Dirt Work

by Christine Byl

  A Zen saying captures the music of the barn coming home from a hitch: “How refreshing, the whinny of a packhorse unloaded of everything!”

  The Sperry Trail leads to Comeau Pass, terminating at a fifty-foot set of narrow stairs blasted into the headwall by the CCC crew in the 1930s (from back in the day when a depression could get you a government job in the woods). Every spring we installed a rope handrail, tightening the turnbuckle at the top to support a tired hiker’s weight, and then we removed it in the fall before winter turned the stairs into an icy chute. Such rock handiwork is evident through out the Sperry district; trails wind past decades of drystone masonry. Rock walls ten courses thick with a keystone the size of a couch, a squared chunk of pink rock that it took five of us to move, climbing turns with stairs on a slight batter, retaining walls that bear up slopes of scree. Countless hours of work over even a single season, let alone five, let alone twenty.

  One summer Cassie and I hiked out of a hitch we’d spent building rock stairs and came back six days later after a hundred-year rainstorm blew through, a toad-strangler that blasted the alpine trail network to pieces. Currents of water rushed through switchbacks leaving crevasses that took ten minutes to drop into and climb out of again, more topography than trail. If I hadn’t seen it the week before with my own eyes, I’d never have believed water could change something that quickly. The rocks we’d cached for our stairs were gone, as well as the section of trail the stairs had climbed. We paired up on the rock bar, four hands and 250 pounds reefing on debris the size of kitchen appliances—Refrigerator Rock, we named one, taller than me by a foot. We leveraged precarious rocks over the ends of switchbacks, hooting as one-ton boulders catapulted like tumbleweeds into gullies that swallowed them up. We spent days grubbing, prying, digging through fill ten feet deep, cutting our hands through our gloves on rough edges, falling into our bunks at night too sore to move. Talking to tourists, we shook our heads: Never seen anything like it. Even our foreman, working trails since the seventies, agreed it was epic. It seemed as if every single piece of sediment on the whole mountainside had traded places with something else. As if heft were weightless. As if permanence, fleeting.

  Winston Galt was the maintenance man at Sperry, with a trim mustache reminiscent of Nazis and a kindly, helpful air that put them straight out of mind. His voice held a southern twang so distinctive he didn’t need a call number on the radio, his accent a handle on its own. He drank Coors Lite, which you could smell on his breath, fighting Doublemint and spicy mouthwash. Win tended the Park Service buildings surrounding the chalet and monitored all things mechanical. He tracked oxygen levels in the million-dollar composting toilet facility, tightened what was loose, kept things fixed.

  Win kept an eye out for our two- or three-woman crew with his gently solicitous deliveries: a package of propane mantles, extra toilet paper, a new radio battery sent up on the pack string. We didn’t need Win for much, but when we did, it was great to have him just a shout away. Some nights we went up to the comfort station, where he lived, for a few beers and a game of cards. His building had plumbing, while the trails cabin did not. Win always invited us to take showers—our T-shirts dirty, hair smelling of fumes from chainsaw or rock drill. We usually poached one shower per hitch, the maximum we could allow ourselves without selling out the traildog dirtbag ethos. Win couldn’t understand this. “Why on earth not go to bed clean?” he’d say, stroking his mustache. It was hard to explain.

  One night in late season, I woke in the Sperry cabin to a pounding headache and the insistent bleep of the CO2 detector. Disoriented, I stumbled around in the dark trying to shut off the propane lines and rouse the others. We fled up the hill, dragging our sleeping bags to the closed-for-the-season chalet, where we slept on the porch in fresh air. The next day Win replaced the cracked radiator coupling that had caused the leak, said the reason we didn’t die was that the cabin was a mile from airtight. With the door closed against cool fall air, it could have been a death trap, but those cracks under the walls, the gaps where warp lifted frame from floor box, the spaces we stuffed with dish towels too gross to use—the cracks saved us. Win cackled at the thought of a cabin being too crappy to kill you. He invited us up for dinner that night. I took a shower. We played hearts and drank whiskey and toasted our narrow escape.

  Wild is head back hollering at the sky, a moment that contains the full world. Wild is not tame, not bound, not constrained, constricted, condensed. Wildness is big or it is small, but it is open—open mouth, season, door, heart.

