. In these instances it's not unusual for a waiter to come charging out of the kitchen with a fully laden tray, only to be startled by a dark form rushing at his face.  The bat will careen away as plates and covers go crashing to the floor. The tourists, who've settled in for a quiet meal, react to the intruder according to their personal inclinations; some find the appearance of a wild animal in this decorous setting to be delightfully incongruous, while others feel scandalized at having their dinner party crashed by a decidedly  unfashionable member of the Park's ecosystem. Often a diner will realize there's a bat in the restaurant only when it actually flies in their face. A shriek will be heard and the other diners will turn their heads and wonder what her problem is - too much to drink, probably - until they spot the uninvited guest for themselves.

The job of removing the intruder falls to the dining room staff, who will usually wait for it to alight and trap it gently in the folds of a napkin and release it outside.  If the bat refuses to stop its circulations around the dining room it becomes necessary to snare it - again, accomplished with napkins.  As the bat nears, two or three employees will toss napkins in its path. The bat, confused by the sudden appearance of these obstacles, will usually fly into one of them and fall harmlessly to the carpet where it can be safely scooped up. Once however, with a bat thus ensnared, a touron leaped up from his table where several of his companions were in apoplexy over the appearance of this filthy, disease-bearing rodent with wings, and stomped on it. After having terminated the uncouth animal, he strutted back to his table like a returning hero.  The employees, saddened by this tragic turn of events, removed the carcass from the dining room and took it into the kitchen.  Curled in a ball and dark-complected, it looked remarkably like a buffalo wing.

Yellowstone Romances

YELLOWSTONE Romances, about which I’ve already spoken a bit, are not for the meek.  They exist under the intense scrutiny of co-workers, dormitory residents, tourists, managers… everybody. The lead characters are generally able to drown out the world in love's first flush and ignore the welling whispers around them (as anyone knows who has witnessed a young couple in love) but sadly, such blissful ignorance is fleeting, and soon the background noise begins to orchestrate their affairs.  Love is like an indulged childhood - everyone who has experienced it and lost it wants it back - and those who've taken center stage in these dramas know that they're its superstars with all the attendant basking-in-the-glow and complaints about loss of privacy.  A friend of mine once told me that her love life always followed the same pattern: feast or famine.  If she wasn't involved with a guy she was pretty much left alone, but as soon as she started hanging out with someone it was as if she'd been sprayed with some irresistible pheromone that made the male population go wild.  She would move into the rarified air of the stars.

Yellowstone couples provide much of the entertainment previously provided outside the Park by television, and their ups and downs are followed with a tabloid-like preoccupation.  Few couples survive.

There is another factor which contributes to the evanescent quality of these relationships.  One could call it the magic of Yellowstone (which is lost when the season ends and one has to re-enter the real world), or less poetically - the wake-up call. Once the spotlight snaps off at season's end, stranding scores of Yellowstone lovers in an empty auditorium, it's easy for the players to leave the stage by different exits.

Another friend who had formed a close relationship with a girl during one summer, returned the next season alone.  I asked him what had become of his partner, with whom he'd been inseparable.

"We lasted until about fifty miles outside the Park," he said wryly.

They were supposed to have traveled to Denver, stayed at the house of one of her cousins, and then found work at a ski resort for the winter.  The arguments began in central Wyoming and by the time they reached Denver they were no longer speaking.  He dropped her off at the relative's house and drove on alone.

None of this would seem of any particular note except for the intensity of these relationships while they were hot.  I used to think that the couplings which began in the Park would only grow stronger once they had sloughed off the annoyance of being under a microscope.  That they would be able to relax and have the freedom to enjoy each other's company in new surroundings, finding strength in having survived the ordeal of being a curiosity where every twist and turn of their relationship was sent through the rumor mill and staying together became almost an act of defiance.  So why was it that the opposite was true? Why was it that when one of the players returned a year or two later, alone, they would scowl at the mere mention of their erstwhile lover's name? "Oh, her."

I imagine that it's the same reason why deep sea creatures disintegrate when brought to the surface of the ocean: they actually thrive on the pressure.  It's their natural environment, and once the pressure is gone they fall apart like wet toilet paper.  All the talk about vanting to be alone is disingenuous. In the end, it's the genuinely quiet relationships that survive. The ones which provide entertainment for the rest of us get cancelled as quickly as an ill-conceived sitcom.

Part Three

Scott from Texas

“THERE she blows!”

“I can’t fit it in the viewfinder!”

“I’m getting wet!”

“It stinks!”

“The animals don’t even notice!”

“It was bigger when I was a kid.”

“Stick your hand in the runoff.  Dare ya!”

“It’s dying now.”

“Let’s eat!”

In the dining room at the Old Faithful Inn the staff steel themselves for another geyser rush, the third one of the lunch shift. Tired bodies, drawn out of bed too early and thrown into the noisy environs of the kitchen and forced to deal with the petulant demands of hurried tourists, always hurried, prepare for the onslaught.  The bussers set the last of the tables as the waiters take a long, pensive look at their quiet sections, the scene of so much chaos during the last geyser rush.  In a few minutes their sections will once again be filled with people and these tables will resemble bird's nests; full of ugly, squawking,  hungry creatures. The first of the tourists arrive at the host stand and begin the usual mantra: “Window seat! Non-smoking!  Geyser view!” The hosts make a brave stand at first, explaining that they can’t slam the waiter who’s got the window tables, that the windows only face the parking lot anyway, but resistance is futile and soon the hosts are following the guests into the dining room, meeting the furious glances of the servers (“What are you doing?  What are you doing!”) with apologetic  and helpless shrugs.  A tour bus shows up and disgorges its cargo of irritable New Yorkers who stagger into the dining room on canes and walkers and kvetch about their bowels and dietary needs to the servers who couldn’t care less and just want to get their order quickly off to the kitchen. No dice.  They want Reuben sandwiches with the dressing on the side, and don’t grill it, and I don’t want any cheese, and what do you have besides french fries, french fries give me gas, and we’re in a hurry so tell the cook chop-chop and don’t forget my goddam mud pie!

In the kitchen the server’s calm demeanor falls away as he shouts out the details of the latest asshole in his station while rushing back and forth for drinks and salads and carry-out boxes and monkey dishes for side dressings and I hope you choke on your Reuben you fucking harpy, just let me be there when your last artery snaps shut from that mud pie and the fork falls from your hand as you clutch your heart and pitch forward onto the table.

Behind waiter’s alley lies the cook’s line; a narrow, sweltering section of hot steel and noisy industrial fans blowing away the smoke and stench from burnt hamburgers and grease traps. This small space being populated by an angry clan of misfits who mustn’t be seen by the general public.  They regard the waiters with envy and loathing because the waiters make all the fuckin’ money so what do they have to bitch about? I’m the one up to my ass in grease, sweating over a hot grill in the middle of fuckin’ summer, all for six lousy bucks an hour.  I’m the one who cooks the fuckin’ food, all they do is bring it out and make a big fuckin’ show of it. If I had a bullshit personality I’d be makin’ the big bucks too.  I fuckin’ earn my money through honest goddam sweat. Jesus I hate this job.

Meanwhile, the server is looking around for his busser. There are four tables out there who haven’t even gotten water yet and their orders have already been taken.  The server can’t do everything and the managers are nowhere to be seen.  Then he finds out that his busser is in the manager’s office and he’s just been fired because the rangers found some pot in his room.

In the midst of all this, one of the waiters is doing something absolutely suicidal. He’s up at the host stand asking for more tables. He takes them back himself; four-tops, six-tops, tour tables! He completely fills his station and even picks up a few extra tables that were seated in a closed section by mistake.  The rest of the servers feel both thankful and bewildered: Why would anyone do that to themselves?  Especially Scott, who’s never been treated with anything but contempt by management, who regard him as a slacker and refuse to give him any dinner shifts.  The hosts smile approvingly - now there’s a waiter! - as he single-handedly  removes the crush of impatient, scowling people closing in on the host stand.  He patiently goes from table to table, taking orders, smiling at special requests which he dutifully notes in his book. Another emotion wells up in the servers around him.  They feel shame. Here is someone doing his job amidst all the insanity and being professional about it, even charming.  His co-workers begin to wonder if perhaps their complaints are illegitimate, maybe they are a bunch of whiners after all.  They have a few moments of doubt as they dash about the kitchen, grabbing extra butter for table twenty-four, crackers for the kid at fourteen, more salsa for the two-top, reduced to butter-crackers-salsa, butter-crackers-salsa as they speed from station to kitchen.

But something is amiss in section one. The people are getting fidgety. They’ve been here for twenty minutes and all they have is a glass of water. Someone waves down the busser and asks for the waiter.  The busser runs off to the kitchen and glances at the pre-check station, then looks down waiter’s alley. He asks if anyone has seen Scott and follows up on the leads: the smoker’s area and the bathroom.  I hate this, having to track down my server.  Now all his tables are gonna be pissed off and we’ll get lousy tips. Not here either. Maybe the manager’s office. No again.  They should make me a server.  I’m responsible. Maybe I passed him and he’s already out in the dining room. He sneaks a glance around Fort Apache - the log partition in the dining room - but some guests spot him and fix him with a stern look that says, “Well?  Where’s our waiter? Where’s our food?  What the hell’s going on here?”  The busser smiles, raises a finger - just a moment - and darts back inside. In the manager’s office he explains that he can’t find his server, looked everywhere, tables are getting mad.  The search continues over the same ground with the same results.  No sign of Scott.  Then, by the employee rest rooms, in the trash, they make a gruesome discovery... a pile of discarded tickets.  Written on each one is the same phrase: Fuck this place. The manager turns pale. The tickets drop from her hands like obscene flash cards as she realizes that she must face the angry mob herself.  Word spreads through the kitchen:  Scott left. He planned it.

It was the perfect parting shot.  Having relieved the dining room staff of dozens of tables while simultaneously dumping them in the lap of a manager who had shown him nothing but disrespect, Scott became an outlaw-hero, our own Jesse James.

Celebs

THE routine of geyser rushes, bus tours, and faux VIP tables consisting of company hacks will sometimes be pierced by the arrival of the truly famous.  When one of these luminaries is scheduled to arrive it seems to trigger an atavistic response from the managerial staff who busy themselves hallowing the ground in preparation for the appearance of Jove.  The line workers are kept busy polishing silverware and realigning  glasses  and  napkins   into  the  most  aesthetically pleasing tabletop formations;  the managers rush about giving pedantic advice about how to act when The One arrives; the Location Manager haunts the kitchen, looking manifestly out-of-place as he worriedly assesses the staff (“Don’t you think we should send Paula home?  Those dark circles under her eyes are so unattractive”).  The employee chosen to greet the honored guest is sure to have his night ruined.  After the first blush of pride in having been chosen, the less glamorous reality of the situation soon becomes apparent.  In an effort to make certain the guest receives the undivided attention of their waiter, no other tables are seated in that section.  So the waiter waits, seeing his section lie fallow as the VIPs make a fashionably late appearance.  They never arrive alone, or all at once.  Their entourage trickles in, placing random orders, leaving, returning, unconcerned with the waiter's attempts to hold the steps of service together.  In the meantime the hosts have buckled under the pressure and begin filling up his section.  In the kitchen the waiter is accosted by apprehensive managers who ask "Is everything all right?" over and over again.  Add to this the inquiries of the other diners ("Is that who I think it is?" "Can you get an autograph for me?") and you have a thoroughly miserable employee.  For the rest of us of course, it's pure entertainment.

"Hey Tom, be sure to ask Carter about the hostage crisis."

"Hey Steve, if Adam West asks you for some ketchup you should say, 'What's the matter, Batman,  don't you have any in your utility belt?'"

"Laura Bush has a big ass!"

"Peter Fonda has no ass!"

Not all of the staff are so irreverent.  When a favorite of some employee shows up, a wild gleam shines in their eyes, as when Harrison Ford came to the Inn. A Spanish girl, who had pictures of the movie star on her wall back at the dorm, shoved aside her co-worker at the buffet line when she saw him approaching and prepared his plate with trembling but loving hands.  She kept an eye on his table throughout the meal and when he left she dashed to his chair and sat down, soaking up his vicarious warmth.

When Michael J. Fox came to Yellowstone he made the mistake of calling down to the front desk for some extra bath towels.  He received three separate visits from young girls bearing towels and giddy smiles.  To his credit he accepted the former and returned the latter, handing out a tip each time without complaint.

Bruce Willis, on the other hand, found the attentions of a star-struck young waitress less than welcome.  True, the girl was so incapacitated  by his presence that she simply found a chair near his table and stared at him with her jaw open - which I probably would have found distracting, too - but enlisting the help of his ogre in her removal did nothing for his local image.

Say what you will about these elevated personages, they all exposed themselves to the rabble. All except Newt Gingrich, who closed off the bar for his own personal use and refused to face us.  We knew then, even before he was run out of Washington, that the man had no balls.

The Yellowstone Motorist

DRIVING in Yellowstone in the summertime is so dangerous that when Lee Whittlesey wrote his book Death in Yellowstone he left out the “not very interesting” category of traffic deaths, in part because it would have easily outnumbered all the other fatalities (despite the fact that private automobiles didn't ply the roads of the Park until 1915, forty-three years after the Park's establishment).  The rangers tend to keep such incidents quiet, but one has only to work a season or two in the Park to understand the peril represented by the Yellowstone motorist.

There is an unkind adage referring to certain visitors which is repeated by both concessionaire and Park Service employee, to the effect that they tend to leave their brains at the entrance gate. Unkind, but often recalled when employees try to cross the Park roads on their way to work and back. Especially treacherous is the crosswalk at Old Faithful which greets motorists as they come barreling down from Craig Pass; they're almost at their destination and they're in no mood to slow down.  At the height of summer an employee can wait for up to fifteen minutes as lines of vehicles charge past, standing between him and the case of Budweiser in his room.  Rock-throwing incidents are not unheard-of in these desperate situations.

Rubber-necking by the tourists undoubtedly has much to do with the majority of accidents, from fender-benders to fatal head-on collisions.  Being a somewhat jaded savage, I tend to keep my eyes on the road when I'm traveling through the Park. The typical Yellowstone motorist, on the other hand, tends to drive like a drunken congressman.  I have to keep a constant watch for people who steer with a cavalier hand as their eyes scan the tree-line for bears. On the way out of the Park one summer I saw a large black bear dart across the road ahead of me and into the woods.  A car coming from the other direction screeched to a halt and all four doors opened simultaneously as the occupants abandoned their vehicle and ran into the woods in hot pursuit with cameras poised.  Their engine was still running as I drove slowly past, which was probably a good thing in case they needed to come running back out of the woods.

The Park roads are narrow and rough.  They have to absorb not only the abuse of vehicles but also harsh winters and unusual thermal conditions.  Hot springs and fumaroles are not fixed features; they move around.  They'll dry up in one area and reappear elsewhere. Sometimes they pop up right under the road and eat away at the asphalt until a steaming sinkhole develops. In the spring the roads are full of pot-holes and frost heaves. Entire sections of road are sometimes lost to erosion, especially along steep embankments. None of which is conducive to the reckless driving I witness every time I tour the Park, and though I have yet to see a vehicle careen into a hot spring and disappear into the roiling maw of Mother Earth, I've seen enough to wear a seat-belt at all times.

What I've encountered most are collisions with animals. Driving back into the Park one night I saw a surreal scene illuminated in front of me: a large forklift was holding aloft the carcass of a bison that had been struck by a vehicle and killed.  It was being moved off the road, but a car was approaching from the opposite direction and its headlights threw the picture into silhouette.               The forklift no longer looked like a machine but rather some species of dinosaur that was trying to toss a recently killed prey down its gullet.

