Squatters in Paradise: A Yellowstone Memoir

by James Perry

  But something is amiss in section one. The people are getting fidgety. They’ve been here for twenty minutes and all they have is a glass of water. Someone waves down the busser and asks for the waiter. The busser runs off to the kitchen and glances at the pre-check station, then looks down waiter’s alley. He asks if anyone has seen Scott and follows up on the leads: the smoker’s area and the bathroom. I hate this, having to track down my server. Now all his tables are gonna be pissed off and we’ll get lousy tips. Not here either. Maybe the manager’s office. No again. They should make me a server. I’m responsible. Maybe I passed him and he’s already out in the dining room. He sneaks a glance around Fort Apache - the log partition in the dining room - but some guests spot him and fix him with a stern look that says, “Well? Where’s our waiter? Where’s our food? What the hell’s going on here?” The busser smiles, raises a finger - just a moment - and darts back inside. In the manager’s office he explains that he can’t find his server, looked everywhere, tables are getting mad. The search continues over the same ground with the same results. No sign of Scott. Then, by the employee rest rooms, in the trash, they make a gruesome discovery... a pile of discarded tickets. Written on each one is the same phrase: Fuck this place. The manager turns pale. The tickets drop from her hands like obscene flash cards as she realizes that she must face the angry mob herself. Word spreads through the kitchen: Scott left. He planned it.

  It was the perfect parting shot. Having relieved the dining room staff of dozens of tables while simultaneously dumping them in the lap of a manager who had shown him nothing but disrespect, Scott became an outlaw-hero, our own Jesse James.

  Celebs

  THE routine of geyser rushes, bus tours, and faux VIP tables consisting of company hacks will sometimes be pierced by the arrival of the truly famous. When one of these luminaries is scheduled to arrive it seems to trigger an atavistic response from the managerial staff who busy themselves hallowing the ground in preparation for the appearance of Jove. The line workers are kept busy polishing silverware and realigning glasses and napkins into the most aesthetically pleasing tabletop formations; the managers rush about giving pedantic advice about how to act when The One arrives; the Location Manager haunts the kitchen, looking manifestly out-of-place as he worriedly assesses the staff (“Don’t you think we should send Paula home? Those dark circles under her eyes are so unattractive”). The employee chosen to greet the honored guest is sure to have his night ruined. After the first blush of pride in having been chosen, the less glamorous reality of the situation soon becomes apparent. In an effort to make certain the guest receives the undivided attention of their waiter, no other tables are seated in that section. So the waiter waits, seeing his section lie fallow as the VIPs make a fashionably late appearance. They never arrive alone, or all at once. Their entourage trickles in, placing random orders, leaving, returning, unconcerned with the waiter's attempts to hold the steps of service together. In the meantime the hosts have buckled under the pressure and begin filling up his section. In the kitchen the waiter is accosted by apprehensive managers who ask "Is everything all right?" over and over again. Add to this the inquiries of the other diners ("Is that who I think it is?" "Can you get an autograph for me?") and you have a thoroughly miserable employee. For the rest of us of course, it's pure entertainment.

  "Hey Tom, be sure to ask Carter about the hostage crisis."

  "Hey Steve, if Adam West asks you for some ketchup you should say, 'What's the matter, Batman, don't you have any in your utility belt?'"

  "Laura Bush has a big ass!"

  "Peter Fonda has no ass!"

  Not all of the staff are so irreverent. When a favorite of some employee shows up, a wild gleam shines in their eyes, as when Harrison Ford came to the Inn. A Spanish girl, who had pictures of the movie star on her wall back at the dorm, shoved aside her co-worker at the buffet line when she saw him approaching and prepared his plate with trembling but loving hands. She kept an eye on his table throughout the meal and when he left she dashed to his chair and sat down, soaking up his vicarious warmth.

