The Sperry crew spent at least one hitch per season at Lake Ellen Wilson, a turquoise tarn so cold you’d shout when swimming even on torrid August days. Once Cassie and I paddled to work in an inflated one-man fishing raft we’d hidden in a manty load—two of us and our daypacks and rock tools jammed in between the rubber gunnels. We moored the raft under a cliff band, scrabbled up scree to the job site, and relished the coolest commute in the world. By 5:30, though, the up-valley winds kicked in, and like a freeway at rush hour, the evening trip took more than two hours, our rock-work-weary arms hardly able to paddle against the gusts. I watched ospreys and golden eagles coasting on the drafts above, the same wind that stopped us short boosting their flight to acrobatic levels. After that, the raft stayed at camp. Instead, we’d hike the twenty minutes home from work and take turns drifting out in the lake, Cassie in a bikini with the straps pushed down to counteract her farmer’s tan, and me in a sports bra and the worn-out Carhartts I’d chopped the legs off of with a pulaski, having forgotten shorts.
The storms off Lake Ellen Wilson were intense. One hitch, it poured for seven of eight days. Cassie stayed high and dry on an air mattress so thick she’d wedged it inside her tent half-inflated and blown it up the rest of the way from inside, but Bernadette, the newest laborer, had a puddle on her floor that soaked her sleeping bag and she worked the last two days with borderline hypothermia. Ellen Wilson could be such a bitch.
On day eight, we’d break camp: lower the coolers from the bear pole (wilted bits of lettuce, limp string cheese, a slice of iridescent roast beef afloat in melted ice), flatten the tents, secure the tools in their special boxes. While waiting for the packers to inch down the long, steep descent into our camp, we’d take a dip in the lake in preparation for the scorching nine miles between us and the truck at the trailhead. On the hike out, the string of mules not far behind, the trail passed a tiny kettle pond much nearer the Sperry cabin, nicknamed Lake Willie Nelson. Coming from Ellen Wilson, we laughed remembering hitches where we’d parted the algae from the top of this pond in order to swim. The raft would have filled half of it. Could we really have been that desperate?
What tourists say to a female traildog: How’d a pretty girl like you get a job like this? What, are all the men too lazy? I wish I could have done that when I was young. My, you seem strong! Well aren’t you something. I’ve always thought a dirty girl was pretty sexy. Who carries your tools up here? I’m gonna divorce my wife and marry you both. Can my boys have their picture taken with you? If your mother could see you! Can my girls have their picture taken with you? For shame!
Midsummer, after a grueling hitch—long miles, heavy rocks—I looked down at my body and could see that it had changed. I had muscles: me, the shrimp of my family, the one with thin skin and angular bones. Over the first season of trailwork, it felt as if I had finally shifted from girl to woman, not with gentle rounding, the fatted ass and softer weight that many women describe, but instead with a taut curve of shoulder into bicep, the imposing loaf of thigh muscle above bony knee. My body felt purposeful and competent in a way it never had, as if it could take control, set the terms. I could hike twenty miles at a quick clip, move uphill bearing burdensome loads. I could lever large rocks, carry with one hand what used to take two arms close to the chest.
That summer, I showed off my arms for anyone. I parodied the strongman’s pose, inviting irony to take the edge off my pride, but in a tank top at the bar, I flexed when asked, let total strangers squeeze my biceps. I’d never been drawn to the passively feminine wiles, and in my new arms I felt the intoxication of latent power, the knowledge that I didn’t just look a certain way, but could force something to happen—lid from a jar, hand off my ass—that I could take the world into my own hands, give it a firm grip, kick it in the balls if I chose. Women have long been told that our bodies are to be presented, arranged for viewing, and that our power comes through flirting, a psychological dominance that stands in for physical strength. Goodbye to all that, which had never suited me. I felt power in my body. By itself.
