by John Hansen
“That’s your mountain, there,” the jammer driver was pointing out his window to the left at a mountain that stood somewhat alone and had a slight conical shape. “Mount Sinopah.”
“My mountain?” I asked, snapping out of my daydream and the distant peaks.
“Two Medicine camp is down below that one.” He pointed out across the tops of the distant trees to our left.
I looked over at my mountain. “Where’s the name come from – Sinopah.”
“Dunno, Indian chief way back when I think,” the driver said, shrugging.
I had read that these jammer drivers were the park’s tour guides, and would provide commentary about the park and its history to riders as they drove, but my guide wasn’t very expansive about anything to say the least, but I realized he kind of already thought of me as one of the team, not to be treated like some slack-jawed, awestruck yokel from the city.
I sat back into the bench seat of the bus as we drove on, grinding gears up the now-steeper hills, and I felt lost in the vast wildness of the place. However, tooling down the road in my weird red bus I felt the nervousness that had now become a deep part of me – the expectation of what lay out there in below “my mountain” was worrying me. I wondered if the others on staff at the store would be nice and decent to work with, if the job was going to be ok… I glanced at my bushy-haired driver; would my coworkers be crazy? But mostly, as the bus lurched down the road toward a chain of lower hills, I wondered if I had made a huge mistake and come all this way for nothing.
We drove for two hours more, and the mountain peaks didn’t seem to get much closer. After yet another hour we drove into a large gravel lot that lay next to a long lake which spanned all way through a valley and stopped at the feet of Mount Sinopah himself. I recognized the scene from my internet searches in Atlanta. There it was – the two-story, very big log cabin next to that very lake I had seen in the magazine. It was the store and the lake, no doubt about it.
After I got out my things, the jammer drove off, beeping his horn twice as a sendoff, waving his hand in a flourish and the disappeared past the trees. I stood in the gravel parking lot next to the store, holding my suitcase in one hand and my guitar case in the other, feeling completely out of place. I listened to the birds chirping off in the distance, to the wind blowing across the lake and getting entangled in the trees beside me. There were no cars in front of the store, no cars anywhere, and I could see no other people around. An aluminum canoe was tied to a tree near the store by the lake.
I trudged across the gravel to the steps of the store, taking in the place as I walked. The store was, as I mentioned, built two stories high with a big, slate, A-frame room. The whole place was made of enormous wooden logs, like unfinished telephone poles stacked horizontally, with a dark slate roof peaked by a glass skylight. Across the front of the store was a wooden porch stretching across the entire face, with a wooden railing going round and two or three large rocking chairs set out on it, empty. The store was painted dark brown with a light, tan trim around the large windows, kind of a Swedish-chalet style, like the big lodge I had slept in the night before. Logs cut in half made up the heavy staircase that lead up to the front door. It looked as good as any place to start with, so I walked towards the entrance and put one foot on the first split log step.
A girl suddenly stepped out of the front door above me and walked onto the porch. She shielded her eyes with her hand from the sun and squinted at me. She looked to be in her early twenties
“Are you Will?” she asked.
“Yep.” I stood there holding my bag and guitar.
She came down the stairs. “I’m Katie – I work here too.” She offered me her hand and I grasped it for a second and gave it a slight shake. She was short and fit and had natural sandy blonde hair with brown eyes set in a youthful, thoughtful looking face. She had a good figure, a nice compact little frame, with fine, full boobs under a tight park shirt that I couldn’t help but notice. An unavoidable little wave of interest shot through me involuntarily. Forget it, I told myself. You are done with that messy business, pal, at least for now.
She was looking at me in a quizzical way, as if studying a science experiment that was turning out different than she had planned.
“The lodge called this morning and said you were on your way out. You’re not what I thought you’d look like.”
“Good…” I looked back at her at a loss for what to say.
She looked doubtfully at my bag. “You packed a suitcase? Everybody here just has backpacks.” She shook her head slightly, “A regular Daniel Boone huh?”
That was a bit irritating. To change to the subject I nodded at the store behind her. “How long have you been here?”
“Two weeks ago, and it’s already been pretty crazy.” She turned back to the store and gestured for me to follow her up the stairs. “I’ve been stocking, cleaning, and getting the place ready non-stop since I set foot off the jammer.”
She spoke in a strangely flat, hesitant kind of voice, like she was reluctantly speaking out of obligation and making an effort to say as little as possible, but also awkwardly trying to be friendly at the same time. I wondered how it was going to be living with her.
She turned and looked back at me as if reading my thoughts. “You’re going to like it here, though,” she said as she held the front doors open, and then gave me a cautious look. “But it’s gonna take some getting used to.”
She then disappeared back inside the dark interior of the store, letting the doors close, apparently having forgotten she had been holding the door open for me, and leaving me alone outside again.
It was quiet in the valley. The mountain peaks around me seemed at once close and an impossible distance away. The cold breeze made a whisper through nearby pines, sunlight peeping down through the branches and dotting the pine needles on their feet; the lake surface rested glassy and still. Perhaps I should just wander into those trees, and never stop wandering… wouldn’t that be simpler? I looked around at the store again and let loose a sigh. I set my foot back onto the first split-log stair and climbed up. I walked across the porch to the front door. Here goes.