  When Michael J. Fox came to Yellowstone he made the mistake of calling down to the front desk for some extra bath towels. He received three separate visits from young girls bearing towels and giddy smiles. To his credit he accepted the former and returned the latter, handing out a tip each time without complaint.

  Bruce Willis, on the other hand, found the attentions of a star-struck young waitress less than welcome. True, the girl was so incapacitated by his presence that she simply found a chair near his table and stared at him with her jaw open - which I probably would have found distracting, too - but enlisting the help of his ogre in her removal did nothing for his local image.

  Say what you will about these elevated personages, they all exposed themselves to the rabble. All except Newt Gingrich, who closed off the bar for his own personal use and refused to face us. We knew then, even before he was run out of Washington, that the man had no balls.

  The Yellowstone Motorist

  DRIVING in Yellowstone in the summertime is so dangerous that when Lee Whittlesey wrote his book Death in Yellowstone he left out the “not very interesting” category of traffic deaths, in part because it would have easily outnumbered all the other fatalities (despite the fact that private automobiles didn't ply the roads of the Park until 1915, forty-three years after the Park's establishment). The rangers tend to keep such incidents quiet, but one has only to work a season or two in the Park to understand the peril represented by the Yellowstone motorist.

  There is an unkind adage referring to certain visitors which is repeated by both concessionaire and Park Service employee, to the effect that they tend to leave their brains at the entrance gate. Unkind, but often recalled when employees try to cross the Park roads on their way to work and back. Especially treacherous is the crosswalk at Old Faithful which greets motorists as they come barreling down from Craig Pass; they're almost at their destination and they're in no mood to slow down. At the height of summer an employee can wait for up to fifteen minutes as lines of vehicles charge past, standing between him and the case of Budweiser in his room. Rock-throwing incidents are not unheard-of in these desperate situations.

  Rubber-necking by the tourists undoubtedly has much to do with the majority of accidents, from fender-benders to fatal head-on collisions. Being a somewhat jaded savage, I tend to keep my eyes on the road when I'm traveling through the Park. The typical Yellowstone motorist, on the other hand, tends to drive like a drunken congressman. I have to keep a constant watch for people who steer with a cavalier hand as their eyes scan the tree-line for bears. On the way out of the Park one summer I saw a large black bear dart across the road ahead of me and into the woods. A car coming from the other direction screeched to a halt and all four doors opened simultaneously as the occupants abandoned their vehicle and ran into the woods in hot pursuit with cameras poised. Their engine was still running as I drove slowly past, which was probably a good thing in case they needed to come running back out of the woods.

  The Park roads are narrow and rough. They have to absorb not only the abuse of vehicles but also harsh winters and unusual thermal conditions. Hot springs and fumaroles are not fixed features; they move around. They'll dry up in one area and reappear elsewhere. Sometimes they pop up right under the road and eat away at the asphalt until a steaming sinkhole develops. In the spring the roads are full of pot-holes and frost heaves. Entire sections of road are sometimes lost to erosion, especially along steep embankments. None of which is conducive to the reckless driving I witness every time I tour the Park, and though I have yet to see a vehicle careen into a hot spring and disappear into the roiling maw of Mother Earth, I've seen enough to wear a seat-belt at all times.

  What I've encountered most are collisions with animals. Driving back into the Park one night I saw a surreal scene illuminated in front of me: a large forklift was holding aloft the carcass of a bison that had been struck by a vehicle and killed
. It was being moved off the road, but a car was approaching from the opposite direction and its headlights threw the picture into silhouette. The forklift no longer looked like a machine but rather some species of dinosaur that was trying to toss a recently killed prey down its gullet.

  The tourists who come to the Park in gargantuan RVs, towing SUVs and ATVs, with satellite TVs so their kids can watch MTV...have no sense of adventure. They never really leave home since they carry so much of it with them. But the worst part is that these behemoths lumber around the Park like tipsy hippos, weaving with every gust of wind and giving the backed-up traffic at their rear an occasional blast of their flatulence as they slowly wheeze uphill. They often sport elongated rear-view mirrors which stick out like ears and threaten to decapitate any cyclists cruising along the shoulders of the road. They share a villainous reputation among Park employees with Hummers: the Edsel of the new millennium.

