Squatters in Paradise: A Yellowstone Memoir

by James Perry

  You're either in or out of the harlot's house when the lights go down.

  Sylvia

  AS a first date, I took Sylvia whitewater rafting. She was from Georgia and had long amber hair that curled voluptuously around her cherubic face. We both worked in the dining room and I found myself taken in by her considerable southern charm. I asked her to come along on a rafting trip in the Tetons, one that already included several co-workers so that she wouldn't have to think of it as a real date, and she said she'd think about it. I made no further mention of it and she never gave me an answer, so I was surprised when she showed up in the employee cafeteria the morning of the trip.

  That was the spring that Jackson Lake was being drained in order to mend the dam, so the Snake River was wild, fed by the wide-open sluices which sent great arcs of water thundering into the canyon and turned the class 1 and 2 rapids into 3’s and even 4’s. Every day people were being tossed from their rafts: overweight tourists, strong young hikers, women and children, even raft guides. The river spared no one that spring, and into this maelstrom I brought the darling of Cobb Country, Georgia.

  Since I'd run the river before I knew right from the start that this trip was going to be different; the current didn't wait for us to paddle out from shore, it grabbed us and threw us headlong down its throat. Normally, the guide informed us, the trip would take an hour and a half. This year we'd be done in forty-five minutes. Our oars were all but useless as we paddled away at thin air half the time because the raft had been lifted almost perpendicular to the river on mountainous waves. The people in the back of the raft, the families on vacation, simply held on, while those in front, the parkies, gave rebel yells at the walls of water that reared up in front of us and repeatedly knocked us on our backs. The guide screamed at us to keep rowing as the most dangerous rapid of the trip approached, but before it even came into view our raft suddenly lurched forward into a depression created by an underwater boulder and met a surging wall of green water beyond. The raft folded back upon itself and I found myself looking straight up into the crisp blue sky. Sylvia, who was seated behind me, reached out and grabbed my collar as she went flying overboard, taking me with her. I deserved it. After all, this date was my idea. I hit the water and the cold took my breath away. I gasped for air as the numbing water knifed through my clothes. I looked up and saw the survivors in the raft staring down at me. They were a shabby crew; wet, mouths open, holding on for dear life. To my left was Sylvia, bobbing in the roiling river, her wavy locks now wet, dark, and straight. She didn't look scared, just surprised, and the river was pulling her away. For once in my life I saw the danger and took action. There was a rope strung along the length of the raft and I grabbed it, then I reached out my other hand to Sylvia. She blinked at it for a moment, then her hand rose out of the froth and she took it. As the river tried to disengage us I marshaled my strength and managed to pull her up against the raft where the guide yanked us both on board just in time to be tossed around like dice as we hit Lunch Counter, the biggest rapid on the river. We flopped on the floor of the raft, laughing and spitting water and howling like half-mad children, shaking our heads and looking deep into each other’s eyes, already in love.

  My brother, who worked in the business in Hollywood, gave a nod to our opening scene. "You met cute," he said approvingly.

  Ours was a physical relationship. On our weekends we’d sling packs over our shoulders and head into the woods, up mountains, along rivers, into the backcountry where we could enjoy - as Poe said - "the utter license" of nature. Often our destination was left unfound because, lovers that we were, we simply couldn't wait. We would dive into the woods, laughing, casting off the world and its paths to crash through the underbrush until we found a resting place where we could lay together under a cloudless sky and put on a show for all the trees to see. Once, on the way back from Heart Lake, we’d romped in warm Witch Creek just off the hiking trail and gotten dressed again only moments before several Boy Scouts came marching past. “Hello boys,” Sylvia said in a voice that called the entire troupe to attention. “Watch out for bears!”

  One day near the end of the season, when we seemed to be hiking more out of habit than inclination, we left the trail and skidded down a slope toward the sound of running water. We discovered a bower of pines sheltering a brook and a small beach where we threw ourselves down on the grass. Sylvia and I cast off our shirts and lay side by side, listening to the wind twisting the leaves. I felt her hand slide over my stomach and move beneath my shorts. Falling into a reverie I watched the quiet clouds above form strange, erotic shapes. Suddenly I rolled over and grabbed her, holding tight as wave after ecstatic wave swept over me.

