Dirt Work

by Christine Byl

  What I won’t miss: Stiff neck. 7 a.m. in the polyester uniform. Every night, making a lunch big enough to last a ten-hour day. Tourist questions. Being part of “the system.” Backing the trailer with the lift-gate truck. Bullshit paperwork. The constant odor of farts. Sandwiches that taste like saw gas. Picking up other people’s trash from the trucks. Editing rants while wearing green and gray. Twenty year olds who think they know everything. Realizing I could have done something better. Oblivious bosses. Sharing tools with people who take shitty care of them. Aiding development about which I feel ambivalent. Stale trail mix.

  Song of Ourselves (with apologies to Walt Whitman)

  I celebrate you guys, and toast you,

  And what you call a good day’s effort, I shall also,

  For every tool belonging to me as good belongs to you,

  And also my emergency Snickers, if you need it.

  I work and invite my soul,

  We sweat and eat at our ease observing the way the mountains look in this light.

  My tongue, every atom of my blood, honed in this soil, this air,

  Born here of my work, born here from your work, and all that work we do together,

  I, now thirty-eight years old in hard-to-complain-about health begin,

  Hoping to keep moving like we do—quick, at ease—till lunch break, at least.

  Alaska, in its abundance, taught me the meaning of enough. Berries at lunch break as far as I can reach without moving from my tundra nest. Berries in the evening after work’s done, berries on dog walks, on weekends when hours pass in rhythm (gather and pluck, eat and hoard), every spare minute near brush pulsing with flora’s urgent command: pick, pick, pick. Low-bush cranberries lasso the spectrum of red, the Yuletide hue made for door wreaths, the deep burgundy lit up from within. Blueberries plump with liquid sugar bring to mind nothing as much as bodies—curve of ass in tight jeans or the gorgeous, blackish swell of a healing bruise.

  Sometimes I feel like the apocryphal post-Soviet woman who had a nervous breakdown her first time in an American grocery store. Bounty can be paralyzing, the awful clench of how to choose and I’ll never get it all. The Tao Te Ching says, “There is no calamity like not knowing what is enough,” and so I’m slowly learning to note what I need, to be satisfied with what there is time for, not cowed by what I miss. There is so much enough; enough for the bears and my neighbors and the birds, enough for pies and pancakes and two batches of jam and a freezer stash, enough for a winy twinge in the air and the drop-and-rot that foments next decade’s humus.

  The biggest berries still catch my eye and my greedy fingers sometimes drop a handful reaching for one better, like Aesop’s dog on the bridge who sacrificed the bone in his mouth for the prize in his reflection. But I’m learning to quiet such urgent grasping, to move from one bush to the next with purpose. The same steadiness applies in the mountains. No need to climb them all, tick names off the list. There are plenty. I’m learning that abundance both dwarfs and ignites longing.

  Satiation—the ceasing of desire—is rare. We constantly defer a sense of completeness, clamoring after the next vacation, face cream, aerobics class, next president, appetizer, child. Desire is alluring, but satiation a subtler host, one that allows contentment to enter and linger. There is radical comfort in the heavy cloak of enough resting on my shoulders. Maybe this is what authentic feels like: Subtle. Heavy. Enough.

  In Alaska Native traditions, the earth provides for people, even in the skeptical modern age. Tlingit memoirist Ernestine Hayes writes in Blonde Indian, “Remember that the land is enspirited. It is quickened. When as you conduct your life . . . remember that it too is conducting its life, and it sees you as well. . . . The land loves you. She misses her children.” I used to think I could not speak of the earth this way. In my white mouth, it tasted of giddy romance, magical thinking. But something in me has shifted. When I kneel in a span of bushes spilling berries like a handful of marbles, I know that plants do not need humans as incentive to grow (though they evolve with us, their flowers bright to seduce our taste buds, seeds hitchhiking in our shit). I know Earth’s ecosystem is impassive, rain and sun without attachment to my jams, relish, muffins. Yet in the face of this knowledge, the world offers itself: here is the cranberry in snow, frozen with sweetness intact; fish hauled in, fistfuls of eggs in its belly. There is the summer sun, up all day, shining, and there is the winter night, tucked in around me when I crave long rest. It’s the skeptic’s guise in which I feel the most at home, but sometimes, the fit is ill. I can’t shake the feeling that I am being cared for, waking some mornings with light on my face before I have even begun to give my needs their names.