I pondered explosive behavior out of context; I looked at my hands and wondered what they were capable of. Could I break a spirited horse? Chop a board in half with my bare hand? Wring somebody’s neck? The violence surprised me, and to any onlooker, I would have seemed still laughably slender, no one to run from in a dark alley. Yet what I imagined I was capable of had changed; I lifted without thinking, spurned the grocery bagger’s assistance, reefed on tight lug nuts, lit into a task without fear of failure. In trailwork, this meant I could quickly get in over my head, because I was by no means invincible (few people are, though Max seemed close, and kept me striving). Sometimes I got a log into my arms before I realized I couldn’t go anywhere; with the rock bar, I could convince myself I was indomitable instead of just aided. Though I had long admired tenderness and vulnerability as much as strength, that summer I relished the bravado of muscle, the swagger of look what I can do. This is why the nouveaux riches spend their money so quickly, I thought. It’s hard not to use wantonly a thing you’ve always wanted, slightly out of reach.
By now, I’m long used to my body and its rhythms, the way it’s shaped and remade by a task. In a summer with lots of uphill hiking, my quads are hard as sandbags, and it takes a bit to raise my heart rate, steady as she goes. After a month of rock projects, my lower back twinges in the morning but my abs are something to write home about. Log work shoves my lats along my spine, bricklike but tender to the touch, and my hands are coated in pitch. On a front-country project with power wheelbarrows, backaches heal and arms revert to noodles.
In my midtwenties, growing strong, I couldn’t foresee the aches and cracks and surgeries and convalescence that would come, couldn’t know that time and labor would do the same thing to my body that it had to others, older or longer at work than I. But I was learning a lesson I’d carry with me through the invincible periods and the hobbled-up times, one of the many things manual labor taught me that my library self did not know. I learned that my body can do good work. That if I am patient, if I note its limits, tend its frailties, and push past them when I have the hunch it’s right, my body is not just a partner I can trust. It’s actually me. Both a tool and a home.
Cassie taught me the Montana Cowgirl’s Mating Song while hiking up the Sperry Hill in the heat. A perfect tune for the Dew Drop Inn or Packer’s Roost, here’s how it goes: tip back your head and shake your hair loose down your neck. Hands on slightly cocked hips. Now, tap the rhythm with your foot, a horse’s drumming canter, and sing loud in a monotone, raising the last syllable an octave: “Get it up, get it in, get it out, don’t muss my hair-doooooo!” Go find a dance floor and try it. If that doesn’t get you bum rushed in a cowboy bar, nothing will.
Glacier has about 725 miles of trails, many more than most national parks, but almost three hundred fewer than the peak 1,000-plus miles of the park’s early years, before the road, when most visitors traveled by foot or horseback. In those days, the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and local wilderness rangers and explorers built the trails network fast and furious, with painstaking artistry in some places and get-’er-done, bare-bones efforts in others.
The old-time rangers also did trailwork, which back then consisted of roaming with an axe or crosscut and blazing trail or clearing blowdown. Nowadays, miles of trails and constant use mean that trail crews do very little new construction; our bread-and-butter work is drainage and tread maintenance, brushing, and logging out winterfall. But once in a while, a washout or flood or persistent beaver colony would require a reroute, and out would come the dusty survey tools—the Abney level, the grade stake, the clinometer—and the trail crew would put in new alignment.
Neither Cassie nor I had ever surveyed trail when our foreman gave us a perfunctory tutorial and sent us up the trail to Gunsight Pass. When we zeroed out our clinometers outside the cabin, Cassie saw my eyebrows and I saw the spot where the
top of her hair puffed up from her head. Out on the trail, trying to tie in a switchback corner with the prevailing grade of the miles of trail above and below, 12 percent was harder to manage than we’d guessed. We spent hours peering through the clinometer, one-eyed, while the other person tried to hold the stake and mark the spot and keep blowing dust out of her eyes. The alignment finally staked with wobbly pin flags in talus, we grubbed in the working tread, whipping up a cloud of fine dust that didn’t settle until we left the site each day. Our eyebrows were devilish, skin two shades darkened and powdery to the touch, white T-shirts striped with sweaty dirt rings, lips chapped and sore.
At the end of the hitch, we hiked the finished trail. Halos of dust floated up from our feet. The grade was steeper than we’d meant it to be. Maybe our “zero ground” hadn’t been level at all, or the clinometer got dropped and knocked out of whack, or one of us read the degrees instead of percent, so the finished product was somewhere between the 5 percent of a wheelchair ramp and the 32 percent of the upper Cutbank Pass section, an ancient Blackfoot thoroughfare and a calf burner for any hiker, even Max. Next time, we swore, we’d be better at the survey part, having learned from a mistake or two on this one.