  Traildogs in Glacier were rabid for skiing, especially telemark skiing, with its free heel and dropped-knee turns, perfect for the big, open bowls and treed powder slopes so prevalent in Montana’s backcountry. Lots of people worked as lifties in the winter, at Big Mountain, the local hill in Whitefish, or resorts in Bozeman, Colorado, Wyoming, Utah. Several trails guys skied for the US Telemark Team, and nearly everyone who’d been in Montana more than a couple of seasons had caught the powder bug.

  Reba brought her tele gear to the Sperry cabin the year I worked for her, sweet-talking the packers into lashing skis on the outside of a load and hiding the boots in her canvas duffel. A midwestern kid, broke from college loans, I’d never downhill skied before and looking up into the peaks where the slivers of white seemed so high and far away, I wondered if Reba’s was just wishful thinking on the part of a self-described powder addict. But the first time we worked at Comeau Pass, Reba hiked up after quitting time and she skied those lines, then stashed her gear in the bushes so she didn’t have to carry it three miles uphill every time. Marmots chewed the liners of her very expensive plastic boots, but she swore it was worth it. I explored the kettle ponds at the pass and poked around in the talus slopes at the foot of Mount Edwards, watching her bounce through turns on the soft summer snowfield above. It seemed worth it to me.

  The next season, Cassie told me she alpine skied (who didn’t, growing up in the resort town of Whitefish?) but she didn’t telemark, and anyway, she said, she wasn’t very good. As a kid from Michigan, I’d stomped around on fish-scale skis in golf courses and city nature preserves, and nothing had yet prepared me for going downhill, fast, in mountains. But I was getting comfortable hiking on steep snow; skiing seemed at least theoretically possible. Reba, who had upgraded to shaped skis and plastic boots that year, gave me her skinny old sticks and a pair of leather telemark boots, because she knew I wanted to try. I really wanted to try. Too shy to poach a lift off the packers, Cassie and I carried in a pair of skis for the two of us, splitting the load, the pictures of which later elicited laughs from our backcountry ski friends—one ski each?

  On the first run, it became clear to me that although Cassie made parallel turns instead of tele turns, she was a “not very good” skier only by the improbable measuring stick of ski towns, where children run double black diamonds by the time they’re five. Humiliation loomed. It was too late to back out, so I tightened my boots, pointed tips downhill, and fully epitomized the popular ski term “yard sale”—a crash-and-burn tumble where sunglasses, hat, gloves, poles, and pack get strewn over snow in bargain-basement fashion. Cassie laughed, despite promising not to. I couldn’t blame her. I’d rarely felt so uncoordinated, splayed at the bottom of every run. We kept this up for a few hours, and that night I was as sore as if I had been beaten with a tire iron in a Tarantino movie. That was my first taste. I loved it.

  A few years later, I was the crew leader who hiked my skis and boots up at the beginning of the season to the disbelief of my newbie laborer. I stashed them at Comeau Pass, praying marmots would stay away from my secondhand gear, and made turns after work in the evening before heading down to the cabin for canned stew, just as Reba had. I started by inching along the lower slopes of Gunsight in a nervous traverse, then skinning midway up the snowfield and snowplowing down. Eventually I could drop my knee into shaky tele turns to control my speed, falling every two or three turns, leaving ca
rtoon craters in the slushy snow. I still wasn’t good, years away from even the barely intermediate status I now hold, but I was mostly upright, at least. I was beginning to get what it would be like—snow an element in which I could thrive.

  Most years, my mid-July birthday fell on a hitch, and I’d work the crew long days to bank hours so I could take my birthday afternoon off and ski the glacier. Once, my friend Brent hiked in to help me celebrate. With his far-superior skills to coax me, we skied a whooping run from the top of the snow-covered glacier, a soft corn slope that toed out into hard ice, our edges skittering over the open slots of narrow crevasses, until I bailed in a chicken-shit fall and cut up my knuckles deeply enough to leave a web of little scars, another accessory on my hard-knocks birthday suit. I chipped out a piece of the bloody ice and sucked it on the hike back down to the cabin, where Brent made monster burritos and margaritas. Happy birthday to me. I know how to ski, I sang to my past self, the eager girl who watched from the sidelines, and to my future one who’d look back at these golden days, older and wiser and stiffer. Happy birthday, dear me.