  Wildness is taking things back. Wild is giving it all away.

  I am a writer made by work. My sentences and stories are dictated by the body’s rhythms; by rain, wind, sun, dirt; by the smells of animals and engines, the feel of feet in boots, a tool in hand. Proximity to wilderness has given me analogy for the way story finds Spirit, that alchemy by which the known world merges with the unknown through effort, imagination, and being in the right place at any time at all. God bless manual labor, for my lungs and legs and my bank account and my friendships, and yes, for my mind, which wanders while I do my tasks, which tinkers while expectations wane, which, unwatched, partakes in that inexplicable sorcery: wind and sweat in a pot with idea and image, mix them until they bubble and steam.

  Dirt work is foundation work. On construction sites, dirt work happens before other work begins. Dig hole to examine layers. Is the soil well drained? How much rock? Excavate trough where sills will lay. Bury logs, build a berm, outslope so water will flow here, not there.

  Dirt work is easy to overlook, unless you’re the one doing it. Not everyone wants to: Don’t give me the dirt work, the shit job. But someone else steps forward: Dirt work is the best work. Give it to me.

  Dirt work is the last work. When the project is finished, the site plan complete, then dirt work resumes. Mound up mulch, scarify soil to prepare for seed. Push excess fill to edges, load it and truck it away. Smooth out tire tracks. Back drag windrows. Inslope the turn. Deepen the ditch line: water must flow there, not here.

  Dirt work is final. Dirt work is never done. No one can do all the dirt work. No one should do none. Dirt work is good work. Give it to me.

  Afterword

  Since I began this book, years have passed. People in these pages have moved on, things have changed, in Montana and Alaska both. And Gabe and I don’t work for the Park Service anymore. That era is past, partly our choice—eager for new challenges, out from under the watchful eye of the feds—and partly a sadder story, a book I haven’t written. It’s not easy to divulge that “America’s Best Idea” has a dark side, as subject as any corporation to the march of development, the ruses of ladder climbers, and the misuse of employees. Trust me, I’d rather talk about tools.

  Often, especially for seasonals, leaving a job means leaving a place. But Denali doesn’t belong to me via the NPS anymore. I belong to the place, via the claim made by time spent and things learned. Such changes have prompted a career that giddy girl in Glacier could never have foreseen. Done with the park, but somehow, still not done with trailwork, Gabe and I started a trails business, doing survey, design, training, and construction across Alaska. Running a business with a spouse when between us we have a nickel’s worth of business sense has been interesting. (To quote Paul Newman, “There are three rules for starting a business. Fortunately, we don’t know any of them.”) Recession aside, we’re paying bills due to the combinations that serve one well anywhere: sweat and patience, humility and confidence, good mentors, a little luck, very low overhead and duct tape. Shovels and machines bring home our paychecks. We keep on building bridges. So far, we’re too small to fail.

  Statewide work means travel, and between the busy field season and wintertime forays, I fee
l less rooted than in the NPS days. Still, Healy remains our home. Over the past few years, figuring out a way to stay, we moved out of our rental, built a tiny studio on our tundra, and in lieu of the house planned when the park job seemed permanent, put up a sixteen-foot yurt. Off the grid, we have a woodshed built of salvage, fenced raised beds, and a killer outhouse. The park, that old ground zero, feels like another world. We still end up in C-Camp occasionally, to bring the recycling, or poach a shower after a winter trip. When we drive past our old cabin, I think back to my first summer with fondness, introduction to a landscape, the edge of community, by way of a park entrance. There’s a swath cut through C-Camp now, a wider-than-it-needed-to-be road corridor leading to a bigger parking lot, the new trails shop I had to see to believe. Nothing stays the same. The old days always seem like the good ones. From far off, it’s easy to mistake rust for gold.

