Dirt Work

by Christine Byl

  But the Denali crew, with its merger of loose cannons and heavy equipment, raised the stakes. My crew stuffed Nic’s truck cab with tree limbs and we returned to our pickup at the end of the day to a six-hundred-pound rock in the truck bed, heavy enough to squash the tires. No way to remove the rock without the Bobcat (long gone), so we drove back to the yard with evidence of Nic’s triumph hulking over the tailgate. Crews traveled across Riley Creek to a job site via a zipline, and pranksters were always tying the pulley on one side or the other, hiding the harnesses, the tensioning lever, anything to strand someone or force a hand-over-hand along the 110-foot cable. On top of the railroad trestle that spanned another crew’s work site, we patiently awaited their lunch break and, from stories above, upended our water bottles on their heads. One kidnapping spree lasted four months, as crews swapped two stuffed mascots, a snowman and a multi-colored teddy bear, which appeared in photos with duct-tape gags and glued-together ransom notes. By season’s end, the snowman had been decapitated and the teddy rocked into a gabion wall, visible only to those of us who know where to look.

  Birthdays gave carte blanche; the more elaborate the trick, the higher the honor to the recipient. People got thrown in the creek, force-fed rotten concoctions, duct-taped to furniture, blindfolded for an X-rated piñata, and locked in a Knaack box. Sometimes it’s hard to believe that the median age of the gang was late-twenties, and that all of these schemes went on during work hours with no drop in our renowned productivity. When I think about quitting trails or imagine those office jobs I’ve seen on TV, I know that along with labor and nature, this is the stuff I’d miss the most: hiding someone’s clothes while they’re skinny-dipping at lunch break, a parade of floats made of power wheelbarrows, climbing trees to drop onto an unsuspecting crew mate passing below, or filling the truck’s defrost vents with sawdust so that, on a wet day, the driver turns it on to a face full of woodchips.

  Nic is the oldest of the gang at fifty-six, and claims he’s never felt younger than he does on the trail crew. But no one can do trails forever. Neil Young says it’s better to burn out than to rust, and the old trails adage holds that It’s a good life until you weaken. Everyone in it knows this career isn’t endlessly sustainable. Bodies wear out, people move on. But I could laugh like that for another fifty years. Please, hide bear scat in my boots. Okay, sure, jury-rig my truck for a harmless explosion. Yes, fine, stuff spruce needles down my pants while I’m sleeping at lunch break, you sneaky bastard. Please.

  Near the end in Glacier, burnout threatened: same tasks, the constant repetition of work, marching orders from a maintenance schedule set in stone. In Denali, leaders were far more involved with deciding the way things got done. We ordered equipment, designed and gave trainings, kept inventories, surveyed trails, wrote evaluations, and oversaw progress. Most of which was satisfying stuff. Gabe, whose job became subject to furlough a few seasons in (a step up from seasonal, yet blessedly, still impermanent), did even more logistics—parkwide presentations, all-employee meetings, NPS indoctrination trainings. In exchange for these upgrades, Gabe got us health insurance and the first 401(k) plan of our lives, and we both got new challenges. The trouble is, sometimes I’d go a whole day without picking up a shovel. Between the supervisory role and light-duty months because of persistent injuries, I often traded the mattock for the keyboard, the chainsaw for the camera.

  No one wants to be a grunt forever. The longer you work, the more opinions you have. You crave responsibility, and then you get it. But for a die-hard laborer at heart, who’d rather work than talk about work, the slippery slope into oversight is terrifying, because before you know it, you stop doing the things you love, the reasons you’ve stuck out the downsides of the job all along. It happens to everyone who climbs the rungs. Cell phones, daily planners, and spreadsheets close in. Meetings about jobs supplant jobs. The crews wait in the field while we stand in the doorways of management offices, one foot out, one in.

  There are wonderful things about rising in the ranks. Mentoring is a highlight for me. Nothing beats seeing a new laborer’s confidence rise when his tree falls as planned, or the delight on someone’s face when she unlocks the mystery of the log scribe, the clinometer, the skid steer. I like when my input is sought early on, instead of after it’s too late. I like to choose the new saw to replace the one that burned out, what equipment to rent, for how long. I like to sketch plans, stockpile materials, line out the steps, see the job through, critique it when it’s over. It’s nice to be asked how something should be done. Nicer still to have an answer, backed by years of work.

