by James Perry
I had far more to fear from my fellow employees. I would often receive calls from the Resident Coordinators in the dorms asking for assistance in breaking up parties or hauling off kids who were having a bad drug experience. If I was lucky the party would have already broken up by the time I arrived, or the addled employee would have passed out and I would simply check to see if he was still breathing and then call the rangers. During my first season, however, there was a murder. It was the result of a fatally mismatched pair of roommates who decided to settle their score in the woods, with one bludgeoning the other to death, then heading for the hills. He was apprehended a few weeks later far from the Park, but for those few weeks he was the backcountry bogeyman, deterring employees from going on camping trips for fear that he would turn up in the night and bludgeon them in their sleeping bags.
During my second season I met Jim, a world traveler who was twice my age and had somehow washed ashore in Yellowstone as a fellow security guard. We would pass the prosy hours in conversation until dawn brought an end to our graveyard shifts. He held me rapt with his tales of working the Alaskan pipeline, slumming with hobos in Boston, living and working abroad. Articulate and inspiriting, he was to become my mentor for the next few years as we traveled together from Europe to Asia until he dismissed me as a boring Francophile while touting the pleasures of the East. Bangkok, to be precise. Pat Pong district, to be more so. His communiqués left little doubt that he thought the Park was for the birds.
But enough about Jim. I've already written his book. This book is for Yellowstone.
Resident Coordinator
I QUIT during my third season. I’d been hired as a Resident Coordinator, responsible for keeping the employee dormitories clean and quiet, vacuuming and handing out rolls of toilet paper. Socially, it was a step up from Night Security, but with less pay. During the early part of the season when buses full of employees were arriving daily we would often be detained from taking our meals in order to check-in the new arrivals. After this happened three or four times my supervisor, Bobbi, called to apologize for the extra hours.
“I don’t mind,” I said cheerily. “As long as I’m getting paid for it.”
There was a pause.
“Well…you’re not,” she said.
“What do you mean I’m not?”
“It’s considered part of your job,” she explained.
“Then I should be paid for it,” I reasoned aloud.
“It’s part of your job,” she said firmly.
“Look, I’m not working for free,” I said, and receiving no response at the other end, added, “I’m going to dinner.”
Her voice returned, alarmed.
“We’ve got buses coming in!”
“Then you’d better get over here,” I said.
I hung up and phoned the other RC’s to let them know that they were now working for free. All of them put on their jackets and left for dinner. About halfway through the meal Bobbi came into the employee dining room and charged up to the table where all the RC’s were gathered.
“I’ve taken care of all the check-ins,” she said breathlessly. Then, fixing her glare on me she added, “I’ve left a list of things you need to do on your desk.”
It was a bitch-list: scrub out the garbage cans, wipe down the baseboards in the hallway, rewrite the resident lists, etc. etc. Employee-management relations were strained for several days, but the RC’s remained firm. Minimum wage was one thing, no wage was quite another. Unable to cow us with extra work (during the hours we were actually getting paid), or with guilt (“There’s too many people for me to check in by myself!”), Bobbi called her superiors in Mammoth, and they sent down Patti. Patti was a tall, spindling woman who gave the impression of being somehow hurt by our request for wages. She sat us all down at a table on the third floor of the Inn and promised that we would naturally be compensated for the extra work…later. Right now it just wasn’t in the budget to pay us for all these extra hours. If we would only show some patience for a couple of months while things got settled around the Park we would be paid for our time and then some, but let us work together as a team and do the job at hand and hear no more of this unpleasant business. Agreed?
Agreed.
August. Things having settled into a pretty regular routine, we decided to ask for our bonuses. The word came back from Mammoth: Patti says she doesn’t recall ever making any such promise.
There are moments, like the one following this revelation, when you know that a line has been crossed. The world of innocence slips a little further off the map while something else, something disturbing, takes its place. At once you feel both the need to protest and the futility of it. In a matter of days I was packed and back on the road, driving across summertime America on my way home. Hi mom, mind if I crash here awhile? Thanks.
It all began as an adventure and an escape and it ended abruptly with my resignation. It wasn’t a traumatic event. I simply went on with my life. I even took the opportunity to travel around the world. I don’t think that I would have considered working in Yellowstone again except that two years after I left the Park it was caught up in a huge conflagration that attracted the attention of the media and threw my old stomping grounds on the nightly news. The fires of ‘88 made the Park impossible to ignore, and I began to feel the pull of the West again. I felt that Yellowstone was ailing and, being a friend, I needed to be at her bedside.
Pubtender
WHEN I reapplied for a job in Yellowstone after an absence of two years I was offered a job making beds. Luckily I still had a few friends hanging around the Park and one of them happened to work in the Personnel Department at Mammoth. Molly told me to tear up the Housekeeping contract I'd been sent and to wait for another contract which she would mail out in a few days. She sent me a contract for Pubtender at Grant Village, serving beer and making nachos at the employee pub.
Molly had a good heart, and she was looking out for me, but the company was trying to mold her into one of their own. The results were predictable. Soon after my arrival, as Molly was driving to work along the Gardner River one morning, she found herself debating whether to continue up the hill to work or drive her car off the cliff into the boulder-strewn river below. She decided to quit instead.