The tourists who come to the Park in gargantuan RVs, towing SUVs and ATVs, with satellite TVs so their kids can watch MTV...have no sense of adventure.  They never really leave home since they carry so much of it with them.  But the worst part is that these behemoths lumber around the Park like tipsy hippos, weaving with every gust of wind and giving the backed-up traffic at their rear an occasional blast of their flatulence as they slowly wheeze uphill.  They often sport elongated rear-view mirrors which stick out like ears and threaten to decapitate any cyclists cruising along the shoulders of the road.  They share a villainous reputation among Park employees with Hummers: the Edsel of the new millennium.

Road rage exists in Yellowstone as well, but thanks to the Park Service policy of not allowing firearms in the Park it's usually confined to the blaring of horns and shouting of brief insults out of car windows.[1]

A final note about Yellowstone motorists; they're usually pretty good about picking up hitchhikers.  Many employees arrive by bus and have no personal means of transportation within the Park, so hitchhiking is about the only way they can get around.  The smart ones carry signs that identify them as employees ("Harmless Park Employee" "Park Employee - Late For Work" or even the facetious "Psycho Killer"), but the old-fashioned thumb is still a serviceable appendage.  It's one of those rare occasions when tourist and savage meet as equals with the former providing a ride and the latter providing  information  (minus the company spin), allowing us to get along just fine.

Fuck the Cooks

WE once had a student from the Culinary Institute of America working the line at the Old Faithful Inn dining room.  He lasted about two weeks before demoting himself to kitchen prep. When I asked him why he'd given up the line job he scowled and said, "That wasn't a cook's line, that was an assembly line."  This perception was shared by the columnist of a food magazine who was doing a series on restaurants in National Parks.  After going into some detail regarding the culinary enticements offered by other park lodges, the dining room at Old Faithful received this curt review: "Grand Central Station."  Another reviewer, with evidently more lax standards, instructed her readers to try our "famous potato salad."  I asked one of the Pantry workers how our potato salad was prepared, to which she held up a carton.  "We scoop it out of this box," she said.  Then there was the summer we lost an entire cook's line because one night they decided to thump one of their own, leaving him beaten and bloodied in a dark parking lot.  One can easily imagine the reason: "Don't you ever – whack – suggest a goddam – whack – en croute special again!”

To be fair, these guys were throwing together up to a thousand meals a night.  Simple dishes, to be sure - trout, prime rib, fried chicken and burgers - but knocking them out at a blistering pace. That, however, is as far as I'm willing to go in their defense.

This rant is for the waits.

Yellowstone cooks have it easy.  All they do is stand in the same place and sweat and curse and fuck up your food.  They're averse to making anything that's not on the menu so if a waiter sends them a special order because a guest has an allergy or if they want a different sauce than the one that comes with the entree, the cooks shriek like stuck pigs and blame the waiter.  Fuck the cooks!

Waiters, on the other hand, are diplomats; intelligent, adaptable, and able to lie convincingly to the public.  We're the human face of the restaurant.  Without us, most tourists would take one look at the back-of-the-house staff and brown bag it. In the dining room we're charming, patient, and attentive.  In the kitchen we're bastards. It's the only way to survive in a busy restaurant.  When a guest tells you that she has "a special dietary need," you nod and take note of her request, then you put the order into the computer and head into the kitchen where the lynch mob is already forming.

"Hey JP!  You want your trout without any pecans?  You're fuckin' outa luck!  The pecans are already in the flour!"

"Then don't fuckin' bread it!"

"You want a trout without any fuckin' breading?!"

"That's what I fuckin' said!"

"Fuck that!"

You see, cooks make no distinction between waiters and diners.  It's too difficult a concept for them to grasp.  They work in a crowded, overheated environment, they do it for a wage that barely creeps above the minimum, and they stay until well past midnight scrubbing their stations clean before they can leave - long after the rest of the dining room staff have gone home. Waiters regard them as dumb animals who need to be kept in the dark about their circumstances, like circus elephants who would gladly trample the silly man with the sequined vest if they ever saw through the illusion of his pathetic whip.

Cooks are like high school bullies (they probably were high school bullies) and they can fuck with your food, so most waiters abstain from confronting them even when they know they're in the right.  Since the cooks fuck up half the orders anyway it doesn't make sense to exacerbate the situation by antagonizing them.

Cooks talk tough, but that's only because they don't have to face the public.  Many times I've passed on guest requests to the cook's line only to have them bark back at me, "Tell 'em to go fuck themselves!"  It makes them feel rebellious and cool, but they still have to put the fuckin' sauce on the side.  And on those rare occasions when a cook has to make an appearance in the dining room, summoned to the Location Manager's office perhaps, they quickly scuttle past the diners in their filthy whites and paper top hats like pale subterranean bugs unsettled by the light of an alien environment.  And if a guest asks to see the "head chef" on one of those even rarer occasions when everything happens to go right, it's nothing short of delectable to see the prick who happens to be drafted by his peers come and face the public:

Tourist:  That was the best prime rib I've ever had.  I wanted to thank you for doing such a fine job."

Prick:  "Uh...so yuh liked it?" (Awkward silence)

Fuck the cooks.[2]

The Backcountry II

ONE of the loveliest and least frequented areas of Yellowstone is the northeast corner, where the Lamar River runs through rolling sage-covered meadows surrounded by stark peaks and thick pine forests.  It also offers some of the best hiking in the Park. Pebble Creek trail was the destination one weekend in September when my friend Josh and I made the long drive from Old Faithful.  We intended to take it easy and enjoy the scenery along the twelve-mile trail, and instead we finished the day as horse thieves.

My friend wasn't much for hiking - he preferred to spend his free time casting fly lines over the blue-ribbon trout streams that criss-cross the Park - but he was willing to give it a try. Since the trail was called Pebble "Creek" though, he couldn't resist taking along his fly rod.

In order to reach the valley where Pebble Creek courses, you have to climb about 1,000 feet in the first mile.  During this stretch Josh was utterly unconvinced by my enthusiasm for the fine weather and crisp mountain air, but he soldiered on without complaint.  Once we reached the top of the ridge though, the trail descended quickly to the river valley and we made good time, emerging from the pine forest into a wide meadow that seemed secluded from all the world.  High ridges surrounded us, and to the west, ahead of us, rose the rocky wall of Bliss Pass. I'd climbed the pass years before with a group of eight people.  It was brutal: a series of steep switchbacks that seemed to go on forever. My close friend Beth was also in the group and we kept leap-frogging each other on the way to the top; she, desperately trying to prove that she could best a man, and me, desperately trying to save face as a man.  Finally, near the top, I passed her for the final time.  She gave me a quick nod and said, "I think I'm going to throw up."

There was no such rivalry on this day.  The hike through the meadow was tranquility itself.  The trail was flat and our legs carried us along breezily while our eyes took in the treasured view.  Our only concern was bears. At each of the campsites we passed was posted a notice which said that overnight camping was prohibited due to recent bear activity in the area. We weren't overly worried; it just made us a little jumpy at the sounds coming out of the woods.

As the trail turned south it re-entered the pine forest and rose above the creek, affording tempting views of prime trout habitat to my friend.  I was watching the creek when he stopped short and made a surprised exclamation. I followed his gaze ahead of us and saw the shape of an animal through the trees.  Before I could identify it he said, "Horses!"

It wasn't what I was expecting, but sure enough, there were three horses on the trail ahead of us. They were watching us, and none of us moved for a minute.  Josh broke the silence.

"How far are we from the Beartooth Mountains?"

"Just a few miles," I said.  "Why?"

"I just remember reading in one of the local papers about how some horses were lost in the Beartooths.  Do you suppose...?"

We came up closer to the horses, which had gone back to grazing, and noticed that two of them had been hobbled with leather belts around their front legs.

"They belong to somebody," Josh said.  “That keeps them from wandering too far away."

"What a shitty thing to do to a horse," I said. "What if a bear came around?  They'd be helpless!"

We spent a few minutes acquainting ourselves with the animals and stroking their backs, commiserating with them about their cruel masters, when Josh decided to see if their masters were even around.  He headed towards the creek and called out in a loud voice, but received no reply.  When he came back he was shaking his head.

"I don't know. It doesn't seem right. Just to leave them here, hobbled and all."

"You think we should take them with us?" I asked. He didn't answer at first, then he smiled.

"You think we should?"

"Well, their owners don't seem to care about them," I said. "I wouldn't feel right just leaving them here with bears around."

He nodded.

So we took the hobbles off and Josh remarked with pleasure that his horse had nudged him affectionately when its legs were freed.  None of them had saddles, just a simple bridle with a trailing rope. It was this we took hold of as we headed down the trail, the third horse following us without any further motivation than the occasional whistle to keep up.

Suddenly the hike took on a much greater significance than before.  Here we were, just a couple of regular Joes out on a hike who happened to find some stray horses who were at the mercy of fierce animals in the wilds of Yellowstone. We were heroes, no?

I didn't have much experience with horses; all I knew was that I liked them, even if I didn't have any talent for riding them. However, as the hike dragged on and we grew less enthralled with the scenery it seemed a waste not to take advantage of our mounts.

"Do you know how to ride a horse?" I asked.

"Bareback?" came the reply.

I hadn't thought about that, but I'd already made up my mind.  Josh was up for it, so we halted near some deadfall and clambered on the logs to give us an easy-up on the backs of the horses, who didn't seem to mind us at all.

Now we were traveling in style.  From our mounts we surveyed the surrounding hillsides without having to concern ourselves about tripping over roots or stubbing our feet on rocks. The gentle swaying of the horses seemed to lull us into a frontier reverie.  I felt like pulling out a gee-tar and singin' a ditty about sagebrush and tumbleweeds.  Josh was a bit tentative at first, but quickly warmed up to the new travel arrangements.  He was riding ahead of me so I had some warning before we reached the gully.  His horse suddenly broke into a trot as it nosed into the dry creek bed that cut across the trail.  I watched Josh bounce up and down several times before bouncing sideways and falling off his horse.  It looked like slow-motion to me; his body going airborne and crashing onto a fallen log.  It was all I could do to hold on for laughing when my horse went through the same maneuver. Trying to sound concerned, but fighting back tears of laughter, I turned my horse to see if he was all right.  He looked very serious.

"Is my fishing pole okay?" he asked.

He refused to get back on the horse, which was showing complete unconcern for his ejection by taking the opportunity to graze in a succulent patch of tall grass.  The rest of the hike was downhill anyway and man and beast enjoyed frequent stops to partake of wild raspberries and cool mountain streams.  It was still daylight when the two of us arrived at the Warm Creek camping area with our charges.  We tied the horses to a tree and sought out the person in charge.  It turned out to be an old man who was untouched by our story of animal rescue.

"Those horses belong to a fishing guide from Silver Gate," he said.  "Took some people from Illinois up there this morning."

Josh and I exchanged a glance and saw our story disappear from the local papers, or at least we saw the headline change from HEROES to HORSE THIEVES. At that moment a man came running down the trail, kicking up dust as he skidded down the hill and across the bridge to where the three of us were standing. He spotted the horses tied to a tree and dashed towards them. In a flash he had them lashed together and ready to head back up the hill to where his Midwestern tourists were waiting for his return (irritated and no doubt a little nervous at being left alone in bear country).  He shot a dark look toward Josh and I, but the old man spoke to him in a reproachful drawl, "Next time keep a better look on your horses," which kept him quiet.

When the guide had gone charging back up the hill, the old man offered us some consolation.

"You boys did what you thought was right. Seems to me like you had more concern for those horses than he did.  Serves him right."

Feeling a little better, Josh and I drove out to Cooke City for a late dinner at the Beartooth Cafe, accelerating past the sleepy town of Silver Gate on the way there because, you know, they don't look kindly on horse thieves in these parts.

Hot-Potting

HIKING in the backcountry is what really put Yellowstone under my skin.  From the first short tramps around the geyser basins to the marathon multi-day camping excursions to remote areas of the Park, it was as much a labor of love as a journey of discovery.  But I tended to shy away from writing about these treks because I'd found most nature writing to be insufferable, falling more or less into the category of breathless bombast favored by John Muir, whose quasi-religious effusions on the glory of the natural world often made him sound like a lunatic, as in this passage describing the Yellowstone River:

Roaring and gray in rapids, booming in broad, bossy falls, murmuring, gleaming in long, silvery reaches, swaying now hither, now thither, whirling,  bending in huge doubling, eddying folds, serene, majestic, ungovernable, overflowing all its metes and bounds...

What does one do with such cascading hagiography?  And yet it's hard to criticize someone who so obviously loved the Park, as Muir did.  So at the risk of sounding theatrical, there is one aspect of hiking the backcountry I'd like to relate. Namely: hot-potting.

There are hundreds and possibly thousands of hot-pots in the Yellowstone region, a term which simply refers to a body of water - be it a river, catch-basin, or hot pool - fed by thermal springs  which  raise the temperature of the water to hot-tub levels.  Some of the best of these thermal pools are located deep in the backcountry, like Mr. Bubbles, while others, Boiling River for example, are within walking distance of a parking lot.  Hot-potting is one of those gray areas in the Park world.  It's not illegal because there are Park-sanctioned hot-pots like Boiling River.  It's not legal either because there are other hot-pots that will get you a hefty fine - or fired if you're an employee - if you're found bathing in them.  The distinction between the two often confuses the rangers themselves.  I've seen employees run off from a swimming area by the NPS, only to have the authorities later admit, grudgingly, that the kids were perfectly within their rights.

Yellowstone attracts a young crowd. It's a demographic known for testing the waters - as it were - and some get burned.  One only has to read a few chapters of the book Death in Yellowstone to form an appreciation of the manifold ways one is endangered out here.  I myself carry a mark, tattooed on my right foot by the boiling water that splashed over my shoe as I was foolishly trying to cut through a thermal area. Others have died.  While it would be easy for some to look at the dangers and say, "Put up a fence, put up a wall," I think we should let nature be nature and let people have a place where they can learn from their mistakes - even if those lessons are learned posthumously by those who are left behind.  It is one of the attitudes I appreciate in the more philosophically-minded rangers, this sense of "wildness" which Paul Schullery - himself a ranger - comments upon in several of his books.

Having dutifully stated my disclaimer, I will now sing the praises of the hot-pot.  It's the features found in the backcountry that interest me the most because there's simply nothing better than immersing yourself in a relaxing, and I do mean relaxing, pool of warm water after having hiked fifteen or twenty miles that day. The closest I've come to being an acolyte of Muir was at the end of one of these forced marches I'd put myself through, when I stripped off my sweaty clothes and lowered my mosquito-bitten body into a glorious and remote pool that happened to be located at the top of a waterfall overlooking a pine-covered valley. No king surveying his dom could have felt the same pride of place that I felt that day, because my feelings were not based on a sense of ownership but on a sense of belonging.

When I worked at Grant Village as a pubtender I would often, after work, drive with some friends to a hot-pot located about thirty miles away.  It was not remote - in fact, it was just off a side road - and it was not legal, which was why we chose such late hours for our excursions.  This was a different kind of hot-potting experience from the backcountry in that a fair amount of alcohol was consumed while the bathers were in situ. Still, the atmosphere of these gatherings was generally hushed as people swam around the large basin and enjoyed the moonlit terraces which glistened with running water.  And being good, environmentally-conscious folks, we made sure to clean up after ourselves and left nothing but footprints.