As my hand rested on the door a nervous expectation and fear built up to a point that I wanted to grab hold of something immovable and just think for a moment… just for a moment. To think about what I was doing… I had given up so much to be here, I had given everything up for a new start. What was I doing here? I had talked and dreamed for so long about living in Montana, and now here I was feeling like I was lost.
I pushed the heavy wooden door open walked in. I saw that the store itself was mainly a large, open room all the way up to the A-frame roof, until you got back to the further end to a second floor of rooms. The same long, telephone-pole size beams stretched across the roof, were held in place with metal braces, wires and thick steel bolts.
I saw that the large room consisted of three major sections of stuff for sale, separated only by a big stone fireplace and sitting area in the middle on the right side. As I walked further in I saw that the area nearest to the front doors held tourist merchandise like stacks of park tourist books and DVDs, picturesque mugs, candles and other knickknacks for sale. A bit further in were shelves with t-shirts, jackets, sweatshirts and other wearable park souvenirs for tourists. It was kind of an odd assortment of stuff all stacked and displayed together, some of it seemingly not organized in any discernable way.
Beyond the clothes and off to one side near the wall was a large, glass counter with a cash register. The stone fireplace had a couple of rocking chairs set in front of it, just like those on the porch out front. At the back of the building was a little grocery and camp supplies area and a snack bar kitchen with a few tables and chairs in which people to relax and eat as they stared out the huge windows that lined the log walls on either side of the store. The ceiling was about 30 feet above.
No one was in view in the store proper, but I could hear Katie speaking from somewhere in the b
ack near the kitchen hidden from view, so I followed the sound through aisles of postcards, past little wooden carvings of bears and eagles, and by rows of CDs and tapes of outdoor-themed music, gripping my suitcase and guitar case.
As I walked I looked with dismay at the plastic and cheap touristy crap that was being sold here – in such a pristine and wild place! I felt disappointment at the message these things near the front of the store were saying to me, to anyone that came in here – that I was going to be working in a gift shop. I had imagined something more like the back of the store, I suppose, selling camp supplies like food and propane gas, tents and sleeping backs – the honest, rugged and respectable outdoor necessities – not key chains and license-plate covers... I averted my eyes as I passed some plastic, mountain goat Montana magnets for the fridge.
I found my way into the back of the store and walked into the grocery and snack shop area as Katie popped her head through a steel swinging door in the back. “Come on Mr. Boone, Larry’s back here.” Still that blank, careful voice, immobile face – hiding something inside.
Her hair swung back as she retreated, the door swinging back into place. Who “Larry” was I had no idea, but I moved with the determined gait of the first-time parachutist approaching the plane’s open door, and I set my face with a steady gaze, gripping my suitcase and guitar tighter, as if wielding these as two weapons as a defense against any further dismay I may find behind that swinging metal door.
I pushed through the door and found myself in a two-story kitchen. It was a room full of big steel appliances, two large stoves, two double-door refrigerators, big metal sinks and countertops – a regular restaurant kitchen, everything metallic and wood, the surfaces here and there looked a little scratched and used but otherwise spotless. Katie leaned against a counter to my right, slowly sipping from a mug. To my left an older, short, round man with a mostly bald, blotchy head was vigorously scrubbing one of the sinks in the kitchen with a steel wool pad. He wore a burgundy-colored polo shirt and khaki pants; the shirt was too tight for him, a huge belly protruded out over his khakis.
He turned to me as I set my suitcase and guitar down beside my feet – he wore enormous glasses. He wiped his hands on a dish rag. He stared at me for a second with a kind of earnest but distrustful gaze. “You must be Will,” he said after a moment. “I’m Larry Martin.” He said his name industriously, like a car salesmen introducing the make and model of a prized show car, “This here’s the ‘Larry Martin,’ and she runs like a dream…”
“Glad to meet you,” I said as he gripped my hand. He had a hard grasp, and shook it only once; it was a practiced, intentional handshake that told me he put stock in how a man shakes his hand. I unconsciously squeezed back harder. He came up to about my chin, and I could see the wispy strands of hair brushed over his head clearly.
Larry’s mouth then split into a crooked grin and he gestured over to my guitar. “Looks like we got us a regular John Denver here…” he said loudly, over to another lady I had not noticed, and who was standing on a small stool, hanging a curtain over one of the windows in the back wall. She just looked over and smiled absently.
Larry’s grin faded a little and he regarded the guitar case a second time a bit more suspiciously. “You aren’t gonna play that thing after ten o’clock at night I hope...”
“Oh, don’t worry about that, there’s not guitar in there – it’s just full of drugs and booze I was hiding on the plane.”
Larry’s face suddenly sagged with dismay, and he glanced nervously from my case to me, but then realized the joke and gave a halfhearted smile and grunted, “Ha, well just keep her down up there.”