Yellowstone attracts many employees because of its unspoiled beauty and the promise of a natural experience, but the company has a different mission; to create and increase profit. Every now and then the company fails to properly indoctrinate these new recruits, falls short in weaning them away from concern for the welfare of the Park and toward welfare for the rich, with the result that some of these youngsters recoil in disgust and escape - or end up in the river.
One of Molly's last acts before leaving the Park - securing a sinecure for me - was an altruistic one. It was, then, an act of rebellion against her corporate masters.
Grant Village is the most hated location in Yellowstone. It's situated on a beautiful curve of Yellowstone Lake known as West Thumb, close to thermal features and sporting a sublime view of unspoiled shoreline and mountains. It was also built in the middle of some of the most sensitive grizzly habitat in Yellowstone, close to several important cutthroat trout spawning streams where grizzlies take much of their spring nourishment, and only two miles from an already developed area. Grant Village was built with the understanding that another location, Fishing Bridge, would be closed. The idea being that there would be zero net growth as far as development in the Park was concerned. But Fishing Bridge never did close and Grant Village simply took its place among Park villages like an obnoxious, uninvited guest. Thus its moniker - The Mistake on the Lake.
This was new territory for me. I'd come from Old Faithful, which is regarded by employees at other locations the way New York City is regarded by the rest of America; with envy and loathing. Employees who didn't work at Old Faithful would often tell me that they wouldn't work there - too crowded, ugly, overbuilt, overrated and so on - while singing the praises of their locatio
ns. Having come from the Big Yellow Apple myself I was forced to listen to a lot of this crap, but the place turned out to be a good fit for me. Grant Village was a small location, and far from the corporate officialdom of Mammoth. There were no geysers or waterfalls to be photographed here, no historic Inns or horseback rides. It was just a quiet spot on the unfashionable thumb of Yellowstone Lake. Tourists would drop off their luggage at one of the nondescript hotels and then leave to see the Park. There was nothing to keep them here. It meant that Grant Village, perhaps more than any other location in the Park, belonged to its employees.
The employee pub however, was a dump. Brand new, it looked from the outside like a corrugated tin warehouse and from the inside like a high school cafeteria with garish pink and blue neon ceiling lights and plastic signs which spelled out the company rules. After a few days the employees began to complain about its lack of atmosphere. One of them made the trenchant observation that "You come into this place and it's just four white walls with signs that say 'No! No! No!'" The Food and Beverage manager, a wholesome southerner who saw the pub as a necessary evil, was adamant in her refusal to allow any alteration to its spartan lack of appeal. The employees simply took matters into their own hands and showed up one night armed with crayons and grease pencils, marking the austere walls with graffiti, street art and - for the less artistically inclined - anti-establishment squiggles.
"I hope you don't get in trouble for this," they said. "But Jesus this place is so grim."
I didn't care. I sat on the bar and blew smoke rings while the carnage went on. I knew I'd be called in to the office when word got out about the damage to company property, but a little voice inside my head kept saying, Forget it, Jake. This is Grant Village.
Squatters in Paradise
YELLOWSTONE employees, when anyone bothers to write about us, are generally portrayed as cheery bumpkins awash in the splendor of our summer home, as in this passage from Cal Glover’s A Grizzly Death in Yellowstone:
Then there are the young people who come here to mix work with pleasure. Free, away from home, setting their own rules, experiencing life with a revived exuberance, a charged youthful vibrance. They will work hard eight hours a day in their new summer jobs before hiking around the geyser basin at sunset, or going to Observation Point, or maybe visiting Hamilton’s for a milkshake or a cold beer.
Or this inside look at my ilk, provided by Joyce B. Lohse in A Yellowstone Savage:
Occasionally, campfire gatherings were organized and all employees were invited. A campfire would be built in the hills and we would gather to share fellowship, songs, and laughter. As the sweet smell of Mother Nature wafted up with the smoke of the campfire, we were enveloped in a clannish mood of good feelings.
Gosh. Do we hold hands and sing koombaya, too?
The truth about us employees is far more complex and disreputable than any such dismissive account (we're not nicknamed savages for nothing). We are as varied as the places we come from. We make the Park work. But to those who employ us, who are responsible for galvanizing us into a workforce, and to the rangers who see the other side of our lives outside of work, we are the Park’s dirty little secret.
Hiking takes a distant second to the preferred recreational activity among employees, which is drinking. And since the advent of the portable, affordable satellite dish - which has been sprouting around the employee dorms lately like a noxious weed - enjoying the outdoors is in danger of falling to third place.