The last time I visited this hot-pot, on a warm night in July, it was with a city girl named Sam who marveled at the unbroken tapestry of stars above us which stretched from horizon to horizon on this moonless night.  We watched shooting stars and satellites - how many of them there were - and we laughed at the way the soft muck at the bottom of the pool released bubbles that danced around our bodies when we stepped into it, tickling us. So there we were, soaking in the warm water and staring at the night sky, when all of a sudden I heard the sound of approaching steps.  I shushed my friend and we listened for a moment.  Out of the forest came something big, moving towards us with a slow, methodical tread.  It was too dark to see anything, but the heavy steps came closer and closer.  Sam and I slowly drifted out to the center of the pool, trying not to make any noise, then froze as the nocturnal animal splashed through the runoff channel only a few feet away from us. For a crazy moment I imagined a grizzly bear dragging us out of the pool for a midnight snack, but the footfalls receded toward the distant trees and we remained silent for a few minutes more, letting our tensed muscles relax.  Finally I started to breathe again and said, "That was cool!"

And it was cool.  I was genuinely afraid.  Suddenly the idea of soaking in a hot pool under starry skies and laughing with friends seemed frivolous, and this plodding beast was going to put an end to it.  It was as if a God had passed in our midst and we'd had to bow our heads in deference to its gravitas.

To us, it felt as though we had discovered the promise beneath the slogans we'd read in the company literature about "The Yellowstone Experience." It really was here; you just had to break the rules sometimes to experience it.

Rangers

SEVERAL long-term Park employees got together during a recent winter season and decided to form an organization that would allow people to air their grievances and make suggestions about how to benefit from and improve their Yellowstone Experience. The small group who conceived this idea decided to invite the rangers to one of their meetings as a show of good will since relations had been strained as a result of some misinformation about drug use that had fallen into the hands of these officials, resulting in bad blood between the two camps.  It's a funny story, so I'll tell you about it.

Hank came into the employee pub one night to meet his friends for a few drinks after work.  They greeted him from across the room and shouted, "Hank, dude, you gotta do the green with us!" Hank replied, "I want to, but it's too expensive."  An off-duty security guard overheard this exchange and decided to report to the rangers that this group was openly advocating drug use; "the green" being an obvious reference to pot. The rangers responded by calling Hank into their office and subjecting him to a standard intimidation session.  Hank, though shaken, pled innocent to the charges of being an insider to a Yellowstone drug cartel. The company considered terminating Hank for being tainted by this scandal, but decided that since he was a long-term employee they would give him the benefit of the doubt and await the result of the inquiry. As it turned out, the employees in the pub had been planning a river rafting trip on the Green River in Utah after the winter season, and they were recruiting as many people as possible because the multi-day trip was going to be expensive and they wanted to share the cost.

Doin' the green suddenly became a sarcastic catchphrase among employees for any drug related double-entendre; "Keep it quiet, dude, we're having pot roast in the EDR tonight."

Thus the invitation to the rangers.

The meeting took place in the employee pub with about thirty people in attendance (the rest were occupied by the night's special: $1.50 shots of tequila lined up on a cross-country ski). After a few opening remarks were made, the rangers decided to take over the meeting.  One of them, giving his best impression of a cave dweller, took out his nightstick and began cracking it against the tile floor.  Having won our attention, they pulled out their new taser guns and began pointing them at random employees, playing the red laser over the knees of the assembled crowd.  The stunned employees, realizing that they were in the company of truly dangerous people, began to protest. The rangers laughed and belted their weapons, shaking their wide-brimmed hats at our amusing discomfiture.

It should be said that these were Law Enforcement rangers, not the kinder, gentler, Naturalist variety.  Naturalist rangers are the ones we all remember from Disney programs; taking nature walks with children and pointing out the many varieties of wildflowers and insects.  Naturalists are in the business of interpreting the parks for their visitors, declaiming on the flora and fauna as well as the cultural history of a place.  They are the campfire rangers who have people skills which allow them to hold forth in front of an audience while parlaying an appreciation for their environs.

Law Enforcement rangers have no people skills.  They have leadership skills, weapons training, and crowd control expertise.  They are the jarheads of Wonderland, and they can be an incredible pain in the ass.

During the meeting in the employee pub, these latter grunts decided to regale us with vignettes from Weaponry Training.  They tried to instill in us an appreciation of the efficacy of the taser by explaining how, in training, they were required to shoot one another in order to experience for themselves the power they would soon be wielding against others.  "It's no picnic," one of them said knowingly. An image sprang to mind of two rangers a few feet apart, with one pointing a taser at the other:

"Sorry 'bout this, Steve."

BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZT!

Steve crumples in a twitching heap while the others try to hold back a guffaw.  Later, in the break room, Steve hears about how he pissed his pants and shrieked like a schoolgirl while 50,000 volts of electricity passed through his body.

For most rangers, this is what passes for The Yellowstone Experience.

Last Tango in Yellowstone

ONE of the best perks of working in Yellowstone is knowing that it’s a finite arrangement.  We agree to work together for three to six months before an amicable separation with the possibility of reconciliation goes into effect.  For people who shy away from long commitments to corporations and other dubious engagements, the Park offers an exceptional period of abeyance during which no major decisions need be made.

Unlike year-round operations such as the Grand Canyon, there is no effort made in Yellowstone to accommodate employees who are married with children.  They do not belong here.  Entering the confines of the Park is like Jeanne entering Paul's apartment in Last Tango in Paris; it's a secret trysting place where the outside world is forgotten for a time, and when you get tired of taking it up the ass you can simply skip the next rendezvous.

It was an easy routine for me to adopt since I enjoyed traveling abroad and knew that I could save enough during the course of a summer in the Park to pay for an overseas adventure.  As time went by, my parents came to expect the late-night phone calls from the downtown bus depot: "I just got back from Istanbul!  I found a great deal on standby!  Can you come get me?"  Usually I'd turn up penniless, asking if my Yellowstone application had arrived in the mail while I was gone.  After all, I had my next trip to consider.  My parents would listen with patient smiles to my stories of riding camels around the pyramids of Egypt and seeing the Whirling Dervishes on the Anatolian plateau, and then bore me with real world caveats about saving money and getting health care. I figured if I could survive amoebic dysentery in Kenya without health care I could handle antiseptic America.

While the other parkies regarded their sojourn in Yellowstone as exotic, I began to see it as the most stable aspect of my life. I was a model employee - after a fashion - showing up on time (and sober) for most of my shifts, keeping my complaints to a minimum, and lending my growing expertise as a returner to my co-workers.  I felt that I had stumbled upon the perfect lifestyle, or at least a very serviceable one.

It only got better when I discovered that I could collect unemployment during the break between seasons.  A fellow employee explained to me that if I was working both summer and winter seasons then I was considered job-attached by the government, and was eligible for free money in the interim.  I took advantage of this boon, though my father disapproved.

"I don't want no son of mine on unemployment. That's for poor people."

"Dad. Have you seen my paychecks? I am poor."

The break between seasons also tends to bestow upon one's summer the softening smudge of nostalgia, whereupon we forget the long hours and difficult work and remember instead the community we were a part of.  It's a powerful drug, and it explains why I would sometimes see familiar faces back in the Park the season after they had left with fingers flying.  One friend of mine quit during the summer season, breaking his contract and thereby short-circuiting his chances for a return engagement. He told and re-told the story of his exit, gesticulating madly to show how animated he had been in cursing the managerial staff for their incompetence and short-sightedness.  He made it sound as if he couldn't put enough distance between himself and Yellowstone.  He ended up five miles outside the Park working in a coffee shop and would often be seen on his weekends haunting the second floor balcony overlooking the dining room at the Old Faithful Inn, gazing with mournful eyes at his former co-workers as they danced their tango below.

You're either in or out of the harlot's house when the lights go down.

Sylvia

AS a first date, I took Sylvia whitewater rafting.  She was from Georgia and had long amber hair that curled voluptuously around her cherubic face.  We both worked in the dining room and I found myself taken in by her considerable southern charm. I asked her to come along on a rafting trip in the Tetons, one that already included several co-workers so that she wouldn't have to think of it as a real date, and she said she'd think about it. I made no further mention of it and she never gave me an answer, so I was surprised when she showed up in the employee cafeteria the morning of the trip.

That was the spring that Jackson Lake was being drained in order to mend the dam, so the Snake River was wild, fed by the wide-open sluices which sent great arcs of water thundering into the canyon and turned the class 1 and 2 rapids into 3’s and even 4’s.  Every day people were being tossed from their rafts: overweight tourists, strong young hikers, women and children, even raft guides. The river spared no one that spring, and into this maelstrom I brought the darling of Cobb Country, Georgia.

Since I'd run the river before I knew right from the start that this trip was going to be different; the current didn't wait for us to paddle out from shore, it grabbed us and threw us headlong down its throat. Normally, the guide informed us, the trip would take an hour and a half.  This year we'd be done in forty-five minutes.  Our oars were all but useless as we paddled away at thin air half the time because the raft had been lifted almost perpendicular to the river on mountainous waves.  The people in the back of the raft, the families on vacation, simply held on, while those in front, the parkies, gave rebel yells at the walls of water that reared up in front of us and repeatedly knocked us on our backs.  The guide screamed at us to keep rowing as the most dangerous rapid of the trip approached,  but before it even came into view our raft suddenly lurched forward into a depression created by an underwater boulder and met a surging wall of green water beyond.  The raft folded back upon itself and I found myself looking straight up into the crisp blue sky. Sylvia, who was seated behind me, reached out and grabbed my collar as she went flying overboard, taking me with her.  I deserved it. After all, this date was my idea. I hit the water and the cold took my breath away.  I gasped for air as the numbing water knifed through my clothes.  I looked up and saw the survivors in the raft staring down at me.  They were a shabby crew; wet, mouths open, holding on for dear life.  To my left was Sylvia, bobbing in the roiling river, her wavy locks now wet, dark, and straight. She didn't look scared, just surprised, and the river was pulling her away.  For once in my life I saw the danger and took action. There was a rope strung along the length of the raft and I grabbed it, then I reached out my other hand to Sylvia.  She blinked at it for a moment, then her hand rose out of the froth and she took it. As the river tried to disengage us I marshaled my strength and managed to pull her up against the raft where the guide yanked us both on board just in time to be tossed around like dice as we hit Lunch Counter, the biggest rapid on the river.  We flopped on the floor of the raft, laughing and spitting water and howling like half-mad children, shaking our heads and looking deep into each other’s eyes, already in love.

My brother, who worked in the business in Hollywood, gave a nod to our opening scene.  "You met cute," he said approvingly.

Ours was a physical relationship. On our weekends we’d sling packs over our shoulders and head into the woods, up mountains, along rivers, into the backcountry where we could enjoy - as Poe said - "the utter license" of nature. Often our destination was left unfound because, lovers that we were, we simply couldn't wait. We would dive into the woods, laughing, casting off the world and its paths to crash through the underbrush until we found a resting place where we could lay together under a cloudless sky and put on a show for all the trees to see. Once, on the way back from Heart Lake,  we’d romped in warm Witch Creek just off the hiking trail and gotten dressed again only moments before several Boy Scouts came marching past. “Hello boys,” Sylvia said in a voice that called the entire troupe to attention.  “Watch out for bears!”

One day near the end of the season, when we seemed to be hiking more out of habit than inclination, we left the trail and skidded down a slope toward the sound of running water.  We discovered a bower of pines sheltering a brook and a small beach where we threw ourselves down on the grass. Sylvia and I cast off our shirts and lay side by side, listening to the wind twisting the leaves. I felt her hand slide over my stomach and move beneath my shorts. Falling into a reverie I watched the quiet clouds above form strange, erotic shapes.  Suddenly I rolled over and grabbed her, holding tight as wave after ecstatic wave swept over me.

Later, when I'd hopped in the river to wash off, Sylvia said, “That was a surprise!”  She seemed quite pleased with her newfound prowess, as if she’d figured out a Rubik’s Cube, and regarded me with deep satisfaction.

It was only later that we noticed the viewing platform a short distance away, overlooking one of Yellowstone's cascades, loaded with tourists sporting cameras and binoculars.

I knew Sylvia loved me because she followed me 13,000 feet into the sky, the hard way.  We drove south to the Tetons one bright morning and donned our backpacks in the shadow of Wyoming's most dramatic mountain range.  Four miles into the hike, after zigzagging along the switchbacks above Lupine Meadows through fields of flowers and grass and buzzing insects, we caught the first glimpse of our goal - the Middle Teton - which rose above Garnet Canyon like a woman's thigh.  A thin, vertical streak of dark volcanic rock, like the seam of a silk stocking, ran towards her mount.  We camped for the night in a grove of wind-lashed pines, lulled by the muttering of a nearby brook as it passed through a boulder field before plunging down the slope we'd ascended.  In our tent, side by side, we slept well.

The morning brought a smile to my face as I poked my head out to witness a beautiful blue sky. In the mountains, days like these, even in the midst of summer, are a gift.  We slung our daypacks over our shoulders and set out.  After marching with full backpacks the day before, I felt as light as air.  My mother would often laugh at my disinclination to accumulate things, and how I seemed to be satisfied with little.  I'm certain that this was not an innate quality, but a learned feature of my personality. The more belongings you have, the more you have to carry.  That is the lesson of the backpacker, and it easily translates into a creed for life in general.  There is simply no substitute for the sense of freedom that comes with the knowledge that all you need fits comfortably in a small pack slung over your shoulder.

Sylvia too, was a gift. Here in the mountains, in the open air, I was in my element, but now I had someone to share it with.  In the past, when I'd stumble upon an arresting vista or happen to catch a glimpse of an elk giving milk to its fawn, I would often cast a glance behind me, as if to halt my nonexistent companions and draw them close with a whisper: "Shhh.  Look!"  Because I could not share them, there was always a certain sadness associated with these moments.  They seemed diminished somehow, as though I were an intruder rather than an observer, because I had nothing to offer in return.  But now, simply by touching the hand of my lover, these scenes became so much more.  The joy Sylvia took in plunging her head into an ice-cold cataract and tossing back her voluminous hair, spraying water in a crystal-colored arc, left me a disciple.

This was a difficult hike.  While it didn't require ropes or crampons or any of the usual mountaineering accoutrements, it was hard.  There was a point near the summit where it was necessary to climb, hand over hand, up a rock-strewn couloir. At this altitude, even though summer, there was snow interlacing the rocks, playing false with one's steps.  I reached an outcrop of rock and sat down to rest, breathing deeply and watching Sylvia with a certain sense of detachment as she ascended below me. She moved slowly, picking her steps, and then she began to cry. She stopped for a moment and lowered her head, gathering her strength and breath, sobbed softly, then continued.               I felt like a monster.  What am I doing? I thought.  She's doing this for me! Every gasp of breath, every step, every salted tear was an offering laid at my shrine. I understood at that moment what love meant, and it shook me.

We clawed our way to the summit and languished on the cool rocks overlooking the valley floor.  Only the Grand Teton still rose above us, close enough to touch it seemed.  Sylvia, the world at her feet and cheerful again, tore off her shirt in a practiced move and lay back against a rock, facing the sun - an exposure she would later regret.  Her chest rose and fell heavily at first, then slowed. Her eyelids fluttered and closed.  I watched the sun warm her skin hungrily as she dozed; the picture of youth and beauty set against a panorama of snowy alps and green glacier-carved valleys.  I woke her gently when I heard other climbers approaching.  It was time to begin our descent.

Peak experiences are always brief affairs.