  Halfway through a hitch, seeing Gabe approach on the trail brought pure glee, especially as a surprise. Visitors know to bring treats—the paper, extra chocolate—and visitors who love you best of all know to bring really good treats. Once, in a heroic gesture, Gabe packed in ice cream buried in an insulated lunch cooler at the bottom of his towering pack. It was a scorch-hot day and the ice cream had melted to a chocolate milkshake in a carton. I could have swallowed the whole thing, but sharing seemed appropriate—some for Gabe the courier, some for our friend Peach, who hiked in with him, and for Cassie, as hot and dust-covered as I was. After they finished, politely refusing the last sludge, I ran my fingers around the edges of the carton, finally tore it apart at the seam to slurp every last drip, and came up with the tip of my nose sticky and brown. To this day, the best ice cream I’ve had.

  The rock bar’s right-hand machine is the Pionjar, a Swedish gas-powered drill, pronounced poon-jar (good for a snicker) or pun-jar, like a glass receptacle of bad jokes. A dense powerhead that will drill or pound with the flip of a lever, with detachable three-foot bits for either function, it holds a special place in the heart of anyone who’s worked in rock. When you want one tool that will drill holes and break rock off the grid, the Pionjar’s your man. We used it sporadically in Glacier, to set a turnbuckle in a rock staircase, sink rebar for bridge abutments, prepare holes for blasting, until suddenly one project—say, an outhouse hole six feet through bedrock, or a repair of the craggy Highline Trail—and then we used it daily for weeks.

  For all its iron bestiality, the Pionjar is a delicate machine. With a chainsaw, you can change 2,500 feet in elevation and never adjust the carburetor, but drop the Pionjar one switchback and the idle chugs, and if you tilt it too far, the engine will flood. In hard granite the bits dull faster than disposable razors, and the fumes kicked out by the 12:1 mix (four times richer than saw gas) made us vomit in the bottom of the shitter-to-be. Starting the thing cold is equal parts mechanics and sorcery, and carrying it, well, that’s another complaint altogether. All this to say, when it runs, it’s all worth it. The carbide-steel bit boring through bedrock, a perfect cylinder left behind, ready for rock bar or feathers and wedge: there are few things in life as pleasurable as the right tool for the job.

  In open areas across the West, bear grass grows thick: in meadows and clearings beneath trees and the broad gullies of avalanche paths. There’s something alien about bear grass, a swath of it or a single flower alone. It grows on a tall, reedy stalk, sometimes curved, the head a burst of small white flowers like those of a hyacinth, looking like one bulbous bloom from a distance. Also called squaw grass, elk grass, turkey beard, soap grass, basket grass, bear lily, or quip-quip, the Blackfoot name is eksisoke. Locals claim that bear grass grows in seven-year cycles, some years almost nonexistent, and others, white as far as you can see. The heavy heads grow little nipples on the top of the blooms, bringing to mind adolescent training bras. Native people used bear grass for basket weaving; elk and goats forage the stalks in early season. In contrast to the murky reek of the namesake bruins that use its leaves to line their dens, bear grass smells all lily, an un-bottleable perfume.

  When Ira joined the crew, he greeted us all the same way. Stood at attention, stuck out his hand like a karate jab to the gut, and shouted, “Ira J. Schwab, US Marine Corps, Slippery Rock, Pennsylvania!” He was the new guy on Gabe’s crew and we worked together off and on all that summer, long enough for Ira to gift me with more hilarious turns of phrase than I’d ever received from a single person. The phrases stuck because Ira said them over and over, and his booming voice made you take note. (He’d gone deaf in his machine gun ear, he told us, and we should feel free to tell him to pipe down, which we did, to no avail.) He introduced himself with the same exuberant spiel to anyone I ever saw him meet, from the chief ranger to a tourist on the trail. People startled at his forthright bark, but his boisterous charm warmed everyone.