  Later, when I'd hopped in the river to wash off, Sylvia said, “That was a surprise!” She seemed quite pleased with her newfound prowess, as if she’d figured out a Rubik’s Cube, and regarded me with deep satisfaction.

  It was only later that we noticed the viewing platform a short distance away, overlooking one of Yellowstone's cascades, loaded with tourists sporting cameras and binoculars.

  I knew Sylvia loved me because she followed me 13,000 feet into the sky, the hard way. We drove south to the Tetons one bright morning and donned our backpacks in the shadow of Wyoming's most dramatic mountain range. Four miles into the hike, after zigzagging along the switchbacks above Lupine Meadows through fields of flowers and grass and buzzing insects, we caught the first glimpse of our goal - the Middle Teton - which rose above Garnet Canyon like a woman's thigh. A thin, vertical streak of dark volcanic rock, like the seam of a silk stocking, ran towards her mount. We camped for the night in a grove of wind-lashed pines, lulled by the muttering of a nearby brook as it passed through a boulder field before plunging down the slope we'd ascended. In our tent, side by side, we slept well.

  The morning brought a smile to my face as I poked my head out to witness a beautiful blue sky. In the mountains, days like these, even in the midst of summer, are a gift. We slung our daypacks over our shoulders and set out. After marching with full backpacks the day before, I felt as light as air. My mother would often laugh at my disinclination to accumulate things, and how I seemed to be satisfied with little. I'm certain that this was not an innate quality, but a learned feature of my personality. The more belongings you have, the more you have to carry. That is the lesson of the backpacker, and it easily translates into a creed for life in general. There is simply no substitute for the sense of freedom that comes with the knowledge that all you need fits comfortably in a small pack slung over your shoulder.

  Sylvia too, was a gift. Here in the mountains, in the open air, I was in my element, but now I had someone to share it with. In the past, when I'd stumble upon an arresting vista or happen to catch a glimpse of an elk giving milk to its fawn, I would often cast a glance behind me, as if to halt my nonexistent companions and draw them close with a whisper: "Shhh. Look!" Because I could not share them, there was always a certain sadness associated with these moments. They seemed diminished somehow, as though I were an intruder rather than an observer, because I had nothing to offer in return. But now, simply by touching the hand of my lover, these scenes became so much more. The joy Sylvia took in plunging her head into an ice-cold cataract and tossing back her voluminous hair, spraying water in a crystal-colored arc, left me a disciple.

  This was a difficult hike. While it didn't require ropes or crampons or any of the usual mountaineering accoutrements, it was hard. There was a point near the summit where it was necessary to climb, hand over hand, up a rock-strewn couloir. At this altitude, even though summer, there was snow interlacing the rocks, playing false with one's steps. I reached an outcrop of rock and sat down to rest, breathing deeply and watching Sylvia with a certain sense of detachment as she ascended below me. She moved slowly, picking her steps, and then she began to cry. She stopped for a moment and lowered her head, gathering her strength and breath, sobbed softly, then continued. I felt like a monster. What am I doing? I thought. She's doin
g this for me! Every gasp of breath, every step, every salted tear was an offering laid at my shrine. I understood at that moment what love meant, and it shook me.

  We clawed our way to the summit and languished on the cool rocks overlooking the valley floor. Only the Grand Teton still rose above us, close enough to touch it seemed. Sylvia, the world at her feet and cheerful again, tore off her shirt in a practiced move and lay back against a rock, facing the sun - an exposure she would later regret. Her chest rose and fell heavily at first, then slowed. Her eyelids fluttered and closed. I watched the sun warm her skin hungrily as she dozed; the picture of youth and beauty set against a panorama of snowy alps and green glacier-carved valleys. I woke her gently when I heard other climbers approaching. It was time to begin our descent.

  Peak experiences are always brief affairs.

