Dirt Work

by Christine Byl

  Things changed daily. New reveg sites took priority over old ones. We ran out of mulch. Brakes went out, the power takeoff on the dump truck shit the bed, a rolled skid steer incited a safety shakedown. With complex logistics and a tight timetable, each day required innovative thinking and a ready store of cuss words to surmount inevitable glitches. Hurdles notwithstanding, it was great fun for those with a thing for big machines and playing in mud (most traildogs). Although I wasn’t licensed to legally drive the Cat or the twelve-yard dump trucks, Nic schooled me on the sly on airbrakes and bucket controls. In the woods well out of sight, I lurched around in a twenty-ton machine like a giddy bull in a deserted china shop.

  The project’s end brought resounding success. We moved and transplanted over a square mile of tundra, the largest known such operation in the state. (Regrowth two years later at 80 percent.) The bike trail and the VC looked spit-shined and the finished product silenced the critics who thought we’d bitten off more than we could chew. Even the road crew, the guys who bemoaned us novices—a bunch of wing nuts borrowing their trucks, who forgot hard hats, traffic vests, seatbelts, safety glasses, those kids who ran back and forth on the job site—even they had to admit we done good. And the boss? Ralph leans back in his desk chair, arms in the air. He gets out of the office far less than he did when the project started, but that doesn’t mean he won’t get his share of the credit: “I told you we could do it!”

  As always, new tasks meant new vocabulary. Large-scale mechanized trailwork brought with it the diction of road building. Who knew there were so many kinds of gravel? Pit run, aggregate, screened, three-quarter-inch minus, D-1, trail mix, washed, fine. And the trucks gravel comes in: ten-yard, five-yard, end dump, belly dump, side dump, some with a “pup” trailer pulled behind. Using heavy equipment meant hauling heavy equipment, and there were words for trailering (itself a new verb): tilt top, ball hitch, ratchet strap, low boy, chain binder. The words for trails mixed with the words for road and construction-site work until language blended into one fluid mass, and a shift happened: we traildogs seemed less the blue-collar cousins of rangers and more the woodsy siblings of trade laborers. The old rule, brought from Glacier’s barn to Cordova’s harbor to Denali’s yard, held true: the only way to enter a new world without humiliation or offense was to keep ears open and mouth shut. Quiet is better than stupid.

  Nicknames ruled the crew’s roster. It began with Alec, the crew leader from Rocky hired on with Gabe and me. He was an übercompetent traildog, the biggest goofball either of us had ever met on a job, an able mountain partner, and soon enough, a dear friend. Two days into the season, he admitted that his distinguished name, Alec, had long earlier been replaced with “Krusty” because of clownish antics and some unrepeatable high school legend involving his underwear. Krusty set the bar low and nicknames proliferated. Nic, the oldest of us, and an incorrigible womanizer, became Dirty Uncle Nic. Evan Owens had a puff of blond hair that went fuzzy in the slightest heat; we called him “Frowens.” (His wife called him “fucking Owens,” with great tenderness.) Pretty dark-haired Mara nicknamed herself “Elvis”—with her full lips and wide-set eyes, well, you could see what she meant. Felipe was “Flip,” the biggest wiseass of us all (which was saying something). Jack Roderick came with the nickname “Nice Guy Jack” because of his affable way, but the new job let him rechristen himself and he chose “The Rod,” whose irony he savored for its anti-nice-guy bluster. Gabe went from Gaberiferous, to Riferous, to Gaber, and me, well, nothing sticks, so anything goes. Nic called me a number of standards—Stretch, Throttle, sister, Trouble, woman (earning a punch in the gut). For any “lady” on the site, Nic used Gretchen, Matilda, Henrietta: whatever old-fashioned name came fastest to mind. Conventional wisdom says you can’t choose your own nickname, and the more you resist one, the longer it’ll stick. Krusty, like it or not, will have his for life. Even his mom back east goes, halfheartedly, by Mama Krust.

  Of course, it was different. Glacier, eight-day backcountry hitches, with six days off; Denali, four ten-hour workdays, three-day weekends. Glacier, a modern two-bedroom we spent little time in; Denali, a one-room cabin without running water that we came home to every night. Glacier had one million acres with trails crisscrossing every USGS map quad; Denali had six million acres nearly void of constructed trails.