  Many of Ira’s greatest hits had military origins. He called Gabe “m’leader” and followed him within five feet on the trail, stopping to pee when Gabe did, or waiting, spine straight, eyes straight ahead, for him to finish. When Gabe told him Go on past, I’ll catch up, Ira would holler, “I stick with ya, man, yer m’leader!” Every night on hitches, Ira ate too much and moaned, “Man, that put the hurts on me!” Another common mealtime phrase, “Gabe, I’m a freakin’ huge fan of yer beans and rice!” which he’d say every time Gabe made them (once a hitch).

  Ira was new to the alpine realm and he took notes on our gear and the little tricks we’d accumulated over the years. A pair of gaiters for work on snowfields, a CamelBak for clearing days, a Tupperware lunch box to keep saw gas fumes out of the sandwich—Ira would respond to each innovation with, “Man, I gotta get me one a them!” His raucous laugh could scare you if you weren’t prepared. He slurped his cereal, and, built like a Pionjar, was by far the strongest person I’ve ever worked with, even vying with Max for sheer brute force. Generous beyond measure, Ira praised all good ideas equally, tapping the side of his head with his index finger, a little too hard: “That’s what I like about ya, man, yer always thinkin’!” For himself, he saved good-natured scorn. If he screwed up, he’d shake his head and bellow, “I warned ya, guys, I’m sharp as a marble!”

  What Ira lacked in quick, he made up for in determined. On one hitch at Lake Ellen Wilson, Ira hiked to Comeau Pass after work, twelve miles round-trip, because he wasn’t sure he’d get to see it otherwise. On the way back to camp, he stopped at the Sperry Chalet kitchen and bought each of us a slice of still-warm cherry pie. He hiked three miles to camp with a stack of Styrofoam containers balanced in his huge arms.

  Years after the last time we saw Ira, Gabe and I still use his phrases weekly. I’m a freakin’ huge fan of Gabe’s beans and rice, for example, though they put me in the hurt locker. When perusing some eye-catching gear in a catalog, Gabe says wryly, “Man, I gotta get me some a these!” But Ira’s most useful phrase was one he’d say apropos of nothing at all that summer he fell hard for “GlacierPark,” and one we still quote on almost every trip into alpine country: “Guys, I’m gonna die in these here mountains!” It sounds like a death wish, but really, it’s the opposite, a hope for longevity among friends in high places, life turned up full volume.

  Four years in, Reba left trails to become a nurse, Cassie went to law school, and I inherited the Sperry crew. The transition to leadership had nerve-racking aspects (would I remember the right tools, time the projects well, bring enough fuel?), but I knew I was ready to be in charge. Where I’d once had questions, I now had opinions. Where I used to ask someone else, now I could figure it out myself. I had the confidence to say what needed doing, and the courage to admit when I didn’t know. I was ready.

  I’d have a new laborer on the crew, like I’d once been, and I’d teach her what I knew,
and keep on learning what I didn’t. Really, I looked forward to it, except for one thing, the most terrifying part of being a leader: the barn. The packers. Especially Slim. No more intermediary. Just me driving the truck, me parking at the barn, the same old scene I could picture: crew unloads, throws down ammo boxes full of food; shovels and pulaskis; and tarps, tents, and bags. The monologue begins: Yer late! Whassall this shit, gonna be in there a gaddam year? Hey Christy, whatever the hell yer name is, move yer outfit, Sheldon’s gotta pull in there. Tell yer guys to stand back. Them mannies are still wet, get the pile, it’s inna barn. Max came outta Fifty Mountain late yesterday, pourin’ like a sonafabitch. Take one end a this! Charley tell you guys they ain’t given no more overtime? Gotta get in there fast ’cause I ain’t working for free, cocksuckers. You seen the drift lately? If it’s rotten we ain’t goin’, I’m not losin’ a string for fuckin’ trailwork. Carry yer own gaddam skis!

  The night before my first hitch as a leader, I sweated and twisted, my stomach an empty bucket, the sheets in knots. Then the day came, with nothing to it but a little shouting. After a few rounds at the barn with no major mishaps, I got over it. Terror aside, insults notwithstanding, trail crews and packers go together like whiskey and Coke. Can’t you see how much we need each other? Without crews, the packers would have no one to transport, no reason to keep the barn running. Without packers, crews would spend all day carrying loads, barely enough time for maintenance, let alone projects.