And so are Yellowstone Romances. After all the ungentlemanly schadenfreude I'd shown while witnessing the dissolution of numerous Park relationships, the worm was about to turn. Sylvia had to return to college before season's end and I dropped her off at the airport with a sense of deliverance.  The way I saw it was that my life was about to be returned to me. Much as I loved her, I had begun to feel a certain nostalgia for my days of solitary self-indulgence, and when she broke the news that she was leaving and would not be coming back the following summer, I took it well. I drove her to the airport thinking about all the cigarettes I was going to smoke on the return trip, blithely assuring her that we would stay in touch while checking my watch to make sure that she wasn't going to miss her flight.  She gave me a passionate kiss as the De Havilland prop arrived on the tarmac and never took her eyes off of me as she joined the boarding crowd, as though she were expecting me to jump the barricades and catch her up in a dramatic embrace, refusing to allow the unjust separation of two such ardent lovers. But I just smiled and waved.  When she was gone I took a deep breath and turned to go, then collapsed into a chair, surprised to find tears running down my cheeks. When I lifted my head from my hands the gate attendants were regarding me with alarm. Embarrassed, I quickly left the terminal and sought out my car.  I sat there in silence, wondering what had just happened.  What had just happened was a moment of lucidity, like the flash of understanding I’d experienced on the mountaintop; that the love I had for Sylvia was equal to the love I had for the Park, and that I'd just made my Sophie's choice.

Part Four

Literary Yellowstone

EVERY now and then Yellowstone will make a brief appearance in the real world - sometimes dramatically, as with the fires of 1988 - but usually it’s only a passing reference in political cartoons or newspaper articles.  Since I've considered the Park my home for many years I tend to take notice whenever I hear her name mentioned outside the ecosystem.  Yellowstone, while hardly a subject one hears mentioned every day, is still well enough known to arise almost anywhere.  Once, while vacationing in France, I rode a gondola from the town of Chamonix to the Aiguille du Midi, a rocky spire at 12,600 feet which affords spectacular views of Mont Blanc and the Alps.  On the way down I was listening to the mix of languages among the tourists when I heard an American woman mention Yellowstone.  She was telling her friends that she had once worked there for a summer, and I recognized in her voice the wistful quality of those who have put the Park behind them.  "We used to say that it wasn't the real world," she said, and then added with a smile, "but of course it was."

There are also those rare literary references to Yellowstone which never fail to bring a smile to my face, especially when they appear in the classics of literature.  Ernest Hemingway, no stranger to Montana, incorporated Yellowstone in his language.  Describing the hot temper of Pablo's mujer in For Whom the Bell Tolls, he writes, "...the  woman  started to curse in a flood of obscene invective that rolled over and around him like the hot white water splashing down from the sudden eruption of a geyser."  In Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, after Humbert Humbert has had the monitory good fortune of seeing his wife struck and killed by a car, leaving him alone with his nymphet, we follow them as they make a circuit of the U.S.  One of their stops is Yellowstone: "Somber Yellowstone Park and its colored hot springs, baby geysers, rainbows of bubbling mud - symbols of my passion."  And then there was John Steinbeck, whose trip to Yellowstone in Travels with Charley was aborted because his dog went feral after it spotted bears on the road, which served him right since he dismissed the Park as "no more representative of America than is Disneyland."

The English poet, Ted Hughes, almost made the same mistake, calling Yellowstone a "Mislaid Red Indian Mickey Mouse America."  But he had the good sense to look deeper. His wife, American poet Sylvia Plath, on the other hand, seems to have connected with the Park from the start.  What is interesting is that they both wrote about the same incident, Plath in prose and Hughes in verse, and used the same title: The Fifty-Ninth Bear.  In Plath's fictional version, Sadie (Sylvia) seems strangely at ease in Yellowstone, walking amidst the "dark entrails of the earth where the sluggish muds and scalding waters had their source."  Like one of Camille Paglia's chthonian goddesses, she dissolves into the hellish landscape while her husband Norton (Ted) dallies by the car.  Later, we hear that she has no fear of animals, that she "has a way with them" in fact.  This is made evident when Norton finds her feeding a wild stag from her hand, as if in communion, or conspiracy.  On the drive back to their campsite, an elk runs in front of their car, which Plath sees as a consoling sign (for Hughes, in his version, it is a dark omen). There is an underlying tension, almost an animosity, between the couple in Plath's version that never quite surfaces.  At least not directly.  "My bear," we hear her say that night as the couple are woken by a grizzly, as if she had called it up out of the dark.  She sends her husband out to shoo it away.  It would be the fifty-ninth bear they would see, the one that would make a sacrifice of Norton for the pagan priestess of Yellowstone.

In Hughes' version (which, fortunately for him is the more true-to-life) he does not confront the bear.  He remembers the "amiable bears" that he saw earlier in the day, with their "teddybear ears”, but even then he wondered if they perhaps weren’t as convivial as they seemed.  As he approached the grizzly, which was tearing into their car in a primal search for food, he stopped short, realizing his pitiful inadequacy before the beast - a real wild bear - and he survives.

The two tales form a wonderful diptych of Yellowstone.   In one, the visitor is receptive to the Park and (like Steinbeck's French poodle) has a rewarding atavistic experience.  In the other, the visitor shows common sense and is not torn limb from limb.

Mr. Ichikawa

ONE summer the dining room manager thought it would be funny to put me in a Japanese movie.  Mr. Ichikawa and his crew were at Old Faithful to do a documentary about the Park, and they wanted to include a few scenes with a regular employee doing regular employee things like working and hiking.  There were to be no scenes about excessive drinking, love among the pines, or wild animal escapades.  I had just come off an extremely long day of work, having agreed to pick up an extra shift in addition to my scheduled double shift (which I had done as a very special, once-in-a-lifetime favor) and was looking forward to a long sleep.  In order to be in the movie I would have to be up at five in the morning to work a breakfast shift, then take the film crew on a short hike, all of which would be recorded.  I told him no.

"C'mon," he said, smiling.  "It'll be fun."

"I'll be in no condition to work or hike if I don't get any sleep," I told him.  "Much less talk intelligibly on camera."

"That's what'll make it fun," he insisted.  "You'll be gabbling like a madman."

I couldn't argue with his logic, but when my alarm sounded early the next morning  just as I'd begun to drift off I realized that I'd been conned.  My body felt sluggish and heavy.  I pulled my feet out from under the warm sheets and set them down on the floor, which sent a sharp, painful spasm up through my legs to my sleep-deprived brain.  No, no, no.  I cursed my boss and kicked myself as I prepared for another long day.

I didn't think the hosts would go easy on me just because I had a VIP table of visiting international filmmakers, and I was right.  They slammed my section all morning.  Maybe they thought that would be fun, too.  The crew needed some scenes of a waiter in action, so they had me run back and forth from kitchen to dining room several times, during which my co-workers would scream "Make-up!" and the sound man would shake his head and send me back to the kitchen for another run.  Realizing that their star was also an actual waiter, the crew tacked on a few extra errands for me while I was in the kitchen and I was soon giving a true-to-life rendition of a pissed-off Park employee dealing with demanding guests while running on little or no sleep.

After breakfast I was sent home to change into my hiking clothes.  It felt good to wear my own comfortable rags but the lack of sleep was beginning to take its toll; I was sweating profusely and dark circles had begun to form under my eyes.

Mr. Ichikawa had decided to make Observation Point our hike.  This was a relief because even though Observation Point was steep, it was also a very short one-mile jaunt, and I was further consoled by the fact that the cameraman had to haul his ungainly piece of equipment up an 800-foot slope.  Are you sure you don't want another danish, Mr. Creosote?  There was a lot of nature photography to be done so I was able to lie in the shaded grass after each "Happy Hiking Employee" scene while director and crew chased butterflies.

The final scene called for The Employee to sit in a meadow and wax poetic about life in the Park.  I was wired and placed on a rock in the middle of a golden clearing with insects buzzing around my head and gentle breezes playing with my hair.  I’m ready for my close-up now, Mr. Ichikawa.  With the huge camera pointed directly at my face the director asked me to explain what it was that brought me to Yellowstone.  Twenty minutes later he held up his hand, "OK, OK, OK, I think that is enough."

For  those  twenty  minutes  I became  John  Muir  on  the mountaintop, Henry David Thoreau in the Walden woods, Walt Whitman everywhere; singing a song of Yellowstone,  of nature, of myself.  I was gabbling like a madman until tears came to my eyes.  I was having fun at last.

When the Volcano Blows

ALSTON Chase wrote a book called Playing God in Yellowstone in which he lambasted the Park Service for what he saw as their mismanagement of America’s crown jewel.  He denounced them for promoting unwise development projects, for having exterminated the wolf, for trying to silence even their well-intentioned critics, and for failing to protect the Park's endangered species while allowing others to increase beyond the carrying capacity of the land.[3 ] What I found odd was that after he'd penned about 300 pages of his critique, the author then made a convincing  case for the imminent destruction of Yellowstone by catastrophic  volcanic eruption.               A detail which made it difficult to care any more about the perceived shortcomings of Park administration.  After all, why bother splitting hairs over wilderness management policy if the whole shebang is scheduled to go sky-high any day?

It's true that Yellowstone sits upon a massive plume of magma which drives the thermal features. It's also true that this region has erupted with frightful regularity in the past.  In fact, geological studies of the Lamar River valley have revealed the remains of twenty-seven forests which have been buried by mud and ash in successive volcanic eruptions.  And it's true that if the past is any indication we are due for one of the major eruptions which occur about every 600,000 to 700,000 years (the last one having taken place about 640,000 years ago).  It's also true that these eruptions are mind-bogglingly powerful.  Hank Heasler, the Park Geologist, has stated that the caldera-forming eruption in Yellowstone was "one of the 2 or 3 largest volcanic eruptions the world has ever known."  It’s been suggested that such an eruption would cloud the skies of the world with ash for years, potentially ushering in a new Ice Age.  Scientists are hard-pressed to convey the tremendous destructive force behind these eruptions, of which the Yellowstone region has endured at least three. I've seen brave attempts by geologists to put the eruptions into some kind of perspective: "The [first] Yellowstone eruption 2 million years ago may have been more than 8,000 times larger than the 1980 Mount St. Helens explosion" ... "Two hundred miles downwind from Mt. St. Helens, in the State of Washington, the amount of ash that has accumulated as a result of Mt. St. Helens' recent eruptions is three inches.  The ash here [a comparable distance from the most recent Yellowstone caldera eruption]  was sixty feet thick" ... "even spread over California, the volcanic material would be 20 feet deep" ... "more than enough to fill the Grand Canyon  in Arizona"  ... The three caldera eruptions were "the granddaddies of them all".  None of which really manages to convey the basic idea that if Yellowstone blows, the world as we know it will end.

There is even a theory which links the emergence of hot spots to mass extinctions, including the Cretaceous Extinction which killed off the dinosaurs.  So that instead of a meteor crashing into the planet from outer space, as one theory goes, the force that periodically wipes out most of life on Earth may come from within.  Very Freudian.

A recent article in the L.A. Times referred to an underwater exploration of Yellowstone Lake which revealed a fantastic landscape of fevered geologic activity.  Like Jacques Cousteau's visions of deep-sea gardens sprouting along the trans-Atlantic rift, the submersibles which photographed the lake bottom in Yellowstone brought back images of otherworldly beauty: thermal vents, a moonscape of craters, columns of silica rising like the spires of a gothic cathedral, and a mysterious bulge rising a hundred feet high and over two thousand feet across which seemed to suggest a resurgent volcanic dome.  Although later Park Service reports tended to downplay the implications of the discovery and any attendant danger, the fact remains that Yellowstone Lake has seen considerable eruptive activity in the past.  The entire West Thumb of the lake was created by a volcanic upheaval which occurred about 125,000 years ago, and nearby Duck Lake was formed by a hydrothermal explosion less than 12,000 years ago. Here, hidden beneath the placid waters of this pristine mountain lake, was smoldering evidence of the destructive forces which had cancelled out dozens of Yellowstones in the past.

But like residents of California who feel a strange pride for living in an active earthquake zone, where talk of the Big One can make daily life seem heroic and living through a temblor of any size reinforces the vanity that the gods favor us, Yellowstone employees live in deluded comfort as well, secure in our belief that the Volcano God will smile upon us for another season. And even if he doesn't, we're taking you with us.

Los Angeles

AS close as I feel to Yellowstone, so my brother feels about Los Angeles.  The joke in the family is that he’s the city mouse and I’m the country mouse, but I would always enjoy driving out to see him after a season in the Park, exchanging my beloved natural landscapes for his beloved urban sprawl.  Sadly, it didn't work both ways since he never bothered to visit me in the Park.  He was, like most big brothers, dismissive of his younger sibling.  The idea of "sitting around in the woods with nothing to do" simply didn't appeal to him the way a visit to the Big City appealed to me.  When he thought of Yellowstone he equated it with Frontierland in Disneyland, minus the rides.  LA was the real world, LA was where it was happening.  But for me, it was La-La-Land; a thirty-five million person pile-up at the western frontier where our nation's destiny became less manifest and more hallucinatory before being swallowed up by the Pacific.  If any place was real, it was Yellowstone.

Whenever I showed up in LA we would immediately make the rounds of our favorite hangouts: lunch at Barney's Beanery off Santa Monica, a browse through the tea-scented aisles of the Bodhi Tree bookstore on Melrose, a large bowl of miso ramen at Asahi Ramen in Little Tokyo West, and there was usually a gig at night for one of the bands he followed at the Troubadour or the Coconut Teaszer.  Once, we drove out to Riverside to visit the old neighborhood where we’d passed several golden summers as kids.  We found it, astonishingly, much as we remembered it.  This was California after all, the land of impermanence, and we were expecting to find an area that had been overbuilt with strip malls and parking lots.  Instead, our old stomping grounds were perfectly preserved, if in a bit of disrepair.  No new houses had gone up, the field of stickers beyond the terminus of our dead-end road was still wild and overgrown, and the dirt path leading to Fran’s Variety Store was still being used by a new generation of tykes on bikes (although Fran’s had devolved into an evangelical mission).  We even found the old tree fort, a warped platform within arm's reach that had seemed so inaccessible to a seven-year old.  Except for the reduced scale of things in our adult eyes, it all seemed dreamily familiar.  There were workmen tooling around our old house, which was empty, and they let us prowl around our childhood home remembering.  We drove on to our old school, Edgemont Elementary, and stared at the empty schoolyard like a pair of ghosts.  Suddenly we heard a sound from long ago; a simple, musical jingle.  We turned and looked up the road to confirm what our ears had already recognized: the ice-cream man, in his little white truck, moving slowly down the street.  It was too much.  It was like a Twilight Zone episode and all we had to do was buy an Eskimo Pie from this man and bite into it to be magically transported back to 1967 and the sunny, uncomplicated days of bicycles, ant hills, and Tang.  “We have to buy an ice-cream!” my brother said, sensing the opportunity.  But neither of us moved, held fast perhaps by the silliness of the idea of two grown men running after an ice-cream truck.  We stayed put and watched him turn the corner, his jingle fading away in the air, into the past.

Somewhere close by, smoke whorls were rising in the air from Rod Serling’s cigarette.  His punctuated voice ending the narrative:              “Two brothers.               Both of them convinced that the worlds in which they live are substantial and real.  What they will soon realize however, is that the real world has very little to do with either of them, because Yellowstone and Los Angeles are located at opposite ends...of the Twilight Zone.”

Savage Days

THE old order finally came crashing down in 1999.  That was the summer when the last vestiges of the ossified managerial staff in the dining room crumbled to dust and the loonies took over the asylum.  It all began when the Food & Beverage manager resigned under pressure from HQ because she failed to live up to corporate expectations, which had become more and more unrealistic with each passing season.  Greed knows no bounds, and this last corporate lapdog was simply the poor unfortunate to be left without a seat when the covetous game of musical chairs came to an end.  When she departed, most of her flunkies went with her, unable to survive without her sponsorship.  It really did represent the end of an era.  These were people who thought it was amusing to go on company booze-cruises sporting t-shirts that read, "Profits Before People."  But, like Rome, the old order simply could not continue to produce these loyal centurions indefinitely, and the barbarians finally had their day.