  Road rage exists in Yellowstone as well, but thanks to the Park Service policy of not allowing firearms in the Park it's usually confined to the blaring of horns and shouting of brief insults out of car windows.[1]

  A final note about Yellowstone motorists; they're usually pretty good about picking up hitchhikers. Many employees arrive by bus and have no personal means of transportation within the Park, so hitchhiking is about the only way they can get around. The smart ones carry signs that identify them as employees ("Harmless Park Employee" "Park Employee - Late For Work" or even the facetious "Psycho Killer"), but the old-fashioned thumb is still a serviceable appendage. It's one of those rare occasions when tourist and savage meet as equals with the former providing a ride and the latter providing information (minus the company spin), allowing us to get along just fine.

  Fuck the Cooks

  WE once had a student from the Culinary Institute of America working the line at the Old Faithful Inn dining room. He lasted about two weeks before demoting himself to kitchen prep. When I asked him why he'd given up the line job he scowled and said, "That wasn't a cook's line, that was an assembly line." This perception was shared by the columnist of a food magazine who was doing a series on restaurants in National Parks. After going into some detail regarding the culinary enticements offered by other park lodges, the dining room at Old Faithful received this curt review: "Grand Central Station." Another reviewer, with evidently more lax standards, instructed her readers to try our "famous potato salad." I asked one of the Pantry workers how our potato salad was prepared, to which she held up a carton. "We scoop it out of this box," she said. Then there was the summer we lost an entire cook's line because one night they decided to thump one of their own, leaving him beaten and bloodied in a dark parking lot. One can easily imagine the reason: "Don't you ever – whack – suggest a goddam – whack – en croute special again!”

  To be fair, these guys were throwing together up to a thousand meals a night. Simple dishes, to be sure - trout, prime rib, fried chicken and burgers - but knocking them out at a blistering pace. That, however, is as far as I'm willing to go in their defense.

  This rant is for the waits.

  Yellowstone cooks have it easy. All they do is stand in the same place and sweat and curse and fuck up your food. They're averse to making anything that's not on the menu so if a waiter sends them a special order because a guest has an allergy or if they want a different sauce than the one that comes with the entree, the cooks shriek like stuck pigs and blame the waiter. Fuck the cooks!

  Waiters, on the other hand, are diplomats; intelligent, adaptable, and able to lie convincingly to the public. We're the human face of the restaurant. Without us, most tourists would take one look at the back-of-the-house staff and brown bag it. In the dining room we're charming, patient, and attentive. In the kitchen we're bastards. It's the only way to survive in a busy restaurant. When a guest tells you that she has "a special dietary need," you nod and take note of her request, then you put the order into the computer and head into the kitchen where the lynch mob is already forming.

  "Hey JP! You want your trout without any pecans? You're fuckin' outa luck! The pecans are already in the flour!"

  "Then don't fuckin' bread it!"

  "You want a trout without any fuckin' breading?!"

  "That's what I fuckin' said!"

  "Fuck that!"

  You see, cooks make no distinction between waiters and diners. It's too difficult a concept for them to grasp. They work in a crowded, overheated environment, they do it for a wage that barely creeps above the minimum, and they stay until well past midnight scrubbing their stations clean before they can leave - long after the rest of the dining room staff have gone home. Waiters regard them as dumb animals who need to be kept in the dark about their circumstances, like circus elephants who would gladly trample the silly man with the sequined vest if they ever saw through the illusion of his pathetic whip.

  Cooks are like high school bullies (they probably were high school bullies) and they can fuck with your food, so most waiters abstain from confronting them even when they know they're in the right. Since the cooks fuck up half the orders anyway it doesn't make sense to exacerbate the situation by antagonizing them.