  In Montana, we’d commuted half an hour from the park to town for staples; in Denali it was a two-hour drive north to the nearest grocery store. Glacier saw one million visitors in six months; Denali had four hundred thousand visitors all year. No more salty mule packers and telemarking stoners; now we had truck drivers and stoners on four-wheelers. Glacier, hand tools and familiar, backbreaking tasks; Denali, heavy equipment and a new challenge every day. Who could separate the rewards from the drawbacks after a while?

  The Denali trails shop is a conglomerate of slapdash structures salvaged, borrowed, begged from other worlds. The power tools, workbench, and rehandling station occupy a dusty metal shipping container, the omnipresent Alaska building-in-a-pinch (commonly referred to as a Conex after the trade name emblazoned on its side). The saw shed is a plywood shack that contains chainsaws and their tack, a cabinet full of Griphoists, block and tackle, winches, and come-alongs. The walls are lined with miscellany: haul chains, tow straps, forty kinds of fasteners (carriage bolts, turnbuckles, all-thread). Then there’s a passel of poorly organized safety gear: a metal trash can full of brain buckets, caution tape, orange vests, and traffic signs. A long, brown building with a rotting front porch holds traditional trails hand tools, hung in racks by their heads. Broken tools lean in a corner, awaiting someone on light duty.

  Rumors of a new shop persisted. Ralph alluded to it. We helped clear the site (more tundra to transplant), but despite blueprint on the wall, I’d believe it when I saw it. What would we do with a brand-new shop, anyway? Who needed a concrete slab free of oil stains, unmarred drywall? A conference room, or God forbid, an ice machine? How on earth could we remain true to our grimy underdog status in a glossy shop, the structural version of new Carhartts? We borrowed tools and space from everyone else—a garage from the utilities crew, table saw from the carpenters, drill press and welding bay in the auto shop—and maybe they would have rather we stayed out of their way. But the back corner suited us, rusted and warped, falling down, out of sight, where we could thrive on getting things done however it worked: borrow, stretch, invent, replicate, brace, scrounge, reinforce, weld. Return. Repeat.

  Back and forth from grad school to woodswork, my vocabulary changed. In cusp months—May, September—I used the wrong words in the wrong settings. My raunchy trails mouth carried over to the first sessions of fiction workshop when I was tempted to write on manuscripts, “This is total bullshit,” and while vernacular does make for vivid writing, I couldn’t pretend that “fucking awesome” was a useful phrase for discussing aesthetics. By the time months of school passed and art openings and poetry readings had given me more appropriate language for scholarly discourse, I’d be back to work again, explaining to my crew that the season’s project would require a “paradigm shift,” and parsing the ubiquitous grammatical errors in NPS memos.

  It’s true that some academics swear and some seasonal laborers have killer vocabularies, but the linguistic well I draw from in each arena tastes of different minerals. This necessity of dialect is satisfying, the way diction gets woven in with the spirit of the endeavor. There’s no language bond like looking at a finished piece of trailwork and slapping your crew high fives with a “hell yeah!” just as there’s true pleasure in crafting well-turned arguments and hearing the ring of complicated syntax. I like hauling up these opposite buckets; the challenge, when both modes are intuitive, is to blend them ably, to use the right words in the right contexts, to consider audience, intent, relationship. In each realm, a quote from the opposite one guides me. For trails situations, pithy writing advice helps translate wordy directions: “Say it plain.” When i
n academia, a trails favorite is a good mantra: “Obscenity is the crutch of the illiterate motherfucker.”

  A ninety-one-mile road cleaves Denali’s northeastern corner, the only developed road corridor within six million acres. Beginning at the north entrance and terminating just east of Wonder Lake at the old mining settlement of Kantishna, the mostly gravel thoroughfare weaves over passes and across river bars, paralleling the Alaska Range through some of the wildest country it is possible to enter by road vehicle. And with few exceptions (researchers, permitted photographers, park staff) that vehicle is a bus. Private traffic is prohibited beyond the initial fifteen-mile stretch, leaving visitors these options: an interpretive tour bus for packaged cruisers who want to stay put, a shuttle bus for visitors who want to get on and off, and a camper bus for backcountry users who just want to get out.

