by John Hansen
He walked back over to the map of Glacier Park, pulling it down further from the rolled-up top. “The thing I like most about Glacier, guys, it that it has almost all its original native plant and animal species that it had when early Europeans explored I it – hundreds of years ago. When you’re out there hiking, you are in fact seeing land as it was a thousand years ago. Large mammals such as the grizzly, moose and mountain goat, and wolverine and lynx inhabit the park – you will see some of them before your summer is over.”
“But I want to specifically talk about the grizzlies tonight. Again, that is the main point of this safety talk, especially for you newbies. Each and every year people get mauled by bears in Glacier Park; on average 1 person dies from an attack each year in the park – mainly by female bears with cubs – but we’ll talk more about that in a minute. Let me first talk about what this animal is.”
He pulled down yet another large poster that unrolled from the wall, which depicted an image of a grizzly bear in profile. It struck me Greg would have made a good high-school science teacher, unabashedly enthusiastic about the simple wonders of nature – year after year of half-interested students never dulling his glee.
“The grizzly bear’s Latin name is Ursus Arctos Horribilis.”
Greg went on to describe how the word “grizzly” came from the word “grisly,” which “spoke for itself,” as he said. “Adult females weigh on average 500 pounds, and adult males average 800. A record size for a grizzly has actually been recorded at 1,500 pounds, and a large coastal male of this size may stand up to 10 feet tall on its hind legs and be up to 5 feet at the shoulder – a real monster.” Somebody whistled appreciatively from the back.
“They get that big on the coast because they have all the fish they can eat, most years. Females around here have 1 to 4 cubs in a birth, usually 2, and, like I said, they are the main problem in the Park as far as attacks are concerned. I’ve seen a full grown male push a small car on its side, so it’s not to be messed with people… but the attacks are usually females.
“These bears,” he continued, “like almost all animals in nature, will run away from the approach of people, and they try to avoid contact if at all possible. Basically we stay away from them, and they stay away from us.
“But sometimes you’ll get a bear that is different – that seeks out people, or more specifically, people’s food, people’s stuff, and those kind will not shy away from contact.”
I imagined a large bear pushing down our flimsy screened back door and nosing around in our kitchen – full of food and delicious smells – walking up the staircase to Larry’s room and devouring him in his sleep. I wondered what I would do if I encountered a bear on a trail deep in the woods. What can you do?
As if in response to my thoughts, Greg continued, “So, if you go hiking out into the forests and the higher elevations, you need to carry one of these.” He flipped a leather pouch open on his belt and pulled out a spray can with a large trigger and black nozzle on the end, which he pointed at us.
“Pepper spray,” he said, “is a hiker’s best friend. All rangers carry them because shooting a charging bear doesn’t’ stop it; and a bear’s sense of smell is extremely sensitive. A blast of this stuff will usually send them running – usually.”
He walked over to open door we had come in through and shot a stream of the stuff out into the night. I hoped there wasn’t some poor strangler coming in towards the door when he launched the red, misty powder out into the darkness.
“Also, we advise that you wear these,” he walked back in front of us and pulled out a leather necklace with two round metal bells hanging on it. “Bear bells.”
Some of the people laughed in the chairs, and Greg grinned good-naturedly. “I know they look stupid, and they sound like Santa is coming down the trail.” He shook them a couple of times to make his point. “But you can’t really walk up on a female bear with cubs if you are hiking with one of these around your neck – they’ll be long gone.
“They may be silly, but they will save your life.” He tossed them over to a table by the door. “If you don’t wear them, just try to clap a little now and then, or talk out loud to give the grizzlies some heads up. Just be noisy.”
He continued on for a while about mountain lions (you’d be lucky if you see one, but from a distance), snakes (which were rare too) white mountain goats (liked to lick antifreeze off the roads), and possible hazards like getting lost and being caught in a land slide, but he was soon finishing up.