  But with the challenge of responsibility comes bullshit, in delicate balance. Some days in the office I longed for the era of the simple task: dig a hole, right there; fell a tree, peel it; hike this far and clean the drains, as fast as you can. Gabe arrived home at the end of a day, brain fried and body restless. Human-resources meetings trumped miles walked that day. Where’s the tipping point, when the seesaw drops to the ground with a teeth-jarring bang? I want to do my job for the reasons I always have: because I’m good at it, because it fulfills me, because it’s important. Not just for the paycheck, a promotion, or the stability. I’ve never wanted to climb any ladder for the NPS except the one leaning against the tool shed. I’ll know when I’m done, I told myself. The toolless days were still the minority. I hoped I’d have the sense to throw in the trowel before they disappeared.

  Our first summer in Denali, we lived in C-Camp, the NPS seasonal housing compound just inside the park entrance. Brown cabins lined the road to the maintenance lot where out-of-state Subarus plastered with bumper stickers sat parked next to ten-yard dump trucks with Peterbilt mud flaps. We walked to the trails shop from our one-room log A-frame, the rent invisible, taken directly out of our paychecks like chits at the company store. We showered in the public washhouse, planned backcountry trips for weekends off. My reality was defined by the park, the job, the parameters of a transplant, up for the summer. I knew few locals from the nearby town of Healy—Ralph, in Denali ten years; Owens, the fellow trail crew leader born in Alaska; a handful of permanents from other divisions.

  Returning the second summer, Gabe and I left C-Camp in search of privacy, a place we could have a dog, neighbors, a life beyond the park’s rhythms. We moved north, outside Healy, population 984. Healy’s year-round employers are the coal mine visible across the Nenana River, the power plant (coal-fired), and the park, “protected” from both of them, twelve miles south. The two-lane Parks Highway passes through the middle of Healy and its face to the world is the quintessential small-town one—two gas stations, a ratty bar, a truck-stop diner with the usual gut-bomb breakfasts served all day. Off the road, a K–12 school whose small library is open to the public four afternoons a week, a community center with a tiny clinic, a VFD. Healy booms when summer tourists flock to Denali, but people pass through quickly. Despite its scenic backdrop, Healy is as invisible to travelers as the apartment buildings outside a New York City subway car, or the neat ranch houses off Interstate 90.

  Residents cluster in town on gravel streets or up creeks and on ridges, tucked into aspen groves, hidden in brush. We live up Panguingue Creek, or “out Stampede,” as we say. Stampede Road tees west off the highway toward the park on the skyline, turning from pavement to gravel to two-track to trail, finally passable only by mountain bike and ATV, or dog teams and snow-gos in winter. Out Stampede there are a few big houses, but most people live in modest homes and tiny cabins they’ve built out-of-pocket, a tarp-covered lumber pile far more common than a heated garage. Our first rental was particularly rustic—a sixteen-by-twenty log cabin with no running water—but by no means unusual. Septic systems and wells indicate longevity, money socked away or borrowed to get three hundred feet deep where the water table lies. The rest of us shit in outhouses and collect rainwater in fifty-gallon barrels and haul drinking water from the well house with five-gallon jugs or PVC tanks in the backs of pickups
. Friends with showers offer them freely. At dry-cabin potlucks, people bring their own full water bottles so as not to burden the hosts with more hauling.

  Healy is in some ways a town all its own, unlike anywhere I’ve been, where the post office bulletin board boasts lynx hides for sale (from a local fourth grader with a trap line) and the air smells like coal dust and tundra plants mixed by a muscular wind. In other ways, it’s Interior Alaska’s version of the same town you pass through on the way to any park, both entry and buffer. However common, or however special, Healy is the odd little place I’ve called home. It’s a place made up, in part, of seasons.

  By September, Healy hunkers down. Tourism done, restaurants and gift shops board up their windows and the only stoplight for one hundred miles blinks, then goes dark. Life gets stripped down. Fairbanks is two hours north by snow-packed, two-lane highway, and we go on biweekly, daylong binges: groceries dog food building materials bookstore doctor visits Thai food a movie (if there’s time). Other than that, we’re on our own. Healy has a little store where you can get a rock-hard avocado, chips at $6.50 a bag, or a gallon of milk for the same. There’s no stocking-up in Healy. In winter, you get what you get.