  Traffic on the park road has been managed this way since 1972, when the completion of the George Parks Highway connecting Anchorage and Fairbanks doubled visitation to the previously remote area in just one year. In the forty-some years since, tourism has morphed from large-scale to supersized, and it is only because of foresight and a road plan that Denali’s wildlife remains relatively unharassed and its visitors’ experience enhanced. As I write this, park management is proposing more-lenient road capacity parameters under pressure from tourist-industry big guns and the constant march toward growth: more buses, more rest areas, more access, more exceptions, more.

  As a ranger at Arches in 1968, Edward Abbey lobbied to halt all road construction in national parks, and to make existing roads accessible only by foot, bicycle, or shuttle (his concession to children, the elderly, and the disabled). Abbey’s hope has clearly not come to pass; development in parks has exponentially increased since his death in 1989. Now the norm is the Going-to-the-Sun Highway in Glacier, choked in summer with bumper-to-bumper traffic and mountain goats licking antifreeze in sweltering parking lots, or the Valley in Yosemite, where a line of glistening autos flows at the base of the big walls like a metal river. Amid the grim realities of a burdened national park system and a public obsessed with the private vehicle, Denali’s progressive road policy is a respite. To properly honor Edward Abbey, though, I should not use his name in the same paragraph as the phrase “policy is a respite.” Abbey would probably say that policy talk is a respite for small and fearful minds. Though Denali’s road is far better than many, I know that for Abbey, this is still too much. And though I love getting out into the park quickly, I know what I’m trading. When I tuck my monkey wrench into my pocket, I wince.

  Some type of bus, or a cluster of them, passes any point on the road approximately every seven minutes. This is not the pinnacle of pristine, but it is amazing how different it feels than the usual road-bound park experience. No private cars means no parking lots outside of rest areas. No parking lots means no trailheads, and no trailheads means no throngs happily trudging in the same direction. Between buses, after the engine grinds away and leaves you behind, you hear water flowing, or notice the direction of the wind. It’s possible, for six minutes, to imagine what it was like here before there was a road, and what it will be like someday, after the road is gone. Once off the bus, you can day-hike anywhere. With a backcountry permit, you can go anywhere and then farther. If, miles out, you turn back toward the band of road where you started, you may be able to pick out a green bus passing, a cloud of dust. But as the quiet draws you in and your route coaxes you forward, you’ll forget about the buses. Until you reappear on the road’s shoulder to wave down a ride two hours or five days or three weeks later, they’ll forget about you.

  Minimized traffic protects the visitor experience, but most important, it protects animals, allowing the creatures along the road corridor a semblance of ordinary life. Bears and wolves cross ditch lines, gyrfalcons and rough-legged hawks nest along the cliffs. From a bus on the park road, I have seen a father wolf regurgitating bits of carcass into the mouths of its five pups while the mother lounged in the brush; a bear running upstream in the Toklat River, current pouring over its shoulders; two grizzly cubs in a pullout batting at a traffic pylon; a heavy-antlered moose head breaking the surface of a kettle pond; three jaegers in jet-fighter formation; a wolf pair dividing and conquering a caribou herd, finally picking off the smallest, weakest calf that couldn’t run quite fast enough; a fox with a rodent’s head in its mouth. Others have seen a bear take down a moose in a river swollen with runoff, a wolf and a bear jockeying over a caribou carcass, a mama bear and three cubs sliding down snowfields, a boreal owl clip a snowshoe hare. On the bus, kids turn from their video games and iPods and watch. It’s like a nature show, whispers a man from Ohio. Cynics gape. Stoics smile. Loudmouths go quiet, except for one loudmouth announcing how amazing it is.

  The Denali road system isn’t perfect; as the NPS caves more frequently to corporate tourism, there’s great risk that small concessions—to capacity, frequency, cost—will have large repercussions on animal and human communities. Denali’s bigwigs reexamine road policy under great pressure from the tourist industry to increase the number of buses allowed on the road per day. But it seems probable that Denali has avoided Yosemite’s fate. The optimist in me hopes that people will always have the good sense to protect this place, and feels lucky for what I’ve received here. The pessimist in me knows that eventually, we kill what we love. The pragmatist in me hands the driver my ticket, takes a seat by the window, and watches, for new owlets in a nest above Igloo Creek, for bears on the braided Teklanika River bar, for the Toklat pack’s wolf pups, chasing their own tails, not yet watching for me.