I assumed “up there” meant my room, my new room. The older lady had come down from her stool and introduced herself as “Phyllis.” She offered me some tea and went over to a counter and retrieved a “Glacier Park” logo mug, just like the one Katie was sipping from. Phyllis was Larry’s wife and worked the store with him, and she seemed nice but quiet and shy, meek like a nervous mouse. She was slim, had curly brown hair mixed with gray and was probably around fifty. She had kind eyes and an honest smile.
“How’s the place coming along?” I asked, to anyone in the room in general. “It looks pretty good.”
Larry blew air out of his cheeks as he looked around the room, “Oh, it’s getting there; gotta knock off the winter off everything… Gotta open up tomorrow and still got loads to do.”
He had a thick Midwest accent and the kind of Spartan, no-nonsense, “elbow-grease” attitude that came with it. I didn’t know if I was supposed to start helping him immediately or if there was some kind of down time or orientation before I actually started. I didn’t know anything about this place at all, and the store opening tomorrow made me uneasy.
Katie didn’t seem to be doing anything all this time but shifting between watching me with curiosity and watching Larry with a kind of critical boredom, as she continued to sip her tea with a catlike smoothness. She caught me staring back at her and then turned and walked over to a screened door in the back, which I saw led to a grassy yard with a shed centered in some small trees.
“I’m gonna step out for a second,” she said as stepped through the door to the bright sunshine outside.
I look back over at Larry and he was looking at the screen door. “She’s a bit on the quirky side,” he said after a moment. “Hell of a worker though, isn’t she Phyllis?” Larry looked over at Phyllis who was brushing off wet hands on her apron.
“Oh, she’s great,” Phyllis said, in a sweet, kindergarten -teacher voice, “just takes time for her to open up a bit with new faces.”
Larry and his wife Phyllis were from Kansas I would come to find out. He was now retired but had owned a mom-and-pop hardware store for a long time; and Phyllis had been stay-home mother to their one, now adult, son, who still lived in Kansas and was a lawyer.
I would also come to find out, with an annoying regularity, that Larry also used to be a “lumberjack,” as he called it, before he got married. I had never then, and have never yet, heard anyone actually refer to themselves as a “lumberjack,” not even those who actually worked in that trade – who called themselves “loggers” – and I met a few who did that summer. But Larry would often tell us proudly of his first job in his late teens in Alaska and then Canada any chance he got – traveling around with a railroad lumber mill operation where he was hired to hack away at huge tree trunks for twelve hours a day, for months at a time. This was before the common use of chain-saws, which he said were too expensive and didn’t work well back then – an apparent golden era when axes and two-man saws were primarily the tools of the trade.
Whenever he mentioned this story I kept trying to picture him against a backdrop of some majestic, timber-covered mountain, wearing a red-plaid, flannel shirt tucked into blue jeans with suspenders, leaning on the handle of an enormous ax. I tried to imagine this fat, old pudgy man as healthy and whole and strong in the wild outdoors, braving the elements as he chopped down the towering giants with nothing but his broad axe.
But no, I could never really picture it, Larry huffing and puffing as he swung his ax over and over into some enormous cedar, wood chips flying wildly all around him, the trunk beginning to creak as it began fall… no way. But Larry routinely told us of those days with a stern pride. It got to be so common for him to mention it and so unlikely for it to be true that I thought maybe he was losing his mind and had just imagined it all. Phyllis never mentioned it. In any event, he seemed to want us to know that he was more than a broken down store manager, that at one time in his life he was a man to be reckoned with.
But, true or not, as the story went, it was those wilderness years as a lumberjack that had apparently caused Larry to have taken a fancy to visiting Glacier Park decades ago, and he and Phyllis had traveled every inch of it in an old RV (of which he still had a picture mounted in the store – it was a boxy model of RV called “The Executive,”) driving around with his family, until eventua
lly getting a seasonal job “to keep the moss from growing under my feet after I retired,” as he said.
He was now a man of limited vision, however; his world was inside this store, my new home, and his vision was one of accomplishing chores and tasks, and in turn deriding those who avoided accomplishing chores and tasks with the same drone-like determination, and finally avoiding those who couldn’t accomplish chores and tasks, and he liked bowling.
Also, he was the only person I had ever met who actually said he didn’t “care for music.” Phyllis for her part would continue to remain very quiet almost the entire summer, and she took a subservient back step to Larry whenever he was around. She was the silent partner in the management of the store, literally and figuratively, and seemed happiest in the kitchen where she was endlessly busy.
Larry was, I would come to find out, a very early riser and an early-to-bed goer. Also, despite his past trips to every corner of the vast expanse of Glacier Park, it was evident that he didn’t care for going out into the actual wilderness, and never ventured beyond the gravel foot paths that wandered through the nearby campsite. His “off to work we go” whistling attitude and his commonplace suburban lifestyle offended me once I got a sense of it, in the same way the cheap trinkets and stuffed animal grizzly bears in the front of the store offended me. They were grossly out of place in this wild Eden to which I had escaped, and for which I had risked it all.