When the F & B manager left, she was replaced with a pleasant young woman who probably would have been fine except for the fact that she was in the middle of a wrenching divorce that caused her to break down in tears in front of her staff.  She threw in the towel after a few awkward weeks and was replaced by her assistant, who dismayed her superiors by accepting a job in the real world after just a few days. By this time the dining room was running itself, according to the rules of the inmates, so that when the fourth F & B manager arrived, no one noticed or cared.

By the end of the season we had a host who wore a pink feather boa around his neck and would use it to indicate tables to the guests with a dramatic flourish; there was the waitress who wore red satin pajamas for her breakfast shift and would pull a chair up to the fireplace, sipping coffee and nonchalantly pointing out the self-serve buffet to the guests; and who could forget the assistant dining room manager who had ceased to care and walked around the restaurant smoking and insulting the guests?

After having worked under the ancien regime with its fervor for keeping the staff in line, I marveled at how far the pendulum had swung - as if by some natural law - to the opposite extreme, and I was proud to count myself among the savages.

*               *               *

Concessionaire employees have tested the patience of their conservative minders since the Park's inception.  Here is a quote from Brit Fontenot, writing for the quarterly, Yellowstone Science, in reference to the first sit-down strike in American history, which took place in Yellowstone in 1884:

The park's working class represented a culture ignored by most people - one that park promoters ... attempted to hide from view in their efforts to maintain the illusion of an untouched, unspoiled, natural wonderland.   For park promoters, the notion of laboring in Yellowstone contradicted the very intent of the park; "for the benefit and enjoyment of the people."

Yellowstone employees have always lived this nameless, adumbral existence, and in the eyes of those who would sell the Park as a for-profit pleasuring ground, for good reason.  Years ago there used to be a celebration  called  "Savage Days" - part parade, part drunken revel - in which Park employees would dress up in costumes and decorate their vehicles before driving slowly past groups of tourists; shaking them down for tips, shouting irreverent insults, and generally being an embarrassment to their employers and the Park Service.  Something had to be done. So, in the 1950's, Savage Days was officially given the axe and replaced with "Christmas in August,” a more acceptable and low-key event based on the apocryphal story of a group of late nineteenth- or early twentieth-century tourists who were stranded at Old Faithful by a freak August blizzard and who decided to make the best of a bad situation by pretending it was Christmas. What better way to bring down a pagan holiday than with the sword of Christianity?  Thus, Savage Days passed into history as the new myth took hold under the patronage of the crown.

But as the fall of the old regime showed, the barbarians still lurk just beyond the gates of Rome.

Part Five

Snowcoach Driver

I LANDED a snowcoach driving job in the winter of 1999-2000.  I can’t think of a better way to ring in a new millennium.  My days would begin at five o’clock in the morning when I stepped outside and the sub-zero cold would freeze my nose hair. Trudging through knee-deep snow to the garage I'd grab a broom and whisk the accumulated snow from my coach parked outside. Then I'd fire up the beast, always thankful to hear the engine spark and see the twin stacks at the rear of the coach shudder to life. Our snowcoaches resembled World War I-era tanks, though they'd been designed initially for civilian purposes, serving as postal vehicles and school buses for the harsh Canadian north. They ran on two tank-like tracks with skis up front for steering. Instead of a gun turret, there were hatches which the passengers could pop open for a panoramic view of the winter wonderland around them.  Standing on the roof of the growling vehicle as the wind howled around me, I would crack the crust of ice from the metal surface with the handle of the broom and sweep it into the air where the wind would send it flying back into my face. Then I'd pull out my ice scraper and chip away at the hard film covering my windshield until I'd cleared a fist-sized hole to see through. By then the coach would have warmed up to maybe twenty degrees and I'd climb aboard.  It was the kind of gritty job that I knew I'd be telling my kids about one day: You kids today have it easy.  I remember when I had to kick bison out of my way as I walked to work through twenty-foot snowdrifts to fire up my 1970 Bombardier snowcoach in Yellowstone Park...  I'd ease the gear shift back and the yellow behemoth would lurch forward, freeing itself from its resting place with a crunch of treads. After the #1 driver made sure that all the coaches had been properly cussed into service, we would then caravan to the Snowlodge and load luggage while the guests remained inside by the fire.  We were like a merry chain-gang as we grabbed duffel bags, suitcases and cardboard boxes, pitching them up to the arms of the driver who stood on the roof of his coach and stowed the lot as best he could.  When the luggage was secured under a heavy tarp we would turn our attention to tying down the skis, an operation that invariably found us cursing savagely at the rubber fasteners that had no tensility in the cold.  At last we'd pull the final strap into place or make do with bungee cords. Then the guests would be called from the lobby and they would baby-step along the icy path to squeeze themselves into our coaches.  Pumped up from our exertions and showing rosy cheeks we'd wipe our runny noses and greet our passengers with wide grins, inviting them to enjoy the rocky ride, comparing it to the days of stagecoach travel when anything could happen and just getting there was part of the adventure.  Then one of us would grab the radio and give the word: "2905, this is 718. Tally-ho!"

My coach broke down twice that winter, which was par for the course.  Ancient contraptions that they were, the 1960's and 70's-era Bombardiers were temperamental beasts.  It was not at all unusual for one of them to throw a track or leave a trail of nuts and bolts on bumpy roads.  Our mechanics were wizards of the quick fix.  "That should hold for now," was the usual prognosis. "Just go easy on her." But telling us to go easy on our vehicles was like telling a boxer not to scuff his gloves. The roads, while freshly groomed and delightful to ply in the morning, were horrendous by afternoon.  Thousands of snowmobiles would see to that. The smooth surface would be churned into kidney-pounding moguls and the passengers would be reduced to infantile whining. I once had a woman in my coach who was seven months pregnant threaten me with a lawsuit if she miscarried because of the jouncing her belly was being subjected to.[4]  So it was unusual if Dispatch did not receive some SOS in the course of the day. If you were lucky these mishaps occurred close to home base, but they rarely did.

My first breakdown was uneventful.  I was doing a tour of the Canyon area and stopped to gas up. When I got back in the coach, it refused to move. It just groaned like a stubborn beast of burden that's had enough for one day.  There was a mechanic at the gas station, and with his help I pried up the floorboards and we looked at the jumble underneath.  "What a piece of shit," he mumbled.  He walked off and I had to call in one of our wizards who rode the forty miles on a snowmobile with his tool kit in tow.  The second time I ran into more serious trouble.  On a south run to Flagg Ranch my coach started to vibrate more than usual. I slowed down and listened more carefully, then one of the passengers shouted, "Hey! We're on fire!" I looked back and saw the coach filling with smoke.  I hit the brakes - which we're only supposed to use in an emergency because they're metal-on-metal brakes and raise a helluva stink when applied - and everyone dove out of the coach when it came to a stop in the middle of a lonely stretch of road.  Smoke continued to pour out of the back and I noticed a long green liquid trail heading up the road from where we'd come.  The engine block had cracked and I'd lost all my antifreeze.  I took off my hat as the engine gave a final sigh and expired, resigning itself to the cold.  It was only a couple of days from the end of the season, but my coach had given up the ghost. My passengers took it well; taking pictures of the smoldering vehicle and cracking Donner party jokes.

What really made the job something special were those early mornings when we got to dead-head from Old Faithful to West Yellowstone or Flagg Ranch.  After starting the trip in darkness the sky would begin to lighten and reveal a stunning winterscape. Thermal features would have laid a heavy mist over the hills and a weak sun would turn them pastel colors.  There were stretches of road that were lined with ghosts; trees that had been covered in frozen mist and looked as though they would shatter at the sound of a cough.  In this lunar world it would be hard to imagine any living creature having survived the sub-zero night.  And yet there were herds of bison, clustered together on bare patches of ground where thermal activity had melted the snow.  They sat like tired old men, their great heads unmoving and beards covered in ice. Only the steam rising off their shaggy backs indicated that they were still alive.  Sometimes I would stop the coach as I came to a clearing and turn off the engine.  I'd raise the hatch and let the silence rush in on me.  There would be a few thrilling moments like  breathing  underwater as I marveled at the beautiful and inhospitable world before me.  Then the fear would come; the cold quickly penetrating my clothes and the silence becoming deathly.  It would be with a real sense of humility that I held my breath before hitting the switch to - hopefully - fire up the engines once again.

One bitterly cold day in January management decided to impress a group of foreign travel agents who'd come from all over Europe to experience a winter in Yellowstone.  The head of Park Promotion (a sinecure if ever there was one) arranged a Grand Loop tour involving two snowcoaches and ten snowmobiles traveling 100 miles together in thirty-below weather. When the French tourists discovered that I spoke their language they kicked the English out of my coach and declared it French territory.  None of the guests had any experience with snowmobiles and within the first hour several people had frostbite, a Belgian man ran his vehicle off the road, and a German lady torpedoed her snowmobile into a lodgepole pine, snapping it in half and dislocating her hip in the process. She had to be flown out by helicopter to the hospital at Idaho Falls.  I had the Xanterra company representative on board my coach and she was ready to have a nervous breakdown. "Look at the sky!" she almost shrieked as the helicopter wheeled away, "Isn't it a beautiful day!"

But in the end all the French guests were thrilled with the experience (just seeing a German on a stretcher probably made their day).              They gave me their e-mail addresses and insisted that I look them up the next time I came to France.  Dave, the overwrought snowmobile guide, took me aside and said, "I'll bet you're the lowest paid bi-lingual guide in America."

A few days later the head of Park Promotion shook my hand and thanked me for being the one bright spot in an otherwise disastrous day.  "I had no idea you spoke French,” he said, and gave only the slightest pause before asking, "So James, how about if we schedule a few more of these tours for you?"

As the winter season gave way to spring Mother Nature would relax her stern face and indulge us with intoxicating fresh sounds and smells.  The sound of melting snow was like the unlocking of chains and made us feel playful.  As I was dead-heading back from West Yellowstone one bright afternoon I received a short call on the radio.

"Pull over."

I looked in my rear view and saw one of the conversion vans behind me.  They were passenger vans that had been turned into over-the-snow vehicles by virtue of an articulated metal track grafted onto the undercarriage.  They were more comfortable and afforded a higher and better view than the Bombardiers.  It was generally assumed that they were the next generation of snowcoaches for the Park when the old Bombardier fleet finally wheezed its last. Drivers exhibited a fierce loyalty to their vehicles however, and arguments would often flare up over the advantages of one over the other.  Nothing was ever settled.

I pulled over and let the van draw up alongside me.  The driver leaned out the window and looked down at me.

"We're going to settle this," she said.

So it was to be a drag race. We were at Fountain Flats, where the road shot straight as an arrow through an open meadow until it reached the Fountain Paint Pots thermal area.  It was a good choice, a half-mile track.  The girl had balls.  I nodded and she raised her hand showing three fingers, then two, then one.  From a distance it would have seemed about as thrilling as a race between a couple of giant ground sloths, but to us the roar of the engines and the way we were kicking  up snow and chunks of ice made it seem like flames were coming out of our asses.  Incredibly, I found myself falling behind.  I glanced up and saw a very intense girl pulling away from me and my beloved piece-of-shit 1970's Canadian-made Bombardier. I looked at my gearshift and realized that in my excitement I'd yanked the lever too far back.  I was in low gear.  Shit!  I quickly pushed the stick forward and the coach responded with venerable acceleration. Old number 718 caught up to the van and passed it.  When I crossed the finish line, a lone lodgepole pine at the foot of the geyser basin, I slowed to a stop and waited for the arrival of my opponent. When she pulled alongside me once again I tipped my hat and called out grinning, "Eat my snow!"

Gunga Ga Lunga

THE Yellowstone Winter Olympics are a relatively recent addition to the litany of Savage activities which are looked upon with disapprobation by the Park Service and the Company. What these people don't seem to understand is that this event, coming as it does near the end of the winter season when most employees are ready to snap, serves as a relatively harmless outlet for a lot of pent-up hostility.  So what if a few bones get broken?  At least we're just doing it do ourselves.

Begun in the winter of 1983, the Yellowstone Olympics were initially - like the real Olympics - a bit of a joke.  It was called "Dishwasher Days" and featured ill-advised events like riding an inner tube down a steep treed slope and skiing in the nude. Unlike the real Olympics, our version is still a joke, and a pretty good joke at that.

"Gunga Ga Lunga!" - the battle cry of the Olympics - comes from a line in the movie Caddyshack. According to Bill Murray's character, Carl Spackler, it was the Dalai Lama who spoke these words while playing golf, just after slicing one into a ten-thousand foot crevasse. At the end of the day, Spackler, who was caddying for his holiness, asks the Dalai Lama for "a little something, you know, for the effort."  So the Dalai Lama tells him that when he dies, on his deathbed, he will receive total consciousness.

"So I got that goin' for me," he says.

All the events of the Yellowstone Olympics, unofficially sponsored by Rainier Beer, are preceded by the consumption of large amounts of this particular beverage (which, sadly, Rainier does not provide).  This is also the aspect of the games which rankles the rangers, made evident by their recent efforts to reign in the Opening Ceremonies, which feature a drunken queen and floats that make - gasp - a pro-environmental statement.  I suppose they feel they wouldn't be doing their jobs if they just let us carry on like savages, but they're the ones killing bison.

I should explain.

One recent winter, in a place not far from where Yellowstone Lake sends forth its namesake river, a bison chose to lay down in the road and die.  It was injured, or sick, and somewhere in its animal brain it had decided that it could not, or would not, see out the season.  Soon, coyotes began to gather nearby, watching the bison and waiting for it to die.  If the bison was offended by their presence it gave no sign.  Their arrival may even have been a comfort; serving as a canid harbinger of death, yipping a requiem in the cold night and reinforcing the bison's decision to give up the ghost.  It became something of a highlight on the Park tour and every day would begin with the guides asking the same questions: Is it still alive?  Has it moved?  Have the wolves discovered it yet? But nothing changed.  The bison lay in the road, indifferent to traffic, only occasionally raising its head to indicate that winter - the greatest predator - had not yet claimed its life.

As I drove slowly past in my snowcoach the scene would invariably stir the passions of my passengers.

"It's suffering! Why doesn't the Park Service euthanize it?"

I would then explain how the NPS has a hands-off policy, allowing nature to take its course, and that what we may perceive as cruel is merely the working of a natural system which functions quite well without our aid.

The next day the rangers came and shot the bison.

They put a bullet in its head while it was lying on its side. The blast blew a hole in its skull and left a six-inch, blood-spattered crater in the hard-packed snow.  The bison, after eight days of virtual immobility and now sporting a massive head wound, got up on its feet and lumbered into the woods.  If its thoughts could have been made comprehensible to us they would no doubt translate as, OW!  You fucking bastards! Why couldn't you let me die in peace? OW!

Thinking they needed a bigger gun, the rangers ran back to their cabin and brought out a higher caliber weapon, then pumped three more rounds into the dying, bewildered animal. Once dispatched, the coyotes and ravens had their feast, but I no longer gave my spiel about the Park Service allowing natural systems to run their course. Instead, whenever I passed the scene, I envisioned yellow police tape cordoning off the chalk outline of a murdered bison.

This episode was still fresh in our minds when the Olympics began.

Downhill Day and Beer Ball are obviously popular events, and people will request days off to coincide with these games weeks in advance, but my favorite event by far is the No Talent Show.  This is the night of the most drinking (since it takes place in the employee pub) and the most fun.  There are no rules. There are no censors. There are only the occasional repercussions for nudity.