But there was no next time. I never held a clinometer again for trailwork in Montana. The brush grew fast, trees fell every winter, and drains clogged with the rocks kicked up from horses’ shoes. Maintenance versus construction, the constant seesaw—many trails desperately needed reroutes, which fixed problems for good and ended the constant annual repairs. Yet, there was rarely money for the large-scale fix: Band-Aids are cheaper than surgery. Even Band-Aids eat up time, though, and every year, because of diminishing funding and smaller crews, we lost a chunk of the historical miles. In the shop hung pitted black-and-white photos from the trails’ heyday, thirty-person crews clustered around a crosscut, the days of mass tourism still outside the frame. Those hearty young men in stagged pants and suspenders (and one grinning woman with braids) could not have imagined the day when our tiny crews would work as hard as we could just to keep trails open, dreaming of where we’d put new trails, even while the old ones disappeared in the undergrowth.
What we want to say to tourists: Yeah, we saw that bear who ate a hiker yesterday. Well, you’re paying to vacation here and I’m getting paid. I’m not a ranger. Would I march into your cubicle and ask to take your picture? I agree, best job in the world. No, I can’t spare any water because I’m working six more hours and I need it. Yeah, they take our leg chains off out here. No, we don’t pick up the mule shit. In the winter, I ski. You’re welcome, it’s my pleasure. Nope, not a ranger. Yep, been to college. You’re old and pudgy and sexist and how do you think your wife feels standing right next to you while you propose to me? No pictures, I’m on the lam from child-support payments. I probably can’t get your son a job, sir. In the winter, I write. In one million acres, do you have to take your snack break in the middle of my work site? I’m not a fucking ranger!
It is beautiful, isn’t it? It is so beautiful.
The Sperry cabin had a mouse problem. Or, I should say, the residents of the Sperry cabin had a problem with mice. A sticky night in mid-July, sleeping atop the sheet on my bunk, I woke to a mouse on the run from the tip of my foot up the length of my buck-naked body into my hair, where it paused in the tangles long enough for me to grab it and chuck it at the wall as hard as I could. Cassie woke up to my hollering and laughed at the thought of a mouse trapped and horrified by my knotted, gritty hair. (My old buzz cut would have been easier to navigate.) In the morning, a greasy spot on the plywood but no signs of mouse. It was probably licking its wounds, along with WD-40, in the tool cache. We thought we’d seen the last of it.
But the next evening, our dinnertime soundtrack was skittering feet in the walls. Cassie and I were not prone to shrieks and eeks over rodents. We dutifully cleaned up the mouse shit on the first hitch of every season, bandanas tied over our faces to prevent the dreaded hantavirus from roosting in our sinuses. We dealt with dead voles found in the outhouse without drama. Still, we postponed the inevitable task for hours, hoping the mouse would go away and we wouldn’t have to kill anything. (It’s much easier to dispose of dead pests than to kill them on purpose.) But with bedtime approaching, the dirty deed was unavoidable. We had to take back our home.
We carefully prepared the traps; the wooden one with a plastic bait platform shaped like a cheese seemed the most deadly. (Gabe’s crew nicknamed theirs Fromage de Mort.) Before bed we placed the trap in the center of the cabin floor, peanut butter smeared on the platform, and that night I woke to the snap, tried to tune out the clatter and squeak, fell back to sleep pretending that my comfort didn’t demand a small death. Cassie was a fish-eating vegetarian and in the morning as she fried croissants in butter on the iron skillet and I cleaned out the trap, I teased her ethics: if she killed an animal, she might as well honor its spirit by eating it. She poked out her tongue at the mouse and me, so I carried it to the rocks by the tail and slung it into the woods, stiff ballast that hurtled above the scrawny trees. On the cliffs across the creek, I saw the huge male mountain goat that patrolled the area, a handsome specimen we’d nicknamed “Big Balls” for the swinging sack he proudly displayed while perched on rocks in silhouette. The irony was blatant. So long, crappy mouse. Hello, beautiful goat.