  Don’t come to Healy looking for chai. This is not Outside magazine’s Best Town in America. No ski resort, no health-food store. And though I’ve used—and often miss—that cultural tackle, Healy has the charm that comes from its lack of artifice, the old kind of dorkiness—uncalculated. An informal tai chi group meets on Thursday nights in the school gym. No yoga studio with fancy workout clothes; we bend and bow in baggy long underwear to the tinny commands of a Chinese woman on a warped VHS tape. Here, chi smells more like sweaty socks than incense.

  Like any small town, Healy has entrenched divisions—pro-road, anti-mine, more wilderness, no zoning. Yet, nothing’s simple. Park employees have trap lines and coal miners have dog teams. We all complain about the price of gas and the weeks at 40 below. Healy is a tiny and pragmatic place, invisible to anyone who doesn’t live here, and that’s what bonds those of us who do. There are ideological divisions and old grudges, to be sure. But animosities have to sit alongside what we have in common: remoteness, self-reliance, weather that matters. During a deep freeze, everyone clumps around in the same insulated bibs and bunny boots, politics bundled beneath the veneer of the practical.

  Solitary tasks make up the winter days of many residents—hauling water, running dogs, caring for the baby, drywalling the basement. To ward off too much loneliness, locals gather for any reason we can muster: book clubs, knitting groups, poker and hockey games, school pageants, a periodic slide show by someone back from afar. At the community center, a chili feed, a borough hearing, and midwinter, the holiday extravaganza—Healy on Ice, where Santa rides a Zamboni at the outdoor rink behind the school. Don’t let this list fool you. Healy is quiet. Some days when the palette is gray and white and all talk is of projects and weather, I wish for color and art, noise, live music, free lectures about something I’ve never thought about before, a nutcase on a busy corner with a wacky sign. Some days when the cabin feels dark and small and there’s no way to stay warm outside for longer than an hour, I wish for a clean, well-lighted space, a hot drink amid the bustle of the public sphere, the haven of anonymity. Not here. There’s no hot, no bustle, no public. No anonymous.

  Up here, winter makes you local. Denali as workplace means summer months on the trails, tools in hand, always on the move, crowds of seasonals gathered at bars and parties and river pullouts. It’s clear why anyone’s here—the job is full time, the world hospitable. Summer is an easier place to live, but the other three seasons make this home.

  When we chose to stay past the usual cusp, the reason wasn’t the weather or the job or the potlucks. We stayed because right now, it’s where our life is. With the exodus of summer’s ease, we settle in with canned goods and Netflix and our ski loop behind the cabin, where the snow blows into drifts as hard as tarmac and we never see anyone.

  Wind is wild. No one has figured out how to domesticate wind. A turbine, a windmill, they collect, not control. Wild is the cabin groaning in a strong gust, a skier hunched against a winter storm, a car on a bridge that can’t stay its course into blowing snow. Wild is a tired sled dog curled tail over nose in a melted hollow in the snow. Wild is a summer wind, full of dust and clatter. Wild finds the lee, sleeps.

  It was hot and windy on the Savage River trail and Jerry and I were doing a gravel patch job, an afternoon errand. After the last shovel loads and before driving back to the shop, we took a break. I was always eager to avoid tourists, but it’s hard to hide in tundra. We slunk into a depression twenty feet off the trail and I turned my back on it. Jerry is decidedly friendlier than me; he faced outward, leaning on his pack. Moments after we sat down and popped open Tupperwares for cold leftovers, I heard a voice. I chewed and rolled my eyes at Jerry. They always found us.

  “Ex-cuse me?” said a man in a thick German accent, shouting from the trail. “Is zis vair I may see zee moose?” Trapped in our coin-operated nature show, I swiveled toward him. As protocol, the leader usually answered, so I explained in a half shout that yes, he could see one here, but there was no guarantee. Undeterred, the man chattered on: he was sure zis was zee best place; after all, a sign on the road said to watch for moose here. I nodded, feigned enthusiasm. “Good luck,” Jerry said. Finally the man seemed ready to move on, but then, a few steps away, he whirled back to us and announced in a grave voice, oddly projected, as if for an audience, “In zee river, I have seen sree ram.” He paused for effect and held up sree fingers, which then morphed to the side of his head to illustrate a Dall sheep’s horn—“wiz zee full curl!” he finished proudly, with a flourish.

