by James Perry
The dining room at Old Faithful began to resemble a syndicate, and whenever a new waiter arrived he was immediately taken aside and clued in ("This is how we do things here at O.F..."). The newbie would generally have a crisis of conscience until being seduced by the lordly sums he saw the others pirating. However, theft requires rationalization in all but the most rapine of souls, so it became common to hear stories like Nick's: "Can you believe I got written up for not sorting my silverware at the dish drop? That's gonna cost the company fifty dollars!"
Most of the people involved understood that this was a one-time deal. It was simply too good to last. As another restaurant employee said wistfully, “It will never be this good again.” Understanding this fact, none of the people involved in Operation Maple Syrup returned the following summer. While it lasted though, I have never seen a more cheerful staff. At last they were earning a decent wage. One of the foreign kids, reeling from the fortune he’d amassed, said to me just before returning to his poor Eastern European country, “I can now buy a house, a car… It is the American Dream. I love America!”
Oddly enough, when all the tallies were done for the summer of 2001, the dining room at the Old Faithful Inn had had a banner year. The only conclusion one can draw is that a happy workforce is a productive workforce - even if that cheery smile is accompanied by a sly wink.
In the seasons that followed, the Maple Syrup affair did of course continue. It didn't take long for new employees to put two-and-two together and start getting their hands sticky. The company implemented a few half-measures to limit the siphoning of funds, but it wasn't until the summer of 2003 that the authorities were called in. The National Park Service, working with the FBI, ran a sting operation that season which netted a couple of Latvian waiters. They were fired, but they weren’t deported because they ratted on the Russians, who were stealing even more.
The Ones Who Don’t Make It
THE nutcases, for one. These employees usually make themselves known early on and tend to self-destruct. They are the dysfunctional alcoholics and sociopaths who have “incidents” that get them terminated or arrested (usually both) before the end of the first month. May is for weeding out the psychos; a dangerous but entertaining time.
An early clue into the imminent demise of an employee is if they go to bed early every night. I mean seven or eight in the evening, lights out, under the sheets in the fetal position. These are the folks who have failed to adjust to Yellowstone time. Without the comforting diversion of television they simply shut down. Unable to create their own amusements - drinking, hiking, making new friends, writing a book - they lose interest in life and haunt their dorm rooms like foul-smelling ghosts.
Braggarts. This category of the condemned refers specifically to waiters, especially those who bring their irreproachable skills to the Old Faithful Inn dining room. They scoff at the size of their sections and dissertate on the organizational skills they possess which have won them fortune and acclaim back home. "My old boss pleaded with me not to leave," they pronounce with unassuming humility. When the hour arrives for them to show their mettle, when the fans leap from their seats in anticipation of a bluegrass classic, these erstwhile stags show themselves for the nags they really are. The exemplar being a watery-eyed candidate from Indiana who disappeared one lunch while the rest of us were being hammered without mercy. The managers found him huddled in a corner of the men's room with a confused and frightened expression on his face, mumbling about how the hosts wouldn't listen to him when he said he couldn't handle another table: "They just kept seating me," he repeated incredulously as the managers hovered over him and exchanged knowing glances.
One sure sign of an employee with the mark of death on his forehead is if he tries to change the system. It's OK to complain about the company, but if you actually try to change the way things are done, god help you. And if you succeed in forcing the company to do the right thing - say, provide night meals for employees who work into the wee hours (as a short-lived friend of mine accomplished) - you can forget about the company tagline, "A great job for a year or a career!"[5]
Another friend of mine split when she became fed up with what she considered to be the unprofessional manner in which the Park was run. Which brings me to the next category of employees who don't make it through the season; anyone with standards.
A large slice of the pie chart showing employees who don't make it would have to represent anyone in management. This seems to be the most efficacious way of burning out a perfectly good employee. Once they enter the managerial arena they are quickly driven insane by company propaganda and either quit in order to live the sunny and uncomplicated life of a drunk, or move up the corporate ladder and live the dark and complicated life of a drunk.
People with ambition. Yellowstone is not the place to go if you want to be noticed. While it's not as obscure as, say, Musselshell, events in this area don't generally reach any further than the local papers. We're the South America of North America; the only time we make the news is when disaster strikes. Earthquakes, floods, and fires are our claim to fame.
Hippies. These are the saddest constituents of the category. They come to Yellowstone because of its unconventional lifestyle, but soon find themselves working overtime for a company that regards the Park as little more than a cash cow. These delicate creatures drift away from the Park like seeds from a dandelion at the first opportune wind; whether it be the rumor of a less-stringent drug policy in another park or the fortuitous passing of a traveling circus.
In fact, the only people who do make it are the ones who, for better or for worse, love this place.