Context is everything. Had the mouse stayed outdoors, hauling bits into its nest to feed its young, we’d have thought it tiny and cute. But for all our desire to beckon animals close enough to witness, distance dignifies. The habituated family of goats that practically trampled us in order to lick our urine off the trailside rocks was pesky, despite majestic looks. The pika that tried to drag away Cassie’s lunch box was menace enough for me to huck a rock at it and knock it out, as if Goliath had the stone. The grizzly bears that broke into our tool cache and punctured the fuel cans and chewed on the bar oil did not seem wild. The marmot that tore holes in a left-behind fleece at the job site triggered one crewmate to brandish a pulaski and threaten, “I’ll make a sweater out of you!” They were all too close, too much. The real irony is this: what made those animals seem less wild was us—our cabin, her lunch box, my piss on the rocks. The closer our lives edged, the more complicated our relationship became. Adoring, annoying, adversary, companion, wild, pathetic.
On the cliff across the drainage, Big Balls foraged tundra plants, looking regal. Somewhere in the scrubby forest below the cabin porch, the dead mouse lay in the duff, awaiting something hungry. I went back inside for my croissant.
Gabe and I spent summers in eight-day stretches apart. Wednesday mornings came and we’d head into the woods for another long week of shit work with crews we were slightly sick of, six days off not long enough to get back the enthusiasm. Morning goodbyes were rushed and tense, running late, and the breakfast spat over You finished all the granola or Why didn’t you put my boots on the dryer last night went unresolved for a week before we could revisit I’m sorry with enough time for it to mean anything. The first days were lonely, best companion several watersheds away and no one to talk to about the thing with my sister, worry over this winter’s work, the pressing urge to get a dog. No one to cut some slack on the day my period started, no one to rub my shoulders and say, Of course your ankles aren’t fat. The scheduled radio rendezvous fell through, the transmission cut off, or it felt rote and intensified the faraway. We’d come out of hitches to a reunion fried and crabby, or the six days flew by—washing Ziplocs, paying bills, stockpiling groceries, never just a quick trip to the store for what sounds good, always the bags of apples, cases of Clif Bars, enough pasta to choke a horse. No time to be alone, visitors leaving, coming, leaving, and the pressure, be sweet, feel loving, give him a massage, only two days until we’re gone again.
“Split my finger open like a grape.” I’ve heard that phrase, and it’s perfect: the thin membrane, slow yield, then wetness. I split open my right middle finger while workin
g on a retaining wall nine miles in the backcountry. The rock hammer lay just out of reach, so I used a small rock to pound in a larger wedge, and wham. Three miles above the cabin, it was nearly quitting time anyway, so I didn’t have to suck it up and finish the day. Cassie packed a bandana with snow from a nearby drift and I held the finger above my head, wrapped tight, blood running down my arm. Good thing the hike was downhill, because I was unsteady on my feet, my face pale and clammy. Hikers parted for me and turned to watch as I stumbled down, trailing bloody splotches on the rocks behind me. Outside the cabin, I retched. Inside, humming nonsense to keep from screaming, I cleaned the pulp of skin and flesh in a bowl of warm water, then splinted it, took four Advil with chocolate milk for the throbbing, and passed out on my bunk. The next morning the grape had swelled to an unripe plum, the kind you pick from a backyard tree, skin taut, and I could feel my pulse in it for the rest of the hitch. I cut the middle finger out of my glove for the bandaged digit; my grip on the rock hammer was loose and awkward. It hurt longer than I’d have guessed it would, the nail obliterated, sore to the touch for months, and years down the road still prone to frost nip.
When we got out of that hitch, I heard that Sheldon had busted his finger when the packstring rodeoed at Lower Nyack cabin, and he loaded the mules one-handed and rode home eight miles without mentioning it, as the story goes. (The reason there’s a story at all is that he passed the crew on the way out; someone noticed blood on the mannies and asked about the hand clutched in his lap.) Stoicism is admirable, and it should be obvious by now that I’m no hero, but for Pete’s sake, Sheldon, not even a whimper, no subtle gambit for a sliver of sympathy, the story dragged out like an ornery mule from the barn? Maybe alone at the cabin he yelped loud, kicked the porch, hopped around, and cussed his head off. Without any witnesses, we’ll never know. If a cowboy complains and there’s no one there to hear it, did he make a sound?
Dirt Work Page 8