  And so are Yellowstone Romances. After all the ungentlemanly schadenfreude I'd shown while witnessing the dissolution of numerous Park relationships, the worm was about to turn. Sylvia had to return to college before season's end and I dropped her off at the airport with a sense of deliverance. The way I saw it was that my life was about to be returned to me. Much as I loved her, I had begun to feel a certain nostalgia for my days of solitary self-indulgence, and when she broke the news that she was leaving and would not be coming back the following summer, I took it well. I drove her to the airport thinking about all the cigarettes I was going to smoke on the return trip, blithely assuring her that we would stay in touch while checking my watch to make sure that she wasn't going to miss her flight. She gave me a passionate kiss as the De Havilland prop arrived on the tarmac and never took her eyes off of me as she joined the boarding crowd, as though she were expecting me to jump the barricades and catch her up in a dramatic embrace, refusing to allow the unjust separation of two such ardent lovers. But I just smiled and waved. When she was gone I took a deep breath and turned to go, then collapsed into a chair, surprised to find tears running down my cheeks. When I lifted my head from my hands the gate attendants were regarding me with alarm. Embarrassed, I quickly left the terminal and sought out my car. I sat there in silence, wondering what had just happened. What had just happened was a moment of lucidity, like the flash of understanding I’d experienced on the mountaintop; that the love I had for Sylvia was equal to the love I had for the Park, and that I'd just made my Sophie's choice.

  Part Four

  Literary Yellowstone

  EVERY now and then Yellowstone will make a brief appearance in the real world - sometimes dramatically, as with the fires of 1988 - but usually it’s only a passing reference in political cartoons or newspaper articles. Since I've considered the Park my home for many years I tend to take notice whenever I hear her name mentioned outside the ecosystem. Yellowstone, while hardly a subject one hears mentioned every day, is still well enough known to arise almost anywhere. Once, while vacationing in France, I rode a gondola from the town of Chamonix to the Aiguille du Midi, a rocky spire at 12,600 feet which affords spectacular views of Mont Blanc and the Alps. On the way down I was listening to the mix of languages among the tourists when I heard an American woman mention Yellowstone. She was telling her friends that she had once worked there for a summer, and I recognized in her voice the wistful quality of those who have put the Park behind them. "We used to say that it wasn't the real world," she said, and then added with a smile, "but of course it was."

  There are also those rare literary references to Yellowstone which never fail to bring a smile to my face, especially when they appear in the classics of literature. Ernest Hemingway, no stranger to Montana, incorporated Yellowstone in his language. Describing the hot temper of Pablo's mujer in For Whom the Bell Tolls, he writes, "...the woman started to curse in a flood of obscene invective that rolled over and around him like the hot white water splashing down from the sudden eruption of a geyser." In Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, after Humbert Humbert has had the monitory good fortune of seeing his wife struck and killed by a car, leaving him alone with his nymphet, we follow them as they make a circuit of the U.S. One of their stops is Yellowstone: "Somber Yellowstone Park and its colored hot springs, baby geysers, rainbows of bubbling mud - symbols of my passion." And then there was John Steinbeck, whose trip to Yellowstone in Travels with Charley was aborted because his dog went feral after it spotted bears on the road, which served him right since he dismissed the Park as "no more representative of America than is Disneyland."

  The English poet, Ted Hughes, almost made the same mistake, calling Yellowstone a "Mislaid Red Indian Mickey Mouse America." But he had the good sense to look deeper. His wife, American poet Sylvia Plath, on the other hand, seems to have connected with the Park from the start. What is interesting is that they both wrote about the same incident, Plath in prose and Hughes in verse, and used the same title: The Fifty-Ninth Bear. In Plath's fictional version, Sadie (Sylvia) seems strangely at ease in Yellowstone, walking amidst the "dark entrails of the earth where the sluggish muds and scalding waters had their source." Like one of Camille Paglia's chthonian goddesses, she dissolves into the hellish landscape while her husband Norton (Ted) dallies by the car. Later, we hear that she has no fear of animals, that she "has a way with them" in fact. This is made evident when Norton finds her feeding a wild stag from her hand, as if in communion, or conspiracy. On the drive back to their campsite, an elk runs in front of their car, which Plath sees as a consoling sign (for Hughes, in his version, it is a dark omen). There is an underlying tension, almost an animosity, between the couple in Plath's version that never quite surfaces. At least not directly. "My bear," we hear her say that night as the couple are woken by a grizzly, as if she had called it up out of the dark. She sends her husband out to shoo it away. It would be the fifty-ninth bear they would see, the one that would make a sacrifice of Norton for the pagan priestess of Yellowstone.