I had actually won the gold medal in this event the previous winter, having made a parody of The Vagina Monologues with a few of my male friends in a skit entitled "Cock Tales."  But this winter I wanted to make a movie: a parody of Werner Herzog's documentary, Grizzly Man, which had been seen by practically everyone at Snowlodge. I called my version "Snowcoach Man" and it featured, among other scenes, an expletive-filled rant by me (as Timothy Treadwell) against the Park Service: What is the job of the Park Service anyway? They're supposed to protect the animals in the Park.  Well what about that bison at Fishing Bridge! It was sick, and it was dying, and it lay down in the road to die a natural death. So what did the Park Service do? They fucking shot it! Fucking Park Service!!

It won the gold.  A lot of people asked me if I got any flack about that film from the Park Service, but they were actually very good about it, even when someone posted it on YouTube. It was the Company that freaked out:

"James! We're getting all kinds of flack from corporate about this YouTube thing."

"James! You've got to take Snowcoach Man off of YouTube or there's going to be serious repercussions."

"James!  Park Service wants to talk to everyone involved in the making of your film so I'd advise you to take it off YouTube now."

This last e-mail was a feint. The Park Service was not interested in my trifling film.  As one ranger explained, "I thought Snowcoach Man was pretty funny, and I shot the bison!"

So the movie stayed on the air and there were no repercussions (it was in fact subsequently shown at the Gardiner Film Festival, a local venue, which settled the matter), but the Company kept an eye on me the rest of the winter.  They found their chance to bring the hammer down when I submitted a photo for the winter photo contest which showed several drivers standing on top of their snowcoaches in Hayden Valley.

"Have you seen this picture? Have you seen this picture!" they shrieked at my boss.

The dust soon settled when they admitted that there was nothing wrong with drivers standing on top of their snowcoaches in Hayden Valley.

The picture took third place and I went on to win the No Talent Show two more times.  I am now the Lance Armstrong of the Yellowstone Winter Olympics' No Talent Show.

So I got that goin' for me.

Bartender

I CONTINUED to fly below the glass ceiling for those who eschew management by getting hired as a bartender.  I’d had some bartending experience, thanks to three seasons at the employee pub in Grant Village, but that job only looked good on paper.  In reality, all I did at the pub was pour beer and burn nachos.  I couldn't have told my interviewer what went into a Screwdriver, much less a Perfect Manhattan, up, with a twist.  Luckily, she didn't ask, at least not before I'd had the opportunity to cram the Mr. Boston Bartender Guide into my head during the seasonal break.  As it turned out, I didn't need half of what I'd memorized.  Most of the pours were beer and wine, with about a dozen mixed drinks rounding out the repertoire one needed to survive.

So, after seven years in the dining room I moved into the Bear Pit at the Old Faithful Inn.  There were a few noticeable differences from my former job of waiting tables.  First of all, I discovered that most tourists regard bars in national parks as outposts of civilization in an otherwise unfamiliar and threatening environment.  Here they feel at home, or at least more relaxed, especially after a few drinks, and they begin to appreciate their surroundings.  The bar is like a decompression chamber which allows people to stop scrambling and worrying long enough to consider the not unimportant fact that they've arrived in one piece.  It also gives haggard moms and dads a little time away from the kids, with whom they've lived a cramped, laboratory-rat existence in their cars for several days.  While one parent assumes the burden of the children, the other wanders into the bar.  You can spot these unyoked beasts the moment they walk in from the way their eyes play reverentially over the decor and fasten on the barman with a grateful gleam.  The younger crowd traveling in groups tend to adopt the bar as their base of operations.  They plan the next day’s excursion there and meet afterwards to toast its success (or to share their misadventures). Occasionally an old-school drinker would belly up to the bar and order his Martini or Manhattan, watching carefully as I poured and stirred, comparing my moves with his regular barman back in the neighborhood. These guys would invariably call me “Jim” or “Jimmy,” because for them a bar was a boy’s club and you had to keep things chummy.  They drank their one drink, let you know if it was any good, and went on with their lives. They may have been lousy husbands, bigots, or right-wing reactionaries for all I knew, but I admired their approach to drink.

Of course there were alcoholics to be dealt with, but these were generally fellow employees who were just starting their binges in the Bear Pit because they couldn't wait for the employee pub to open.  After a couple of rounds they would check their watches and be off to get their bargain drinks.

The main difference between my former job waiting tables and this one was that bartending was physically less demanding.  There was no heavy lifting required, no rushing back and forth between table and kitchen.  There was also the added bonus that people in bars tended to be less emotional about their service. Where diners think nothing of making a scene because the server forgot their side of mayonnaise, people in bars will generally hold their tongues about little errors like the wrong garnish or if their drink is served up instead of on-the-rocks. The reason is simple: you don't fuck with the barman.  Where a waiter is seen as an errand boy, a bartender is seen as a skilled craftsman who can banish you from his bar if he doesn't like you.  I wasn't used to being in charge, but I warmed up to it quickly, putting my personal stamp on the BP by playing free jazz on the sound system instead of the usual rock and encouraging customers to talk about their experiences in the Park.  By the end of the summer the woman who hired me had the satisfaction of knowing that she'd picked a winner, and my dad could finally tell his friends what I did for a living - because in his world, saying his son was a waiter was no different than saying his son was gay.

*               *               *

As I came to work one morning in September I was told by a co-worker that there had been a tourist attacked.

"What was it, a bison?"  I asked, anticipating a tale of foolishness whereby Fred from Iowa got a little too close and was sent airborne.

The co-worker just blinked at me, then realized my misunderstanding and shook his head.

“No, no, not a tourist.  A terrorist.  There was a terrorist attack.”

It was the eleventh, and I learned the grim details only a few minutes before opening the bar for the day.  Management was already there when I arrived.  They had set up a satellite dish and a TV, tuning it to CNN as a crowd of people began to hover outside, having heard the strange rumors. When I opened the doors they wandered in like zombies, ashen-faced and quiet, staring at the images on the screen without comment. Then they began to drink.  Slowly at first, almost apologetically.  As the scenes were replayed and the magnitude  of the event sank in, they started lining up for their third and fourth rounds, spending their cash quickly, desperately, as if it were about to become an obsolete currency.

Operation Maple Syrup

OPERATION Maple Syrup was a radical experiment in the redistribution of wealth that served as a counterbalance to the systemic greed of corporate America. Or, put another way, it was a bunch of employees robbing the company blind.

In the summer of 2001, the corporation decided to gut its accounting department and eliminate all of its dining room cashier positions, turning to server banking and requiring the wait staff to do their own cashiering as well as a good portion of the bookkeeping duties formerly handled by the accounting staff.  For this extra work the company was willing to pay exactly nothing.  They figured to save tens of thousands of dollars by downsizing one department and simply heaping the added work elsewhere with no attendant increase in pay.  So it had to have been an easy step for the $3 an hour employees to take when they perceived that with no accounting oversight, money could simply “disappear” into their pockets (especially during the breakfast shift - hence the name of the operation).

There is a Dilbert cartoon in which the title character explains to an innocent co-worker that they are in the process of doing something unethical.  “Are we bad people?” the co-worker worriedly asks.  Dilbert replies, “We’re good people who have been influenced by a corrupt corporate culture.”  And so it was in the summer of 2001.  But this practice could not have reached its extortionate extremes without some of the managers turning a blind eye to what was going on.  In fact, there were managers who were just as appalled by the blatant greed and disregard for employee welfare as were the employees themselves.  So they not only turned a blind eye, they did it with a wink, and the trickle of misdirected money became a flood.  What remained of the accounting department could only watch in horror as the receipts came in.  They knew something was up, but they didn’t know the scale of it.  I heard one accountant lament, “The company must have lost ten thousand dollars this summer.”  When I relayed this information to a friend of mine who worked in the restaurant he laughed and said, “More like ten thousand dollars a week!”

The  dining  room  at Old  Faithful  began  to  resemble  a syndicate, and whenever a new waiter arrived he was immediately  taken aside and clued in ("This is how we do things here at O.F...").  The newbie would generally have a crisis of conscience until being seduced by the lordly sums he saw the others pirating.  However, theft requires rationalization in all but the most rapine of souls, so it became common to hear stories like Nick's: "Can you believe I got written up for not sorting my silverware at the dish drop?  That's gonna cost the company fifty dollars!"

Most of the people involved understood that this was a one-time deal.  It was simply too good to last.  As another restaurant employee said wistfully, “It will never be this good again.”  Understanding this fact, none of the people involved in Operation Maple Syrup returned the following summer.  While it lasted though, I have never seen a more cheerful staff.  At last they were earning a decent wage.  One of the foreign kids, reeling from the fortune he’d amassed, said to me just before returning to his poor Eastern European country, “I can now buy a house, a car… It is the American Dream.  I love America!”

Oddly enough, when all the tallies were done for the summer of 2001, the dining room at the Old Faithful Inn had had a banner year.  The only conclusion one can draw is that a happy workforce is a productive workforce - even if that cheery smile is accompanied by a sly wink.

In the seasons that followed, the Maple Syrup affair did of course continue.  It didn't take long for new employees to put two-and-two together and start getting their hands sticky.  The company  implemented  a  few half-measures  to limit  the siphoning  of funds,  but it wasn't until  the  summer of 2003 that the authorities were called in.  The National Park Service, working with the FBI, ran a sting operation that season which netted a couple of Latvian waiters.  They were fired, but they weren’t deported because they ratted on the Russians, who were stealing even more.

The Ones Who Don’t Make It

THE nutcases, for one.  These employees usually make themselves known early on and tend to self-destruct.  They are the dysfunctional alcoholics and sociopaths who have “incidents” that get them terminated or arrested (usually both) before the end of the first month.  May is for weeding out the psychos; a dangerous but entertaining time.

An early clue into the imminent demise of an employee is if they go to bed early every night.  I mean seven or eight in the evening, lights out, under the sheets in the fetal position. These are the folks who have failed to adjust to Yellowstone time. Without the comforting diversion of television they simply shut down.  Unable to create their own amusements - drinking, hiking, making new friends, writing a book - they lose interest in life and haunt their dorm rooms like foul-smelling ghosts.

Braggarts.  This category of the condemned refers specifically to waiters, especially those who bring their irreproachable skills to the Old Faithful Inn dining room.  They scoff at the size of their sections and dissertate on the organizational skills they possess which have won them fortune and acclaim back home.  "My old boss pleaded with me not to leave," they pronounce with unassuming humility. When the hour arrives for them to show their mettle, when the fans leap from their seats in anticipation of a bluegrass classic, these erstwhile stags show themselves for the nags they really are. The exemplar being a watery-eyed candidate from Indiana who disappeared one lunch while the rest of us were being hammered without mercy.  The managers found him huddled in a corner of the men's room with a confused and frightened expression on his face, mumbling about how the hosts wouldn't listen to him when he said he couldn't handle another table: "They just kept seating me," he repeated incredulously as the managers hovered over him and exchanged knowing glances.

One sure sign of an employee with the mark of death on his forehead is if he tries to change the system.  It's OK to complain about the company, but if you actually try to change the way things are done, god help you.  And if you succeed in forcing the company to do the right thing - say, provide night meals for employees who work into the wee hours (as a short-lived friend of mine accomplished) - you can forget about the company tagline, "A great job for a year or a career!"[5]

Another friend of mine split when she became fed up with what she considered to be the unprofessional manner in which the Park was run.  Which brings me to the next category of employees who don't make it through the season; anyone with standards.

A large slice of the pie chart showing employees who don't make it would have to represent anyone in management.  This seems to be the most efficacious way of burning out a perfectly good employee.  Once they enter the managerial arena they are quickly driven insane by company propaganda and either quit in order to live the sunny and uncomplicated life of a drunk, or move up the corporate ladder and live the dark and complicated life of a drunk.

People with ambition. Yellowstone is not the place to go if you want to be noticed.  While it's not as obscure as, say, Musselshell, events in this area don't generally reach any further than the local papers.  We're the South America of North America; the only time we make the news is when disaster strikes.  Earthquakes, floods, and fires are our claim to fame.

Hippies.  These are the saddest constituents of the category. They come to Yellowstone because of its unconventional lifestyle, but soon find themselves working overtime for a company that regards the Park as little more than a cash cow.  These delicate creatures drift away from the Park like seeds from a dandelion at the first opportune wind; whether it be the rumor of a less-stringent drug policy in another park or the fortuitous passing of a traveling circus.

In fact, the only people who do make it are the ones who, for better or for worse, love this place.

Tidbits

WHEN Yellowstone became a national park in 1872, Lewis Carroll was enjoying great popularity with his Alice in Wonderland books.  Because the Park seemed like such a looking-glass world with its remarkable geology and fabulous wildlife, it earned the nickname "Wonderland," and early advertisements for the Park used the words Yellowstone and Wonderland interchangeably.

It's a fitting sobriquet for reasons that go beyond the Park's natural wonders. Park Service policies, for example, can often seem like the unreasonable dictates of mad kings and queens. Take the notion that bison are only protected while within the boundaries of the Park and can be shot the moment they stick their wooly heads over the line.  One can easily imagine young Alice puzzling over the difficulties that would arise from such an arrangement:

"But the bison don't know they're in a Park," thought Alice.  "And they certainly don't know what its boundaries are."  She took a moment to think this over, then asked the Gnat (who seemed to know an awful lot about looking-glass policy), "What happens if they leave the Park?"

"Then they would die, of course."

"But that must happen very often," Alice remarked thoughtfully.

"It always happens."

And so it does.

*               *               *

My mother is French, and she cooks wonderful dishes that combine both American and French cuisine.  She doesn't just cook a pizza, she serves up a table-sized pastry topped with seasoned sausage, garlic, onion, and sprinkled with Herbs de Provence.  When I travel overseas she asks not for trinkets but spices; saffron from Turkey, vanilla from Tahiti, sea salt from the west coast of France.  It would be a crime to return from a foreign country without some culinary specialty with which to delight my mother.

Back in the Park I would often bring tremendous appetites to the employee dining room after hiking 15 or 20 miles in the backcountry, coming down from high peaks in the Tetons or searching out waterfalls by compass, only to find loveless heels of pork or pale breasts of chicken, devoid of creams or sauces, lying forlorn in antiseptic steam trays; vegetables, limp and defeated, with all the life cooked out of them;  carelessly cut potatoes suffocating under gobs of cheddar  cheese; and for dessert, carrot cake, served in cardboard boxes and cut into neat squares resembling the post-modern rations of the space age.  From the culinary environs of my home to being handed a plastic tray and ladled penitentiary-grade slop in the EDR in Yellowstone is like casting swine before pearls. No wonder employees spend so much of their income on food! We're being fed like schoolchildren, and the kindergarten-like motif of the EDR with its safety cartoons and bad employee art only magnifies the insult.

*               *               *

When I was working at Grant Village I once overheard the Food & Beverage manager grumble as she was perusing the employee meal plan with her assistant, looking for ways to improve her bottom line, "Sez here we're supposed to have shrimp on Tuesday. Hell, fish sticks is just as good!"

*               *               *

One can't work in Yellowstone for any amount of time without feeling the pressure from the outside world to get a real job. While the Park does tend to attract a certain louche element, we're not pirates (generally).  In the independent film, What Happened to Kerouac, we learn that Jack talked about marriage with most all of his lovers.  It wasn't that he was being insincere, it was the 1950s, and people just didn't have sex without a nod to the nuclear family. Not if one harbored any connection to civilized society anyway. It was necessary to talk the talk, even if only for the sake of appearances.  It's the same with working in the Park; one talks about getting a real job because we all tacitly recognize the objectionable quality of seasonal work.