  As it turns out, to know a place is a tough and complicated goal. It means more than knowing all the hiking trails or where to get a cheap beer, what transplants learn first. In part, knowing a place means knowing its seasons and what indicates them: when the Sandhill cranes pass over on their way from Arctic to equator, when the cranberries ripen, which two weeks the wood frogs sing loud. Knowing when to put out the rainwater barrel because a hard freeze is unlikely, and when to harvest carrots because a hard freeze could come any time. Knowing a place means investing in it like you aren’t going anywhere, even if you might: volunteering at the library, going to community meetings, trying to find the owner of a lost dog. Knowing a place means knowing what I love (the smell of tundra plants in rain), what I hate (small-town gossip), and what has nothing to do with me (when the bears den up). Mostly it means tuning into a place beyond what it can offer. This takes daily effort, daily noticing. Annie Dillard says, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives,” and that’s exactly why a seasonal life can also be a permanent one.

  Looking back the sixteen years since I first showed up in a trails shop with new Carhartts and soft hands, I can see all those days stacked up like cordwood, built into months, and then years, and now, here it is, this hunch growing in me all along, Glacier, Cordova, Denali, and on: living somewhere doesn’t mean you know it, and a job alone doesn’t make a place a home. It takes work to do that.

  Traildogs’ Index:

  A Life in Statistics

  Seasons of trailwork: 16

  Parks/districts worked for: 3

  Pairs of work boots worn out: 5

  Peaks climbed in Glacier: 32

  Fingers broken: 2

  Cost of two hernia surgeries in 2007: ~$45,000

  Annual allowance for official NPS uniform in 2008: $115

  Rides out of a hitch on a horse or mule, in 6 seasons: 2

  Mules that had to be blown up after dying on the trail: 1

  Hands with carpal tunnel syndrome symptoms: 2

  Months to get carpal tunnel worker’s comp claim accepted: 4

  Peaks climbed in the Alaska Range (Inner and Outer): 10

  Gabe’s and my combined hours of unused NPS sick leave: 514

  Fastest time up Sperry Hill: 1 hour 45 minutes

  Longest one-way hike for work: 18 miles

  Number of times my saw nicked my chaps: 1

  Diameter of largest downfall bucked: 40 inches

  Rank of “fuck” and its forms on list of favorite trail crew cuss words: 1

  Range of hourly wage over twelve seasons and three employers: $12.12–$24.91

  Age of longest-worn item of trails clothing (gray Capilene shirt, cut-off sleeves): 14 years