  I snorted. Jerry looked at him for several seconds, quiet. Then he said the simplest, most American thing he could possibly have said, in a deadpan voice: “Cool.” The man stood in the trail, nodding, waiting for further comment. Jerry just smiled and nodded back, a kindly tundra Big Lebowski. I laughed. Zee man moved on. Later, at the bar with a pint glass in hand, Jerry and I made a toast: “To zee full curl!”

  An axe chops. A rock bar pries. A chainsaw fells. A boat floats. A skid steer excavates. And a shovel? A shovel does everything else.

  A clinometer is a layout tool that measures slope angle: rise over run—the amount of vertical gain from one point to another—as a percentage of 100. It’s brushed steel, about the size of a deck of cards. You peer through the sight one-eyed at an object in the distance, while a scale in the foreground measures the slope of your gaze. Simpler than a transit, more precise than a laser level or that old standby, the eyeball, a clinometer is both hired hand and referee, a partner that hangs on a loop of cord around the neck and fits easily in the palm of a hand.

  The sum total of my survey experience in Glacier had been that small section of dusty reroute with Cassie. But as the child of a surveyor, I’d grown up playing with lath stakes and orange flagging, knew the smooth feel of the brass plumb bob, the familiar scrawled numbers in tiny logbooks. I was ready to learn. My Glacier opus was surpassed one month into Denali. With front-country trails going in like gangbusters, the clinometer became a ubiquitous sidekick. Lay out new trail right, I learned, and you’ll sidestep a host of maintenance issues. Survey done poorly, misery and maintenance will follow the trail crew all the days of its life, and it shall dwell in the house of grumbling and recrimination forever.

  A well-laid-out trail considers many angles: user group (hikers, horses, bicycles), intended use (nature walk, commuter trail, wilderness access), outslope that will incite good drainage, the steepest grade a certain soil type can bear. The design must also keep in mind terrain obstacles (cliff, stream, pond), overall topography, views. A curvilinear trail corridor follows contour lines, is visually interesting to the user, with enough sight distance to prevent surprise collisions with wildlife. A good trail is both structure on and interpreter of
landscape.

  The proper use of a clinometer relies more on good eyes and a little patience than any technical finesse, but great layout skills develop only over time and miles. Even one sharp set of eyes can put in a rough flag line, but the best trail layout is a team effort, a mutual plod over downed logs and wet bog and around bedrock outcroppings, talking in call and response: a little uphill, aw, shit, there’s that spring, try there, okay now over, we need a grade reversal soon, think we can make the pass at 10 percent? Then, return the next day, the next week, or the next season, and you realize it needs to change. You shot too steep and hit the cliff band that you meant to stay below. Ground that was dry in September is wet in the spring, requiring turnpike. There’s a beaver dam, an old-growth tree, a big swale that would need to be bridged because the topography is too steep on either side for contouring. Good trail layout requires that you care enough to keep pounding the same stretch of ground long after it’s good enough has occurred to you, and at the same time that you remain sufficiently divested so you can scrap a plan for a better one.

  A good survey is undetectable. Finished trail seems like it was always there, and draws no attention to itself. A poor survey, on the other hand, is noticeable. A too-hasty flag line may set you up for a lifetime of trailwork heartache: steep grades, mud pits, erosion, blown-out tread, failing turns, washouts.

  If you survey with someone for days or weeks in a row, you begin to see them reduced to the part you aim for when squinting through the clinometer’s sight. The brim of Krusty’s hat, Gabe’s mustache. Many survey partners are much taller than I am: as their target, I have to raise an arm above my head. The piece of orange flagging tied around my watchband is easy to see in heavy brush, ornamentation born of necessity. For a girl who’s lost a grandmother’s bracelet, countless watches, every barrette she’s ever worn, and her wedding ring, it’s the best kind of adornment: offhand, unique, and replaceable. A sign too, of temporary importance, a moment and place when I was a part of landscape, to scale, the bright and moving marker around which everything else fell into place.