*               *               *

I recently discovered that the Labor Department classifies seasonal workers in Yellowstone under the same rubric as migrant farm workers. How marginalized can you get?

*               *               *

Although it was William Clark of the Lewis and Clark expedition who paddled down the Yellowstone River, it is Meriwether Lewis after whom Lewis Lake, Lewis River, Lewis Falls, and Lewis Canyon are named in the Park.  The Clark's Nutcracker, a gray jay common in Yellowstone, was named for his partner.  Or, as I liked to point out when I was a tour guide, Lewis got the major features, Clark got the bird.

*               *               *

Near the end of the winter season when I was working as a snowcoach driver, I had had enough of snowmobiles.  Pulling over near Midway Geyser Basin to talk about the history of Excelsior Geyser I had to postpone my speech for several minutes as one after another two-stroke snowmobile roared noisily past, filling the air with the stench of gasoline. I ended up prefacing my commentary with this rankled remark: "Giving commentary in the winter with all these snowmobiles is like trying to do wildlife viewing at the Daytona 500."

*               *               *

Winter can really put the zap on people's heads.  I'm not talking about employees suffering from cabin fever, either.  I mean the guests, especially the ones who are unfamiliar with natural environments.  People from New Jersey.  As I was greeting one such couple prior to taking them on a Firehole River tour the man turned to me and said, "I don't wanna go no place toxic." I asked him what he meant and he explained that he'd heard about the vapors from the geyser basins being harmful.  I assured him that there were important differences between Yellowstone and superfund sites and we began our tour.  When I took him and his wife on the Fountain Paint Pots nature trail, we stopped at a point that afforded a panoramic view of ancient lava flows covered in pine forest which surrounded a sinter-white basin of steaming fumaroles and splashing geysers.  His mouth dropped open and he looked at me in wonder.  "Is this the center of the Earth?" he asked.

*               *               *

Easterners tend to romanticize the West, whereas westerners tend to live there, and the battle between romance and reality is always a losing one.  As Julia Roberts said in Pretty Woman, "I want the fairy tale."

Most tourists are attracted to Yellowstone because they idealize it as a pristine and unaltered slice of pre-colonial America, when what it is is a fragile postage-stamp sized plot of relatively undeveloped real estate in a more-or-less unpopulated region of the American West that is nevertheless threatened on all sides by economic interests who would like nothing better than to chainsaw, drill, strip-mine, clear-cut, and otherwise develop this isolated region for short-term monetary gain.  Like adding parental advisories to music CD's, establishing Yellowstone as a protected national park only adds to the allure of its exploitation for these adolescent-minded entrepreneurs.

*               *               *

A burned-out waitress at the Old Faithful Inn dining room had just come back from seeing the movie Falling Down in West Yellowstone.  She was talking about the scene where Michael Douglas shows up at a fast food joint in L.A. with an Uzi and demands breakfast during lunch hour. She was pissed.  "If that were me at the counter I would've said, 'If you're gonna shoot, shoot, but you're not getting any fuckin' breakfast!'”

*               *               *

The writer Joan Didion has one word for the tourist and restaurant industry: "dispiriting."

*               *               *

I'm running.  I need to get something for a table in the dining room but I've forgotten what it is.  They wanted a mirror, some of those little black discs (I forget what they're for), and something else.  All I can find are a few marbles and some string. When I return to the dining room I see that I've been seated with three more tables of twelve.  I realize that I've been neglecting another of my tables so I give them the marbles and run off, hoping that will keep them happy for a while, even though it's not what they ordered. I'm not usually this disorganized, and it doesn't help that I seem to be the only waiter on the floor tonight, but I finally manage to cobble together a tray of food for one of my tables.  It's difficult carrying the tray out to the dining room because of all the monkeys swinging from the rafters who keep trying to snatch my entree plates.  I set the tray down and start removing the plate covers, but to my horror I see that there's nothing underneath. Everyone in the dining room is looking at me, scowling, snapping their fingers. Then I'm running again, but I'm outside, throwing off my apron, my tie, my wait book, running away...

That's usually the point when I wake up, or the alarm goes off signaling the start of another early shift in the dining room.  I get up, unrefreshed, feeling as if I should be paid for the last few restless hours I've spent waiting tables in my dreams.

*               *               *

The Eastern Europeans have a reputation for being very hard-working, even to the point of getting upset if they don't get overtime.  I asked Kaspars, a busser from Latvia, if he ever got out to enjoy the Park.  He looked bewildered.  "What?  Is just trees. I wanted work in Denver. Here is nothing."

*               *               *

One of my co-workers in the dining room told me recently that he'd asked management to lighten up on his work schedule.  He was a writer, he said, and he wasn't getting enough free time to keep up on his craft.  I thought it was admirable that he felt so strongly about his literary ambitions that he was prepared to tender his resignation if they didn't  give him a schedule that afforded him enough free time to practice his art.  I thought, "Here's a guy I can look up to."

A few days later he was arrested by the FBI for his part in a kidnapping and murder case in California.

*               *               *

In the summer of 2003, the pilot of a small plane crashed into Midway Geyser Basin and was killed.  Because of his accident the road was closed for several hours and a few busloads of irritable New Yorkers were unable to get to the Old Faithful Inn for dinner that night.  The pilot did not die in vain.

*               *               *

Back when The Grateful Dead were still alive and touring, employees would pile into broken-down vans and make Homeric road trips to see them, promising the moon to their co-workers in order to get their shifts covered so that they could join the odyssey. They could afford to promise the moon because many of them never returned.  When the van lurched back onto location several days later it would invariably be several bodies lighter.

"Hey, where's Anne?"

"Oh, she decided to follow the Dead.  She's selling her beadwork to support herself now."

"But...that bitch was supposed to work my lunch!"

*               *               *

A couple of summers ago, in late September, I arrived for my breakfast shift and found myself quite alone.  None of my co- workers (or managers) were anywhere to be seen.  I busied myself making coffee in the kitchen and otherwise preparing for opening, but by 6:30 - opening time - I was still the only waiter in the house.  The host stand was already surrounded by a large mob of early risers who were pressing at the doors like King Kong at the village gates, and there I stood in the middle of the empty dining room, waiting to be violated like Fay Wray. But no! I rose to the challenge and threw open the doors myself, addressing the beast in an authoritative voice: "The entire staff is sleeping off a drunk!" I announced.  "I'm the only waiter in the house! Come on in and enjoy the buffet, but I'm not taking any orders!" The bemused throng fell silent, then someone laughed and it was all right.  They followed me into the dining room like good little children and fed themselves from the copious trough of the blessed buffet while I doled out the coffee and orange juice.

The staff, as it turned out, had indeed been sleeping off a drunk, and when they began to show up at work they were a sorry sight; bleary-eyed, grim-faced, and still reeking of alcohol. When they realized what had transpired in their absence, that James had lashed himself to the wheel during the tempest and saved the ship while the crew were retching below decks, they shook their heavy heads in wonder.  "The legend!" they said sardonically.  For my heroics, management gave me twenty-five dollars’ worth of bear bucks (redeemable in the gift shop or dining room - alcohol not included) and their undying gratitude for having covered their asses.

While it's pretty to work in a place where one has only to show up for work on time to be regarded as an exemplary employee, it does tend to leave one with a sense of being patronized, like a doting mother praising her child's fecal painting.  I mean, the standards are so low.

*               *               *

Thousands of people lost their homes in Louisiana when hurricanes Katrina and Rita ravaged the Gulf Coast within weeks of each other during the late summer of 2005.  The outpouring of sympathy and monies for the victims of the tragedy was rivaled only by the generosity of Americans who wanted to help the families whose lives were destroyed by the terrorist attacks of 9-11. Close to a billion dollars was raised by The Red Cross and other organizations.  People around the country opened their houses to shelter those left homeless, and in Yellowstone a collection was taken in the employee dining room and the proceeds sent to the Red Cross.  Everyone wanted to do their part.

Almost everyone.

On  the morning  of September 27, Ginger, a server in the Snowlodge dining room at Old Faithful, didn't hear her alarm go off at 5:45 and was late for work.  It was her fifth late, and she was fired.  She'd been up the night before trying to get in touch with her mother, who'd been displaced by hurricane Rita, and was still trying to find out what remained of her belongings (if anything) in her brother's house in New Orleans after hurricane Katrina had caused the levees to break and left half the city underwater.

When Ginger heard the news that she was terminated, she called the Human Resources Office to plead her case.  She was homeless, she had nowhere to go. Could she possibly stay in the employee dorms for a week or two, considering the extenuating circumstances, until she located her mother and had a place to go?  After all, she had seen the flyers posted in the EDR asking for donations for victims of the hurricanes.  She'd in fact made a donation herself while she was employed.  Would the company extend the charity to a victim who was, until recently, in their employ?

In classic corporate fashion, the functionary at the other end of the line said, "That was not a company-approved fundraiser."

*               *               *

On the occasion of my official 20th year in the Park in 2005 I received a notice via interdepartmental mail to this effect:

We have decided...to honor all employees with twenty or more years of seniority with the company.  Since you are a member of this elite group of employees, I am delighted to invite you to attend this function. This year's reception will include the awarding of all 20-Plus Bear pins, some special recognitions and an array of delicious hors d'oeuvres and beverages.

The invite came from the General Manager of Yellowstone National Park on the 28th of July.  The reception took place on the 27th.

I related this anecdote to a co-worker who also had a few seasons under his belt.  He just shrugged.  “And you were surprised?”

*              *              *

One of the sure signs of season's end is when the message board in the EDR starts to fill up with items for sale.  Everything from cameras to computers are pawned off at bargain rates. Generally one finds smaller items, but there are also cars and even mobile homes offered from time to time (usually when a long-term employee has finally decided to call it quits and needs to rid himself of his more oppressive effects).  It's a good time for the savvy shopper, but you'll never see the seller again so it's caveat emptor to the nth degree.  There have been many autumn mornings at the end of a season when I've woken to the sound of car ignitions turning slower and slower as the battery dies in a "bargain car" to the accompaniment of heated cursing in Slavic as another envisioned American road-trip goes up in smoke.

*               *               *

In the spring of 2005 The Discovery Channel aired a television docudrama about the imminent eruption of the Yellowstone caldera called Supervolcano.  It was produced in cooperation with the BBC, which explains why the chief doomsayer was screaming about the coming catastrophe like Scotty on Star Trek: "I canno' stop the eruption, cap'n!  We're up shite creek!!"

*               *               *

Every summer there is a contest to come up with a staff T-shirt. The best designs, of course, never see the light of day.  The Recreation Staff only accept "acceptable" designs, which preclude any mention of overworked employees or tourons.  They prefer happy, anthropomorphic animals - just like what you’d find in the gift shops around the Park - with cheerful, outdoorsy themes. My favorite submission was the brainchild of my friend Audrey, a fellow server in the dining room. It traced the physical and emotional devolution of the employee through the course of a summer season.  The first panel was May, and showed a fresh-faced employee saying, "Ah, the Yellowstone Experience!"  The following panel was June, which showed the same employee looking a bit disconcerted.  July was a take off on Edvard Munch's The Scream, while August showed the employee huddled in the fetal position, shaking and sucking his thumb. September showed the employee lying supinely and mumbling to himself.  The final panel, October, was the one that made the entire design work. The employee, disheveled, with bags under his eyes, missing teeth and grinning like an idiot, says, “Piece of cake! I’ll be back next season.”

And so I was.

Part Six

The Real World Closes In

LATELY, Yellowstone hasn’t provided the same insulation from the outside world as in the past.  The arrival of the portable satellite dish set a venal precedent, quickly followed by cell phones and - the most rapidly spreading weed of all - the Internet.  The isolated Brigadoon that I've gone to pains describing in this book is quickly becoming a thing of the past.  While the physical isolation remains, the encroachment of technology has adulterated the experience of being apart.

Or maybe not.  This could just be a fanciful way of compartmentalizing the end of my tenure as a seasoned seasonal employee in Yellowstone.  The company won't be giving me any gold watches when I leave, so I might as well gild the narrative a bit.

What is unnerving is the way my anonymity as a Park employee has been compromised by the unusual length of my sojourn.  People recognize me now, hailing me in the Inn like an old friend:

"Hey, James!  You're still here!  Remember us?  We're the Pokemon's from Iowa!  You waited on us in '93!"

I don't remember them.  I don't remember any of them.  I feel like an amnesiac accosted by incredulous family and friends: "Surely you remember me, don't you?  I'm your wife for god's sake!"

Just this summer I picked up a lunch shift in the dining room, and as I was taking the order from a table of Japanese tourists the translator explained why they seemed so happy to have me as their server:

"They recognize you from your movie," he said.

Things were getting weird.

If I had a nickel for every time I declared at the end of a season that I would not be coming back, well, I'd have about a dollar. The point being, I never really accepted the idea of Yellowstone as a career. I would just find myself back here year after year, as if by magic, but it was a spell that I always intended to break. Now that my co-workers have begun regarding me as a permanent fixture ("You'll never get married.  You're already married, to the Park!"), and the tourists look for me in the restaurant like kids seeking out their favorite rides in an amusement park, and the managers defer to my judgment...it’s just become too respectable.

But there I go compartmentalizing again.

I've often wondered how the end would come; under what circumstances I would leave the Park for good.  I always used to assume that I'd be fired - they won't let me sleep in their cabins anymore - and so my ruminations tended to orbit around what offense would bring my downfall.  Beating a tourist insensible with a peppermill ranked high on this list.  Or perhaps the end would come suddenly, as I was carrying twelve entrees during a madhouse lunch and my overburdened spine would snap, leaving me to expire amidst a clutter of broken plates and scattered special requests.  The last sound I hear being a lone plate cover spinning to a stop on the wooden floor in front of the fireplace (which would signal the onlookers that the show was over and they could resume their dining experience).  Another, certainly milder, possibility was that I would meet a girl who would shatter the Park's siren song and whisk me back to civilization.  It's only recently that I've begun to realize that I'll have to take matters into my own hands, due to the extreme tardiness of Princess Charming.

But why leave at all?  Why all this talk about turning the page on what has really been a marvelous run of luck?  Part of it is wanting to get out while I'm still on top of my game, before I become like the elderly father of Stevens in The Remains of the Day, relegated to an entry-level position because he just can't cut it "at table" anymore.  The rest has something to do with a comment one of my managers made when I let him read a couple of chapters from my manuscript: "When this book is published," he said, "you won't be rehired."

Autumn

AUTUMN is easily my favorite season in the Park, when the elk start bugling and the aspen turn golden in the north and in the Tetons (but not at Old Faithful, where it’s all pine and burnt pine).  That's when I know that another long season is coming to a close.  I never lament the end of warm days.  For me, the coming cold season marks the arrival of welcome winds that blow the tourists back home.  While the Labor Day weekend is the official close of high season, it's the first snowfall that really culls the crowd.  When people see snow falling in the mountains it triggers a basic survival instinct for them to seek shelter.  They abandon the Park like a sinking ship, leaving the employees to contemplate the strange silence.  By this time many of the employees have already departed as well; having been fired, quit, returned to college or gone back home, or having made other arrangements in other parks and ski resorts.  Our exodus follows close on the heels of the tourists and soon the Park is handed back to the animals, who no doubt sense our absence.  They raise their wooly, horned, antlered and feathered heads and exchange glances which seem to say, "I thought they'd never leave."