He grew somber as he finished though, and he stopped pacing and faced us with a serious gaze. “You guys are in the most beautiful place the lower 48 has to offer – much less known, less traveled, than the other parks. The Rocky Mountains up here look different than anywhere else in the county.
“So you are lucky – this place is special. Take it in, spend time in deep woods and see what there is to see. Henry David Thoreau said, ‘Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.’ And that is nowhere truer than here in Glacier.”
He bowed dramatically, and we all clapped with amused appreciation, and there were even a couple of tongue-in-cheek shouts of “bravo!” and “encore!” He waived for us to quiet down and then thanked us and told us we were all free to go.
As people were shuffling out the door, he came over to Ronnie, Katie and I as we waited to get to the exit. “Listen guys, my wife and I work the station at Two Med, our little daughter’s there too. We’re a family at Two Med, and we like to take care of our own. So anything you need you let us know, ok? You guys have the best spot in Glacier, beautiful area!”
I smiled and thanked him, and said I planned on it. Ronnie, for his part, just nodded to him curtly as we left.
On our way down towards the car, Ronnie said to me, “You know Thoreau also said, ‘The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.’ That guy sounds like he’s doing just that, crammed up there in the ranger shack with his little wife and kid.” He spit at the ground as we walked.
“Why are you so critical of the guy?” I asked. “He seems decent enough… And I’m sure being a ranger up here is a better fucking job than most people have.”
Ronnie just grunted something and kept walking. Then he suddenly turned to me and said, “I never trust a cop, and neither should you.”
“Cop?” I asked. “Greg?” I laughed. “He’s like a big boy scout.”
“He’s a cop,” Ronnie said, shaking his head, “and just like the bears up here – they stay away from me, and I stay away from them.”
I didn’t know how to respond to that, but I didn’t really want to get into it right then. We had some time to kill before leaving, so we went down to the main lodge and went inside to look around out of curiosity. The main room at the lodge that I had stayed in my first night was a huge, cavernous, three-story lobby with enormous whole tree trucks acting as pillars keeping the roof up high above.
Ronnie wandered off to find someone he said he knew that worked there, and Katie and I idled at the display cases along the wall in the main lobby, which presented taxidermies of stuffed, furry, white mountain goats in one case, a brown bald eagle in another, and other unfortunate specimens posing for the visitors. I wondered as I looked at the goat if it had in fact licked antifreeze before its unfortunate demise.
I watched Katie as she watched the exhibits, and I tried, yet again, to get a sense of her mood, which was always difficult to say the least, it was like trying to read a map in the dark – she kept so much locked away from her face and eyes. She hadn’t said a word the entire night.
“Why so quiet?” I finally just asked her.
She glanced at me and then back to the mountain goat in the case. “I’m agoraphobic – don’t like crowds. I’d rather be in one of these cases than out with them,” she said, nodding over to the crowd at the check in desk.
I looked around at the people in the lobby, some were families, arranging their bags and parcels, others were older people milling through the restau
rant that was at one end. It was a crowd, definitely, and not one I wanted to see since it was tarnishing my feeling of being in the wilderness and was redefining what the idea of Glacier Park was to me each minute I spent in that buys commercial hub.
So I was working with Ronnie, the itinerant playboy, phobic of cops; and Katie, the mysterious ingénue, phobic of… everybody else it seemed.
Yet as I looked around at the big hotel I realized that I already missed Two Medicine, our quiet and remote wilderness home; and I decided we needed to get back sooner than later.
After a few minutes, Ronnie found Katie and I and said, “Hey guys, there some people hanging out near the dorms, behind the lodge, and they got a bonfire and some booze going. I say we check it out. What say you?”
Katie quickly objected, “Larry told us specifically to be back by no later than 5. He knows when the orientation is over.” She looked at me, as if seeking my assistance.