  Cooks talk tough, but that's only because they don't have to face the public. Many times I've passed on guest requests to the cook's line only to have them bark back at me, "Tell 'em to go fuck themselves!" It makes them feel rebellious and cool, but they still have to put the fuckin' sauce on the side. And on those rare occasions when a cook has to make an appearance in the dining room, summoned to the Location Manager's office perhaps, they quickly scuttle past the diners in their filthy whites and paper top hats like pale subterranean bugs unsettled by the light of an alien environment. And if a guest asks to see the "head chef" on one of those even rarer occasions when everything happens to go right, it's nothing short of delectable to see the prick who happens to be drafted by his peers come and face the public:

  Tourist: That was the best prime rib I've ever had. I wanted to thank you for doing such a fine job."

  Prick: "Uh...so yuh liked it?" (Awkward silence)

  Fuck the cooks.[2]

  The Backcountry II

  ONE of the loveliest and least frequented areas of Yellowstone is the northeast corner, where the Lamar River runs through rolling sage-covered meadows surrounded by stark peaks and thick pine forests. It also offers some of the best hiking in the Park. Pebble Creek trail was the destination one weekend in September when my friend Josh and I made the long drive from Old Faithful. We intended to take it easy and enjoy the scenery along the twelve-mile trail, and instead we finished the day as horse thieves.

  My friend wasn't much for hiking - he preferred to spend his free time casting fly lines over the blue-ribbon trout streams that criss-cross the Park - but he was willing to give it a try. Since the trail was called Pebble "Creek" though, he couldn't resist taking along his fly rod.

  In order to reach the valley where Pebble Creek courses, you have to climb about 1,000 feet in the first mile. During this stretch Josh was utterly unconvinced by my enthusiasm for the fine weather and crisp mountain air, but he soldiered on without complaint. Once we reached the top of the ridge though, the trail descended quickly to the river valley and we made good time, emerging from the pine forest into a wide meadow that seemed secluded from all the world. High ridges surrounded us, and to the west, ahead of us, rose the rocky wall of Bliss Pass. I'd climbed the pass years before with a group of eight people. It was brutal: a series of steep switchbacks that seemed to go on forever. My close friend Beth was also in the group and we kept leap-frogging each other on the way to the top; she, desperately trying to prove that she could best a man, and me, desperately trying to save face as a man. Finally, near the top, I passed her for the final time. She gave me a quick nod and said, "I think I'm going to throw up."

  There was no such rivalry on this day. The hike through the meadow was tranquility itself. The trail was flat and our legs carried us along breezily while our eyes took in the treasured
view. Our only concern was bears. At each of the campsites we passed was posted a notice which said that overnight camping was prohibited due to recent bear activity in the area. We weren't overly worried; it just made us a little jumpy at the sounds coming out of the woods.

  As the trail turned south it re-entered the pine forest and rose above the creek, affording tempting views of prime trout habitat to my friend. I was watching the creek when he stopped short and made a surprised exclamation. I followed his gaze ahead of us and saw the shape of an animal through the trees. Before I could identify it he said, "Horses!"

  It wasn't what I was expecting, but sure enough, there were three horses on the trail ahead of us. They were watching us, and none of us moved for a minute. Josh broke the silence.

  "How far are we from the Beartooth Mountains?"

  "Just a few miles," I said. "Why?"

  "I just remember reading in one of the local papers about how some horses were lost in the Beartooths. Do you suppose...?"

  We came up closer to the horses, which had gone back to grazing, and noticed that two of them had been hobbled with leather belts around their front legs.

  "They belong to somebody," Josh said. “That keeps them from wandering too far away."

  "What a shitty thing to do to a horse," I said. "What if a bear came around? They'd be helpless!"

  We spent a few minutes acquainting ourselves with the animals and stroking their backs, commiserating with them about their cruel masters, when Josh decided to see if their masters were even around. He headed towards the creek and called out in a loud voice, but received no reply. When he came back he was shaking his head.