Tidbits
WHEN Yellowstone became a national park in 1872, Lewis Carroll was enjoying great popularity with his Alice in Wonderland books. Because the Park seemed like such a looking-glass world with its remarkable geology and fabulous wildlife, it earned the nickname "Wonderland," and early advertisements for the Park used the words Yellowstone and Wonderland interchangeably.
It's a fitting sobriquet for reasons that go beyond the Park's natural wonders. Park Service policies, for example, can often seem like the unreasonable dictates of mad kings and queens. Take the notion that bison are only protected while within the boundaries of the Park and can be shot the moment they stick their wooly heads over the line. One can easily imagine young Alice puzzling over the difficulties that would arise from such an arrangement:
"But the bison don't know they're in a Park," thought Alice. "And they certainly don't know what its boundaries are." She took a moment to think this over, then asked the Gnat (who seemed to know an awful lot about looking-glass policy), "What happens if they leave the Park?"
"Then they would die, of course."
"But that must happen very often," Alice remarked thoughtfully.
"It always happens."
And so it does.
* * *
My mother is French, and she cooks wonderful dishes that combine both American and French cuisine. She doesn't just cook a pizza, she serves up a table-sized pastry topped with seasoned sausage, garlic, onion, and sprinkled with Herbs de Provence. When I travel overseas she asks not for trinkets but spices; saffron from Turkey, vanilla from Tahiti, sea salt from the west coast of France. It would be a crime to return from a foreign country without some culinary specialty with which to delight my mother.
Back in the Park I would often bring tremendous appetites to the employee dining room after hiking 15 or 20 miles in the backcountry, coming down from high peaks in the Tetons or searching out waterfalls by compass, only to find loveless heels of pork or pale breasts of chicken, devoid of creams or sauces, lying forlorn in antiseptic steam trays; vegetables, limp and defeated, with all the life cooked out of them; carelessly cut potatoes suffocating under gobs of cheddar cheese; and for dessert, carrot cake, served in cardboard boxes and cut into neat squares resembling the post-modern rations of the space age. From the culinary environs of my home to being handed a plastic tray and ladled
penitentiary-grade slop in the EDR in Yellowstone is like casting swine before pearls. No wonder employees spend so much of their income on food! We're being fed like schoolchildren, and the kindergarten-like motif of the EDR with its safety cartoons and bad employee art only magnifies the insult.
* * *
When I was working at Grant Village I once overheard the Food & Beverage manager grumble as she was perusing the employee meal plan with her assistant, looking for ways to improve her bottom line, "Sez here we're supposed to have shrimp on Tuesday. Hell, fish sticks is just as good!"
* * *
One can't work in Yellowstone for any amount of time without feeling the pressure from the outside world to get a real job. While the Park does tend to attract a certain louche element, we're not pirates (generally). In the independent film, What Happened to Kerouac, we learn that Jack talked about marriage with most all of his lovers. It wasn't that he was being insincere, it was the 1950s, and people just didn't have sex without a nod to the nuclear family. Not if one harbored any connection to civilized society anyway. It was necessary to talk the talk, even if only for the sake of appearances. It's the same with working in the Park; one talks about getting a real job because we all tacitly recognize the objectionable quality of seasonal work.
* * *
I recently discovered that the Labor Department classifies seasonal workers in Yellowstone under the same rubric as migrant farm workers. How marginalized can you get?
* * *
Although it was William Clark of the Lewis and Clark expedition who paddled down the Yellowstone River, it is Meriwether Lewis after whom Lewis Lake, Lewis River, Lewis Falls, and Lewis Canyon are named in the Park. The Clark's Nutcracker, a gray jay common in Yellowstone, was named for his partner. Or, as I liked to point out when I was a tour guide, Lewis got the major features, Clark got the bird.
* * *
Near the end of the winter season when I was working as a snowcoach driver, I had had enough of snowmobiles. Pulling over near Midway Geyser Basin to talk about the history of Excelsior Geyser I had to postpone my speech for several minutes as one after another two-stroke snowmobile roared noisily past, filling the air with the stench of gasoline. I ended up prefacing my commentary with this rankled remark: "Giving commentary in the winter with all these snowmobiles is like trying to do wildlife viewing at the Daytona 500."
* * *
Winter can really put the zap on people's heads. I'm not talking about employees suffering from cabin fever, either. I mean the guests, especially the ones who are unfamiliar with natural environments. People from New Jersey. As I was greeting one such couple prior to taking them on a Firehole River tour the man turned to me and said, "I don't wanna go no place toxic." I asked him what he meant and he explained that he'd heard about the vapors from the geyser basins being harmful. I assured him that there were important differences between Yellowstone and superfund sites and we began our tour. When I took him and his wife on the Fountain Paint Pots nature trail, we stopped at a point that afforded a panoramic view of ancient lava flows covered in pine forest which surrounded a sinter-white basin of steaming fumaroles and splashing geysers. His mouth dropped open and he looked at me in wonder. "Is this the center of the Earth?" he asked.