It's strange to walk through the Inn after it's been emptied of guests and tucked in for the winter; its chairs and tables covered in white sheets, its windows boarded up, its heat turned off.  Walking the creaking floors above the lobby, feeling the cold, the Inn seems fragile.  Recent renovation work has seen the addition of several supporting walls in the lobby meant to shore up the sagging tits of the Grande Dame.  After a summer of impressing visitors with its peaked eighty-foot-high ceiling and its fireplace of five-hundred tons of rock, the cold weather reveals it for what it is: a frail shell which must be nursed through the harsh winter season by squads of maintenance workers and winterkeepers. One feels a tenderness toward the venerable structure, as toward a grandparent, and wishes it well.

Underlying this business of winding down the season is a sense of cycling death and rebirth.  We repack our cars beneath flocks of Canada geese heading south in crooked V-shaped formations.  Their excited quack-quacks seem familiar, like our own sanguine conversations about the off-season adventures we have planned. And like us, there will be many who don't make the return trip, so that these departures are also in a sense conclusions.  Whether we come back or not often seems to have less to do with inclination than chance.  There've been many times I would have bet money on the imminent return of an employee - though never on myself, oddly enough - only to hear off-season rumors of their apostasy in the form of a marriage or a well-paying job in some far-off city. Picking the returners is as confounding as trying to pick the geese who'll be spared from the hunter's bullet.

Unlike summer and winter, which are immutable seasons, spring and fall are revelatory.  They are times of movement and change, which makes leaving the Park seem right.  We feel that we're part of a greater migration affecting all the beasts. Such an itinerant lifestyle seems natural in this setting and it's the rest of the stay-at-home world that seems out of step.  Joseph Campbell referred to these accented moments in his famous interview series, The Power of Myth, conducted with Bill Moyers.  He told the story of an American astronaut who was working on the orbiting space shuttle.  The astronaut was busily effecting some repair or other outside the craft, keeping his attention focused on the job at hand when word came from Mission Control to hold off on the task for a moment while they ran some tests.  In the few moments he had to himself the astronaut glanced around and was confronted with the entire cosmos; its vastness, the utter silence, and moving slowly beneath his feet was the luminous blue disc of the Earth itself. Kept oblivious of this ineffable scene by his toil, his mind reeled at the revelation.  He was quite simply blown away with wonder and found himself asking the rhetorical question, "What have I done to deserve this?"

It's not often in a conventional life that these accented moments occur when one has the opportunity to reflect on the passage of time and consider the checkered roads ahead.  For most careerists living in early twenty-first century America the only chance they'll have to look back with anything approaching reflection is on their deathbed, when they'll grope for something trenchant to say to their estranged children and blurt out a lame platitude instead ("Seize the day, Billy. Seize the day. Urk...").

No.  Change is good.  Change is painful, yes, but as any dominatrix worth her salt can tell you: pain is necessary in order to reach the deeper levels of pleasure.

Survivor’s Party

DURING the summer we employees have our little disagreements amongst ourselves – shouting matches, breakups, fights, the rare hospitalization – but in mid-October we gather together at the Survivor’s Party as one big dysfunctional family.  Like a wrap party at the end of a high school play or a Hollywood film, we put aside the accumulated ill-will of the past few months and show each other a grudging respect for having made it through a rough production.  Yes, the director was fired early on and the script had to be re-written several times and the stars all had breakdowns and the funding was pulled, but by God we made it!

A band is usually hired to play in the employee pub for this final affair, but half the time they don't show up because a blizzard closes the passes and we have to make do with a DJ dance (which is just as well since the bands hired by the company tend to be local talent who normally play for beer).

The Survivor's Party is also a time of heightened emotional states.  We all realize that this is it.  The Park is like a vacuum about to be breached, an event that will scatter its inhabitants - ready or not - to the four corners of the real world.  What usually happens is that this night bears witness to many passionate and ill-conceived liaisons which are hurriedly carried off under the protective mantle of inebriation.               "I'm wearing my fuck-me pumps tonight!" said a friend of mine as she slipped into her party clothes.  Painted faces, costumes, and bared flesh often give this night the feeling of a bacchanal (followed the next morning by the inevitable walk of shame as employees return to their own dorms under the pitiless light of day).  On a more prosaic level we all exchange addresses in a flurry of scribbled scrap paper. This practice has increased with the rise of the Internet; e-mails being of a more impersonal nature than the physical addresses of the previous millennium.  A friend of mine once made the mistake of giving his parents' home address to a girl he hardly knew except as one of the hosts in the dining room.  The girl had always been a bit odd, but she really didn't stick out all that much in the Park.  A couple of weeks after the Park closed, however, she turned up at his house and took up residence in one of the spare bedrooms while he was away.  The parents just assumed she was a friend of their son from the Park and accepted her.  When the girl's supply of lithium ran out though, she had a psychotic break and tore up the room, precipitating a late-night call to the police and an embarrassing scene in front of the neighbors.  My friend received a letter of reprimand  soon after from his scandalized parents which  read in part, "Your Yellowstone friends are no longer welcome here. P.S. We are having the locks changed."

Even if we do stay in touch after the summer, there's no guarantee that our friends will return for another season. In fact, the best bet is that Brigadoon will reawaken with an almost entirely new cast of characters.  This is a community in flux, with Europeans, Asians, Africans, North Americans and South Americans all dancing together in a brief display of global harmony and great sex.

The Survivor's Party tends to be the most raucous of employee gatherings, and most managers steer clear of it.  Recognizing the tenuous hold they have over us at this point they are loathe to incite the savages with their presence.  Besides, they want us to show up for our cleaning shifts in the morning.  Yes, before we can leave we have this one final hurdle to clear.  The day after the Survivor's Party is cleaning day, when the employees straggle in to work like flotsam after a storm.  We're put to work shutting down the stage: piling tables and chairs into corners; deep-cleaning; sorting and bagging odds and ends and covering everything in white sheets and plastic wrap.  So that when the company finally washes its hands of us we're exhausted, having had the last ounce of work ungenerously wrung from us.  We re-enter the world tired, hung-over, and reeking of chemical cleaning agents, with most of us destined to be snapped up by bargain-hunting seasonal outfits all across the land.

Lock your doors.

The Day We Leave

Alice had got so much into the way of expecting nothing but out-of-the-way things to happen, that it seemed quite dull and stupid for life to go on in the common way.

- Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

ONE of the most rewarding moments of working in Yellowstone is the day we leave.  Being seasonal workers, we know exactly what day we’re going to be cut loose, and as the departure date nears it occupies our thoughts more and more until it becomes an obsessive fantasy.  Everyone swaps stories of what they plan to do once they’ve turned in their uniforms; the places they’re going to visit, the people they’re going to see, the sleep they’re going to catch up on, the good food they’re going to eat (God yes, the food!).

It can feel like you’ve just come from the Moon when you finally hit the road: the radio in your car picks up strange songs from groups you’ve never heard of; people talk about episodes of TV shows you’ve never seen; or the government has fingered a new official enemy (“What?  We’re at war with France!?”).  It’s amazing how out-of-touch  one can get in just a few months, and with a few thousand dollars in your pocket at season’s end it can seem as if all of America is a vast cotton-candy continent just waiting to be tasted. It’s a bit like being released from prison (I imagine), but more like school holidays.  It’s a lot like Jack Kerouac’s dreaming of winewomenfriends atop Desolation Peak. After six months in the secluded Rockies you almost expect a greeting, cheering crowd at the entrance gates when you leave: “Welcome back! We missed you!”

It’s glorious.  And then it’s gone.  The fine thread that holds our summer community together unravels the moment the company washes its hands of us. We pack our vehicles and leave. A few people try to extend the show by car-pooling to another park or winter resort, but Yellowstone, like a sated lover, turns her back to us and sleeps.

We quickly come to realize that we’ve left something special up there in the mountains, and that the “real world” is a lot less friendly than we remembered it.  Maybe the first inkling occurs when we drive by pastures dotted with slow, uncomprehending cows instead of the muscular and wary bison we’ve grown accustomed to. Or else it’s when we think of hot springs when we see clouds of steam pouring from an industrial smokestack. Certainly the realization has come when, as a friend once told me, the only wilderness to be found is by lying on the lawn at night, gazing up at the starry sky.

And that is a large part of the reason why I’ve kept coming back to Yellowstone, against all the well-intentioned counsel of friends and family over the years.  Despite the overarching corporate presence in my life (I work at the company store, eat at the company cafeteria, sleep in the company dorm), there is a prevailing quality of rightness about this place.  It’s as if being surrounded by wild animals, unspoiled scenery, clean air and trout-filled streams were natural or something.

I had a good laugh at a Far Side cartoon that showed a middle-aged Peter Pan in an office cubicle, staring into space. The caption read:

Thirty years had passed, and although he had no real regrets about marrying Wendy, buying a home, and having two kids, Peter found his thoughts often going back to his life in Never-Never-Land.

I imagine ex-Yellowstone employees the world over pausing at work to dwell on a memory of uncomplicated laughter under the pines before the world closed in on them and filled their days with matters of consequence.

Epilogue

I’VE worked in other national parks, trying them on like hats, but I would always discard them as a seasonal fad and return to my old chapeau.  It seemed that Yellowstone had spoiled me for natural places.  While I could appreciate springtime in the Sierras, the dramatic storms and sunsets of the Grand Canyon, or the tropical sultriness of the Florida Everglades, none of them had that ineffable je ne sais quoi of my adopted mountain home.  Why was this?  It took me a while to realize that the difference was not in the parks at all.  Yellowstone was different because I loved her.  I could say of the other parks what The Little Prince said of the other roses that were not his own: "You are beautiful, but you are empty... One could not die for you."  Yellowstone is more important than all the other parks because it is she that I have explored; because it is from her rivers that I have drunk when thirsty; because I have eaten her berries; because I have listened to her waterfalls and hailstorms and gushing geysers and winter silences; because it is she that I have longed for when away.  Puisque c'est ma rose.

I used to joke about how, when I finish my final season, I should be given a little parcel of land in the Park.  But part of the reason that I love Yellowstone is exactly her inaccessibility.  No one lives here.  We’re all squatters.  Yellowstone is the perfect lover; always willing to take you in, demanding only your physical exertion, and then disappearing in the night with nothing more than lipstick traces on the mirror which read, "Call me anytime."

fini

My good friend, do not grieve, but depart;

and if your love lingers on, some day return.

- Gautama Buddha

SOURCES

Cather, Willa. O Pioneers!

Houghton Mifflin Company, New York, New York, 1995.

Carroll, Lewis. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass.

Penguin Books USA Inc. New York, New York, 1960.

Fontenot, Brit.  Striking Similarities: Labor Versus Capital in Yellowstone National Park.

Yellowstone Science, Volume 5, No. 4, p. 16. Fall 1997.

Fritz, William J.  Roadside Geology of the Yellowstone Country.

Mountain Press Publishing Co., Missoula, Montana, 1985.

Glover, Cal.  A Grizzly Death in Yellowstone.

Homestead Publishing, Moose, Wyoming, 1994.

Haines, Aubrey L. The Yellowstone Story, Vols. 1 & 2.

Yellowstone Library and Museum Association, Department of the Interior, Washington, D.C. 1977.

Heinlein, Robert A.  Stranger in a Strange Land.

Ace/Putnam Books, New York, New York, 1961.

Hemingway, Ernest.  For Whom The Bell Tolls.

Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, New York, 1940.

Hughes, Ted.  Birthday Letters.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1998.

Lohse, Joyce B.  A Yellowstone Savage: Life in Nature's Wonderland.

J.D. Charles Publishing, Colorado Springs, CO., 1988.

McGahan, Andrew.  Praise.

Carroll & Graf Publishers, Inc., New York, New York, 1992.

Muir, John.  The Yellowstone National Park.

Vistabooks, LLC, Silverthorne, CO., 1999.

Nabokov, Vladimir.  Lolita.

G.P. Putnam's Sons, New York, New York, 1955.

Plath, Sylvia. Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams.

HarperCollins, New York, New York, 2000.

Roberts, Gregory David.  Shantaram.

St. Martin’s Press, 2004.

Russell, Charles M.  Trails Plowed Under.

Doubleday and Co., Inc., Garden City, New York, 1946.

Schullery, Paul.  Mountain Time.

Simon and Schuster, New York, New York, 1988.

St. Exupery, Antoine de. The Little Prince.

Harcourt Brace & Company, Orlando, Florida, 1943.

Smith, Robert B., & Siegel, Lee J. Windows into the Earth: The Geologic Story of Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks.

Oxford University Press, New York, New York, 2000.

Steinbeck, John.  Travels With Charley: In Search of America.

Penguin Books USA Inc., New York, New York, 1997.

Whittlesey, Lee H. Death in Yellowstone: Accidents and Foolhardiness in the First National Park.

Roberts Rinehart Publishers, Boulder, Colorado, 1995.

5

Squatters in Paradise

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

James Perry was born in England to an American father and a French mother.  He moved with his family to the United States at the age of two and soon began working in Yellowstone National Park (or so it seems).  This is his second book.  His first book, Fortune’s Child: Travels on the Open Road, is very difficult to find.

5

[1] Firearms were allowed in Yellowstone when a rider was attached to the Credit Card Consumer Relief bill of 2009, which made it legal for loaded guns to be brought into our National Parks.  Yippee kai-ay.

[2] Listen, some of my best friends are cooks. They're really wonderful people and I'd never for an instant consider putting them in the same category as these fuck-ups. I'm stating this disclaimer on their behalf in part because of my concern for their feelings, but mostly because I don't want them to slap my steak with their penises.

[3 ]3 Alston Chase wrote about how elk had become too numerous in the Park and quoted a researcher who made the unfortunate claim that the herds had so denuded the browse that "the northern range would not burn if you napalmed it." This was written two years before the massive fires of 1988. Embarrassing. However, the response from the pettifoggers in service of the NPS was no better. Park historians Paul Schullery and Lee Whittlesey inveighed against these affronts, writing that the ungulate population in the northern range had been historically high. This claim was refuted by the more independent-minded Mary Ann Franke in her book To Save the Wild Bison, when she revealed that the only source these officials relied upon was the journal of a prospector who claimed to have seen "thousands of buffalo quietly grazing" close to the north boundary of what would soon be Yellowstone Park in 1870. This proximate prospector also claimed to have caught "thousands of fish" - a journal entry artfully ignored by the Park historians.

[4] The last act of the Clinton administration before leaving office was to phase out the use of snowmobiles in Yellowstone National Park.  When George W. Bush took office however, this edict was ignored, leading to lawsuits, recriminations, tears, a skit on The Daily Show, and general political burlesque. When the dust had settled (momentarily) a compromise had been reached in which the old 2-stroke snowmobiles were banned from the Park, while cleaner, quieter 4-strokes would be allowed to ply the winter roads in lower numbers and under supervision.

[5] The reader will recall my own ineffectual attempts to effect change in the company.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Part One

Down the Rabbit Hole

The Early Years

Resident Coordinator

Pubtender

Squatters in Paradise

First Winter

Hosting

My Bear Story

C.U.T.

Part Two

Damaged Goods

Service Industry

The Exotic Yellowstone Employee

We Are The Xanterrans!

Car Trouble

The Backcountry

Accommodations

Roommates

Coffee! Coffee!

Man Vs. Beast

Yellowstone Romances

Part Three

Scott from Texas

Celebs

The Yellowstone Motorist

Fuck the Cooks

The Backcountry II

Hot-Potting

Rangers

Last Tango in Yellowstone

Sylvia

Part Four

Literary Yellowstone

Mr. Ichikawa

When the Volcano Blows

Los Angeles

Savage Days

Part Five

Snowcoach Driver

Gunga Ga Lunga

Bartender

Operation Maple Syrup

The Ones Who Don’t Make It

Tidbits

Part Six

The Real World Closes In

Autumn

Survivor’s Party

The Day We Leave

Epilogue

SOURCES

ABOUT THE AUTHOR