“Oh, don’t worry about that fat bastard,” Ronnie said. “He’ll be just fine. We’ll just tell him I got attacked by a bear or something... What do you say, Will?” He raised his eyebrows a couple of times at me.
I was a bit torn between a strong desire to resist Larry’s authority and break this feeling of ridiculousness which being under his command brought out in me, and a just as strong desire not to have him in my face when we get back, angrily lecturing us on the “rules of the road” as he was fond of saying, and yet another just as strong desire to not being around this big hotel any longer than I had to.
“We’ll catch hell, but I don’t really care,” I said, “but this place just bugs me – too garish. So I say we just go back. Ronnie, you can hang out here whenever you want.”
I looked at Katie, “If you want to get back, I’ll take you – we’ll catch a jammer.”
“If there is one this late,” Ronnie sighed, “look guys, there’s actually this girl out there I need to meet, and you guys are kinda crampin’ my style, you know? So…” He spread his hand out like a man next to broken-down Mercedes, reluctantly asking for a ride. “Can’t you help a brother out? I’ll make it up to you.”
Katie looked at me and then back to Ronnie, critically.
“Come on,” Ronnie pleaded. “I didn’t come up here just to sit in that log cabin like some kind of hermit – I came to meet some people. Didn’t you guys?”
Katie rolled her eyes. “She better be hotter than the last one.”
Ronnie slapped her on the back. “That’s the spirit!”
We walked down a pathway through some trees and past the main lodge to a large clearing near the staff dorms. There were about fifty people standing or sitting around a large roaring bonfire. Sparks and embers shot up above the flames high into the dark above our heads; it made the scene look primitive and wild. The sky was clear and very full of stars – I pictured meteors shooting across the field of stars and decided that it would be quite a sight out here, as Ronnie had mentioned.
There was a spot near the fire that the three of us wandered over to. Ronnie kept craning his neck around, looking for that girl apparently – although it seemed to me that he was in a rush, and more businesslike, tonight than simply looking for another love conquest. Nearby to the right of us, not too far from the fire, I saw a guy who was furiously playing a 12-string guitar, with most of the people ignoring it around him.
On the other side of us a little ways to the left was a big, muscle-bound guy in a cowboy hat sitting on the open tailgate of a pickup truck, next to small, blonde girl. She was laughing hysterically as the guy was saying something. He guzzled a beer and then tossed the can towards the fire, where it fell short by a few feet. Somebody from the crowd grumbled about that but the guy ignored it. He slid his arm around the blonde.
It was true what Greg had said – the whole scene had the look of a college dorm party, but there were a few post-college age people like me around, and also a strong influence of hippies and “granolas” – outdoor-types – that lent a kind of mottled and confusing atmosphere to the air.
Ronnie had gotten up and was soon chatting with a couple of people by the fire. I saw he had gotten a beer somewhere, and Katie was sitting by me with her knees up to her chest, just staring into the flames. She looked so distant that I got the impression that I shouldn’t disturb her, so I moved a little over to the group by the fire near the twelve-string guitar player for lack of any better option.
“We should turn the truck radio down for him,” a girl said to me as I sat down near her blanket. She nodded over to the guitar. “He’s being trying to put on a little show and everybody’s ignoring him.”
I glanced over to the truck with the cowboy, and then back to her. She looked about twenty-five, or even a bit older, had long, wavy, shockingly bright-red hair, and was sitting cross-legged with a beer bottle in the middle in between her legs. She had the light skin and freckles of a true redhead, with red-brown light eyebrows and hazel eyes. She was fairly attractive, but plain, and not as strikingly so as Holly the Redhead had been. I still reacted with wariness, nonetheless, as one would a red-colored snake that one had been trained to sense was probably dangerous to handle.
“That guy on the truck?” I asked her. “I don’t think he’s gonna turn that country music down anytime soon. He looks like he’d maybe grab the guitar and smash it.”
She laughed and offered me a beer.
“Do all of you guys here work at the lodge?” I asked.