* * *
Easterners tend to romanticize the West, whereas westerners tend to live there, and the battle between romance and reality is always a losing one. As Julia Roberts said in Pretty Woman, "I want the fairy tale."
Most tourists are attracted to Yellowstone because they idealize it as a pristine and unaltered slice of pre-colonial America, when what it is is a fragile postage-stamp sized plot of relatively undeveloped real estate in a more-or-less unpopulated region of the American West that is nevertheless threatened on all sides by economic interests who would like nothing better than to chainsaw, drill, strip-mine, clear-cut, and otherwise develop this isolated region for short-term monetary gain. Like adding parental advisories to music CD's, establishing Yellowstone as a protected national park only adds to the allure of its exploitation for these adolescent-minded entrepreneurs.
* * *
A burned-out waitress at the Old Faithful Inn dining room had just come back from seeing the movie Falling Down in West Yellowstone. She was talking about the scene where Michael Douglas shows up at a fast food joint in L.A. with an Uzi and demands breakfast during lunch hour. She was pissed. "If that were me at the counter I would've said, 'If you're gonna shoot, shoot, but you're not getting any fuckin' breakfast!'”
* * *
The writer Joan Didion has one word for the tourist and restaurant industry: "dispiriting."
* * *
I'm running. I need to get something for a table in the dining room but I've forgotten what it is. They wanted a mirror, some of those little black discs (I forget what they're for), and something else. All I can find are a few marbles and some string. When I return to the dining room I see that I've been seated with three more tables of twelve. I realize that I've been neglecting another of my tables so I give them the marbles and run off, hoping that will keep them happy for a while, even though it's not what they ordered. I'm not usually this disorganized, and it doesn't help that I seem to be the only waiter on the floor tonight, but I finally manage to cobble together a tray of food for one of my tables. It's difficult carrying the tray out to the dining room because of all the monkeys swinging from the rafters who keep trying to snatch my entree plates. I set the tray down and start removing the plate covers, but to my horror I see that there's nothing underneath. Everyone in the dining room is looking at me, scowling, snapping their fingers. Then I'm running again, but I'm outside, throwing off my apron, my tie, my wait book, running away...
That's usually the point when I wake up, or the alarm goes off signaling the start of another early shift in the dining room. I get up, unrefreshed, feeling as if I should be paid for the last few restless hours I've spent waiting tables in my dreams.
* * *
The Eastern Europeans have a reputation for being very hard-working, even to the point of getting upset if they don't get overtime. I asked Kaspars, a busser from Latvia, if he ever got out to enjoy the Park. He looked bewildered. "What? Is just trees. I wanted work in Denver. Here is nothing."
* * *
One of my co-workers in the dining room told me recently that he'd asked management to lighten up on his work schedule. He was a writer, he said, and he wasn't getting enough free time to keep up on his craft. I thought it was admirable that he felt so strongly about his literary ambitions that he was prepared to tender his resignation if they didn't give him a schedule that afforded him enough free time to practice his art. I thought, "Here's a guy I can look up to."
A few days later he was arrested by the FBI for his part in a kidnapping and murder case in California.
* * *
In the summer of 2003, the pilot of a small plane crashed into Midway Geyser Basin and was killed. Because of his accident the road was closed for several hours and a few busloads of irritable New Yorkers were unable to get to the Old Faithful Inn for dinner that night. The pilot did not die in vain.
* * *
Back when The Grateful Dead were still alive and touring, employees would pile into broken-down vans and make Homeric road trips to see them, promising the moon to their co-workers in order to get their shifts covered so that they could join the odyssey. They could afford to promise the moon because many of them never returned. When the van lurched back onto location several days later it would invariably be several bodies lighter.
"Hey, where's Anne?"
"Oh, she decided to follow the Dead. She's selling her beadwork to support herself now."
"But...that bitch was supposed to work my lunch!"
* * *
A couple of summers ago, in late September, I arrived for my breakfast shift and found myself quite alone. None of my co- workers (or managers) were anywhere to be seen. I busied myself making coffee in the kitchen and otherwise pr
eparing for opening, but by 6:30 - opening time - I was still the only waiter in the house. The host stand was already surrounded by a large mob of early risers who were pressing at the doors like King Kong at the village gates, and there I stood in the middle of the empty dining room, waiting to be violated like Fay Wray. But no! I rose to the challenge and threw open the doors myself, addressing the beast in an authoritative voice: "The entire staff is sleeping off a drunk!" I announced. "I'm the only waiter in the house! Come on in and enjoy the buffet, but I'm not taking any orders!" The bemused throng fell silent, then someone laughed and it was all right. They followed me into the dining room like good little children and fed themselves from the copious trough of the blessed buffet while I doled out the coffee and orange juice.
