Squatters in Paradise: A Yellowstone Memoir

by James Perry

  Squatters in Paradise

  SQUATTERS IN

  PARADISE

  A Yellowstone Memoir

  by

  James Perry

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  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

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  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!

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  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.

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  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

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  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…

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  Squatters in Paradise

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  Squatters in Paradise

  Part One

  Down the Rabbit Hol e

  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 exp
lain 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.

  Th e 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 cl
osed 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.