“Yea,” she said. “We hang out here about every other night or so. There’s not a whole lot else to do. Where do you work?”
“Two Medicine.”
“Oh!” she said, raising her eyebrows. “Out there in the boondocks? It’s beautiful out there.”
“That it is,” I agreed.
I took a long sip of beer and looked around at the crowd. Mostly white and a few Native-American kids hanging around.
“I’m Bridget, by the way,” the redhead said, offering a hand.
“Will, and that’s Katie over there, sitting by herself, and Ronnie…” I looked around but couldn’t see Ronnie anywhere. “Well he’s here somewhere. The three of us run the store; you should come by and see us. Get yourself a coffee mug, or a keychain…”
“I’m actually a full time employee of the Park,” Bridget said, “and I work in the administration and I have a place in town, but my office just happens to be here at the lodge, so I like to hang out here with these goofballs.” She said tilted her head towards the fire.
“Definitely a random assortment,” I said. “White guys, cowboys, and Indians – guess nothing much has changed – like Greg said.”
Bridget laughed and nodded over to the pickup truck. “Everybody calls him ‘Cowboy,’ so I guess you’re right.”
The guy with the guitar, who had long hair and a thick Native-American-style beaded headband on, suddenly stopped playing and asked loudly, to no one in particular, “You guys wanna hear an original?”
Many of us who were chatting around him quieted down, out of an awkward politeness more than interest, and Bridget called out over to the truck, “Hey Cowboy! Turn the radio down for a sec and let him play one.”
The big Cowboy looked at the guitar guy for a moment as if considering whether it was worth it or not to get up and toss the guitar into the fire, then he frowned and heaved himself off of the tail gate and stomped over to the driver’s side door and reached in to shut the radio off.
The guitar kid smiled nervously at the attention he now had, even though a few groups were still talking among themselves here and there, and the fire was cracking and popping loudly. He suddenly blurted out, “This one’s called Twelve String Boogie!” and he began to feverishly playing tune that sounded like a blues song sped up to twelve times the speed that it should have been.
He was bending notes and pounding out chords frantically all over the guitar neck, and after about 30 seconds of it, a few of the kids around the fire resumed chatting over the guitar cacophony. As a final coup
de grace, Cowboy then got up again and switched on his radio again, turning it up even louder now. The boy kept plowing through the song with determination for a while.
Bridget turned back to me and shook her head, “Definitely a ‘random group.’ It’s like this every year. Keeps life interesting.”
I watched as Twelve String Boogie finished his song; someone handed him a beer.
“Keeping life interesting was what brought me here,” I murmured.
“She okay?” Bridget asked with a furrowed brow, pointing over at Katie.
“Yea, she’s fine,” I said, looking over at her; she was poking around in the fire with a long stick. “I barely even know her yet, but she’s just shy in crowds. This isn’t her kinda scene.”
“Is this your kind of scene?”
“I’d say probably not.” I looked around for Ronnie and spotted him on the edge of the crowd.
“I think I will come visit you guys at Two Med,” she said. “I’d like one of those huckleberry shakes you people make.”
I wondered if she was coming on to me, but it seemed like she was just being chummy. I didn’t get any warning bells from her tone.
“You got it,” I said. “Listen I gotta go talk to Ronnie, who’s my ride. If I don’t run into you again tonight, I’ll see you soon.”
I got up and stepped through the crowd and walked over to Ronnie, who was talking to two guys I hadn’t seen before. They were standing away from the main group by the fire. The two guys did not look like the college types, they looked like locals from Browning – from the reservation – it was just something you could tell, in their dress: which was shabby and poor, and their faces: angular, Asian, sullen. Long brown hair completed the image, and one of them wore mirror-finish, aviator sunglasses, even though it was the dead of night. They both turned and looked at me as I stepped up.
“Ronnie, what’s the plan man? We heading back soon?” I asked him.