  Speaking of wildlife. The first ten minutes in a Bobcat are awkward. The steering handles—or joystick on newer machines—feel strange. The cockpit is cramped. The foot pedals for bucket control are sensitive and prone to accidental activation by an errant boot (Gabe’s size 12.5 monsters barely fit upright). Early on, the Bobcat bucks like a mechanical bull with all but the most tentative acceleration. But give it half an hour. By then, you can rocket across the yard, do wheelies, spin 360s, screech to halt. Drive into the sand pile at top speed and mound the bucket heavy, level the load, dump it on a dime.

  The best way to learn to run a machine is from a cocky guy who’s lived in Alaska for thirty-odd years, who’s worked out west, on the Slope, for the mine, up north, on the ice, building the pipeline, the highway, on a fishing boat, for the union. Watch when he drives: where he flicks his wrist, not his arm, how he grips the throttle, loose, like a baseball bat in a pro’s hand, not white-knuckled, like yours. Listen to what he says: Grease the zerks. Did you check the plug? Split your tracks. Make a windrow. Feather it. If you don’t know what he’s talking about, listen longer. He’ll say it again. Bite your tongue when he calls you honey, sugar, or sweet cakes. He’s kidding (mostly). Don’t be defensive when he says you’re slow, the bucket isn’t full enough, you forgot to throttle up before you lifted the arms, you’re doing it all wrong. He’s right. You are. Don’t tell him when you accidentally put unleaded into the gas tank instead of diesel and bugger up the works. Take a deep breath. Change out the fuel filter. Bleed the lines. Believe it: someday you’ll do it right. Then he’ll tell you, Way to go, honey!

  Midsummer, my crew went west, out to the Wonder Lake gypsy camp at the end of the road. Five of us hitched out to work on a handful of trails between Eilson visitor center and the Wonder Lake campground. These stints were a welcome break from front-country Bobcat-dependent work. I was eager for a work site on steep tundra slopes in full view of Denali’s north face. Eager for tread work, the familiar twist of a wooden handle in my palm, the grunt of moving heavy things, the intricate pieced-together pride of rock steps and walls battered against hikers’ boots and winter’s weight.

  Owens was the west-end crew leader, I his second-in-command. He’d been around Denali several summers and the logistics were all new to me, so I was relieved to follow his lead. Following Owens’s lead was a hell of
a ride. He talked a mile a minute, contradicted himself, interrupted, and gave us all (especially Chip) a rash of shit. Owens was generous: he shared his prized family recipe for smoked salmon, made us biscuits and gravy on the last morning of each hitch, and would offer the shirt off his back. And Owens loved to rant. It was less tendency, more full-on hobby. He had stronger opinions than an AM radio shock jockey and once he got started, his stream-of-consciousness monologues kept him as wired as a handful of amphetamines.

  To shitty drivers on the park road: Don’t even try it, pal, I’ve got the right-of-way, seriously, do people think this is the fuckin’ Autobahn with bears? Turn on your lights, jack-off! On the federal government, particularly then-president W and his minions: Unbe-fucking-lievable, bunch a idiots, who voted for that moron, they deserve it, that’s all they can think to do is elect him again, I oughta move to Timbuktu, Canada’s not far enough. His most vigorous steam was saved for “the bus” out on Stampede Road, and anything to do with it, including Jon Krakauer, tourists on pilgrimages, and rich kids with poor judgment: Goddamn Alexander Supercreep or whatever his name is, what a dumb bastard, Into the Wild, my ass, he died for Chrissake, we oughta blow that bus up before it turns into a monument! Every rant eventually included his favorite expression of disbelief: “I mean Jeee-sus!” Owens moved away for a job Outside, but the phrase remained, homage to his blue-ribbon crankiness, a brand of loveable ornery we’d be lucky if we ever saw again.

  The Denali gang was dirty. Dirty uniforms, dirty trucks, a filthy break room, packs that look like they’d been dragged behind the loader, nasty mouths, lunch boxes caked in mud. Four or five people had gas that could clear a room in seconds. Alongside physical filth, sexual innuendo was constant. I learned more explicit slang in three months than I knew in my previous twenty-nine years, and I never considered myself naïve. Any reference to length in inches elicited jokes about penis size. Ordinary words like “box” and “come” earned guffaws even if they were used four times in two minutes. It is sort of funny, the looming double entendre that yanks you to your toes, the sparring that keeps conversation interesting, but also exhausting, as when you gesture at a two-by-four and say “How long is that?” hoping for some answer beside “Longer than his.”