  In Hughes' version (which, fortunately for him is the more true-to-life) he does not confront the bear. He remembers the "amiable bears" that he saw earlier in the day, with their "teddybear ears”, but even then he wondered if they perhaps weren’t as convivial as they seemed. As he approached the grizzly, which was tearing into their car in a primal search for food, he stopped short, realizing his pitiful inadequacy before the beast - a real wild bear - and he survives.

  The two tales form a wonderful diptych of Yellowstone. In one, the visitor is receptive to the Park and (like Steinbeck's French poodle) has a rewarding atavistic experience. In the other, the visitor shows common sense and is not torn limb from limb.

  Mr. Ichikawa

  ONE summer the dining room manager thought it would be funny to put me in a Japanese movie. Mr. Ichikawa and his crew were at Old Faithful to do a documentary about the Park, and they wanted to include a few scenes with a regular employee doing regular employee things like working and hiking. There were to be no scenes about excessive drinking, love among the pines, or wild animal escapades. I had just come off an extremely long day of work, having agreed to pick up an extra shift in addition to my scheduled double shift (which I had done as a very special, once-in-a-lifetime favor) and was looking forward to a long sleep. In order to be in the movie I would have to be up at five in the morning to work a breakfast shift, then take the film crew on a short hike, all of which would be recorded. I told him no.

  "C'mon," he said, smiling. "It'll be fun."

  "I'll be in no condition to work or hike if I don't get any sleep," I told him. "Much less talk intelligibly on camera."

  "That's what'll make it fun," he insisted. "You'll be gabbling like a madman."

  I couldn't argue with his logic, but when my alarm sounded early the next morning just as I'd begun to drift off I realized that I'd been conned. My body felt sluggish and heavy. I pulled my feet out from under the warm sheets and set them down on the floor, which sent a sharp, painful spasm up through my legs to my sleep-deprived brain. No, no, no. I cursed my boss and kicked myself as I prepared for another long day.

  I didn't think the
hosts would go easy on me just because I had a VIP table of visiting international filmmakers, and I was right. They slammed my section all morning. Maybe they thought that would be fun, too. The crew needed some scenes of a waiter in action, so they had me run back and forth from kitchen to dining room several times, during which my co-workers would scream "Make-up!" and the sound man would shake his head and send me back to the kitchen for another run. Realizing that their star was also an actual waiter, the crew tacked on a few extra errands for me while I was in the kitchen and I was soon giving a true-to-life rendition of a pissed-off Park employee dealing with demanding guests while running on little or no sleep.

  After breakfast I was sent home to change into my hiking clothes. It felt good to wear my own comfortable rags but the lack of sleep was beginning to take its toll; I was sweating profusely and dark circles had begun to form under my eyes.

  Mr. Ichikawa had decided to make Observation Point our hike. This was a relief because even though Observation Point was steep, it was also a very short one-mile jaunt, and I was further consoled by the fact that the cameraman had to haul his ungainly piece of equipment up an 800-foot slope. Are you sure you don't want another danish, Mr. Creosote? There was a lot of nature photography to be done so I was able to lie in the shaded grass after each "Happy Hiking Employee" scene while director and crew chased butterflies.

  The final scene called for The Employee to sit in a meadow and wax poetic about life in the Park. I was wired and placed on a rock in the middle of a golden clearing with insects buzzing around my head and gentle breezes playing with my hair. I’m ready for my close-up now, Mr. Ichikawa. With the huge camera pointed directly at my face the director asked me to explain what it was that brought me to Yellowstone. Twenty minutes later he held up his hand, "OK, OK, OK, I think that is enough."