by James Perry
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 ch
air, 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 a
s 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.