  Percent discount most pro-purchase gear programs offer: 50%

  Percent of my technical clothing purchased on pro deals: 99%

  Capilene long underwear tops in current closet (all weights): 13

  Known cases of giardia: 6

  Largest one-day elevation gain (paid): 4,847 feet

  Maximum calories consumed in a workday: ~8,000

  Minimum respectable number of beers brought into a hitch: 1 per day

  Maximum respectable number of beers brought into a hitch: no upper limit

  Rank of Pabst Blue Ribbon on trail crew “favorite beer” list: 1

  Number of PBR fans in blind taste test who chose PBR as best of three beers: 0

  Search-and-rescue incidents participated in: 8

  Number of times missing person was found by my party: 1

  Pairs of shorts I own (including bike shorts): 5

  Pairs of boots I own (including ski boots): 20

  Lowest temperature I’ve felt in Interior Alaska: 68 degrees below zero

  Highest temperature I’ve felt in Interior Alaska: 91 degrees

  Minimum time to plug in engine block before starting truck at 20 below: 2 hours

  Gallons of wild berries harvested in a summer: 2–10

  Sockeye allotted on a household dip-netting permit: 30

  Average number of pint jars used to can one sockeye: 4

  Maximum price I’ve paid for a gallon of unleaded gas in Healy: $5.11

  Creek or river crossings the highway makes between Stampede and the park: 14

  Closest proximity of a moose to our cabin wall: 2 inches

  Most caribou seen on an afternoon ski: 30

  Months of year with wolf scat on back trail: 12

  Number of friends with 1–20 sled dogs: 15

  Number of friends in Healy with a heated garage: 2

  Acknowledgments

  I’ve worked with so many remarkable people. A cold beer to these standouts, who taught me skills and stories: Aric, Burke, Dundas, Frislie, Kenny G, Amy G, Eldon, Craig and Tim, Dan J, Rhonda, Kirby, Shelley, Casey, Stoney, Ric, Allan, Jillian, Oberg, Sethro, Corey, Allie, and Zastrow. High fives and a fist bump to all the crews: my tribe. Special thanks to Mike Shields, godfather of Alaska trails and a generous mentor. If it takes me twice as long to learn half as much, I’ll be lucky.

  This book is a communal story, but factual blunders and technical errors are thoroughly mine. Many anecdotes herein have twenty versions. Traildogs, if I poached your story, or got some detail wrong, I’m sorry. Such are the limits of oral history.

  Thanks to: Sherry Simpson for early conversations about dirt, Ron Spatz for stalwart belief. Linda McCarriston for modeling brave. Generous experts, for reading pieces: Charlie Reynar, Steve Haycox, Ernestine Hayes, and Carmen Adamyk. All the editors who published excerpts. Cheers!

  About Charlotte, E. B. White wrote, “It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer.” I’ve had way more than my share. For timely input, thanks to Cole Ruth, Angela Small, Susanna Sonnenberg, and Mark Temelko. Liz Bradfield was invaluable, reading far above and beyond, always with her poet’s sharp ear and generous heart.

  My family—Mom, Dad, Julia, Liz, Bill—has buoyed me with its highest confidence, modeling for me all manner of authentic lives. My nieflings keep me tuned to the future of this enthralling world. My large and boisterous extended clan is the best kind of family tree. Lane and Leslie gave me Gabe, and much more. Countless dear friendships have sustained me. So many shiny pennies: I’m rich.

  Thanks to the Alaska State Council on the Arts, the Rasmuson Foundation, the Headlands Center for the Arts, Vermont Studio Center, Breadloaf, and Fishtrap, arts lifelines all.

  Thanks to the shepherds: my agent, Janet Silver, who edits keenly, advocates wisely, laughs easily, and loves books. My patient, generous, and spirited editor, Alexis Rizzuto, whose own dirty hands bettered this work in many ways. Everyone at Beacon who helped this book emerge. I could not imagine a finer crew.

  From Willa Cather to Jim Harrison, Mardy Murie to James Welch, deeply emplaced writers influence me; a deep bow to that lineage. Grateful thanks also to independ
ent bookstores and those who help them thrive.

  All dirt work strives for solid grounding; Gabe Travis is mine, on hitch, at home and everywhere else. He has technical skill, a great ear, and a naturalist’s instinct for detail far surpassing my own (Get those ground squirrels out of the trees!). Thank you, my dear one, for every last thing.

  Finally, I owe so much to public libraries, public universities, and public lands. Three cheers for the many unsung patrons of the arts in this country, and the many tireless conservationists; without them, we’d all be a great deal farther up shit creek.

  Works Consulted

  Abbey, Edward. Desert Solitaire. New York: Ballantine, 1968.

  Armstrong, Robert H. Alaska’s Birds. Portland, OR: Alaska Northwest Books, 1994.

  Birkby, Robert C. Lightly On the Land: The SCA Trail Building and Maintenance Manual. Seattle: Mountaineers Books, 1996.

  Buchholtz, C. W. Man in Glacier. West Glacier, MT: Glacier Natural History Association, 1976.

  Edwards, J. Gordon. A Climber’s Guide to Glacier National Park. Guilford, CT: Falcon Publishing, 1995.