[OK, here's my 5-minute lecture: there's something creepy about television. I watched the movie Ordinary People on the tube not too long ago, which I had already seen several times and count among my favorites. There is a scene which takes place in the psychiatrist's office where a troubled teen, played by Timothy Hutton, has an angry outburst and screams at his analyst, "You wanna know what I think? I think you have a fat, ugly wife and you go home every night and fuck her brains out!" In the televised version, the last part of this outburst was changed to "and beat her brains out!" Evidently, the standards of American media deem it more acceptable to beat your wife than to make love to her. Don't get me wrong - I’m not a Luddite. I’m not going to take a sledgehammer to the metal monsters that bring sit-coms to Yellowstone, but I do resent their presence as being antithetical to the alternative lifestyle I’ve come to enjoy here. With so much time on our hands outside of work without any mindless entertainment to keep us on our derrieres, we tend to lead interesting lives. Weekends are spent partying, road-tripping, swimming, hot-potting, rafting, fishing, and being chased around by wild and humorless animals. In short, enjoying life. My greatest fear is that we’ll become as uninteresting as Mr. Glover’s portrayal, except that instead of hiking the geyser basin at sunset, “…the youngsters will return to their simple but comfortable dormitory rooms to watch reruns of Touched by an Angel.” Shoot me now.]
Sometimes our lifestyle runs counter to the law, as with drug use. But the managers are not drug-enforcement officials, nor do they want to be, and they usually allow the issue to pass with the simple caveat, “There are 2.2 million acres in Yellowstone; use them wisely.” Most of the problems occur with the legal drugs anyway, as when drunken employees get into fights at the pub or try to prove their manhood by facing off with Mother Nature (“Yeah, Frankie! You get on that buffalo! You ride that bad boy! You da man! You da… Oh shit!”). Chalk it up to youthful exuberance. Mouseketeers we are not. More to the point, if the company really wanted a professional staff (as they profess) they would be paying a decent wage. Instead they prefer to hire planeloads of Eastern Europeans and Asians who work hard and come cheap and won’t quit after seeing their first paycheck. It’s corporate and it’s cynical, but at least it’s an improvement over their former policy of busing winos from the Salt Lake City missions in order to plug the holes late in the season. Cynical, yes, but it follows an age-old tradition here in the West.
Western entrepreneurs have long known where to look for men who might be willing to leave the confines of civilization to strike out into the unknown, facing Indians, madness, wild animals and possible death. They went to the saloons. For the price of a few rounds of drinks a man could cobble together an expedition in a single evening. All he needed was a little money up front and a silver tongue. As Charles M. Russell wrote:
In the old times, when the world had lots of wild countries and some brave explorer wanted men to go up agin danger and maybe starvation, he don't go to the fireside of home lovers; he finds the toughest street in a town where there's music, booze, and lots of fighters - he ain't lookin' for pets. When he steps in this joint, he walks to the bar and asks them all up. He don't bar nobody, not even the bartender. He starts with making a good feller of himself. This sport don't ask nobody who he is, but while he's buyin' drinks he's telling about others that has gone to these countries and come back with gold in every pocket, an' it ain't long till all have signed up and joined. If there's any danger of them weakening, he keeps them drunk. There's been many a man that got drunk in St. Louis, and when he comes to out of this debauch he's hundreds of miles up the Missouri, on a line dragging a boat loaded with trade goods for the Injun country. If he turns back he's liable to bump into war parties, so he stays. This game is played on sailor, woods and river men. Cowpunchers were of the same kind of goods - all careless, homeless, hard-drinking men.
I won’t say that every tinhorn hustler and cat's paw who shows up in these parts belongs here, but those of us who put up with the company and put off our “real” lives for love of the Park, although we may feel like squatters in paradise, are the ones who own the place more than anyone else.
First Winter
YELLOWSTONE is different in the winter. It’s a more relaxed work environment. There’s a real sense of community among the small staff. It’s fun… These are some of the terrible lies that were told me before I worked my first winter in the Park.
From the moment I was driven into the heart of Yellowstone aboard a freezing snowcoach on a
gray December day with snow blowing in the wind, I felt trapped. I was trapped. We were dropped off at Old Faithful and would not see the outside world for three solid months. Employees didn't have snowmobiles - which were generally regarded as loud, filthy machines which brought "bubbleheads" into the Park - and snowcoaches were available on a space-available basis only. These latter vehicles only plied the roads within the Park anyway, going no further than the border communities of Flagg Ranch and West Yellowstone; humble outposts in the best of times. For most of the winter, employees would be confined within what was sardonically called The Triangle; three points which referred to the dorm, the workplace, and the pub. Beyond that was the inhospitable natural world, white in tooth and claw.
We skied everywhere. It was the most efficient means of non-motorized transport, and the effort it took to keep a rhythm going was enough to keep our bodies warm even during the coldest of mornings. The only part of my body that suffered from the elements was the lower half of my face, and when I arrived at work after a few minutes of brisk skiing from the dorm I wouldn’t be able to talk intelligibly for a good ten minutes until my jaw thawed out. People with beards would show up at the door with rosy cheeks and icicles hanging off their chins. On those seriously cold mornings when the mercury would huddle in the bowl of the thermostat we would entertain ourselves by taking cups of hot coffee outside and throwing the contents into the air, then watching as the liquid vaporized into a brown cloud. It was on one of these severe mornings that I saw Old Faithful freeze. I wanted a picture of the geyser in winter and was willing to wait it out. The thermally heated ground prevented any snow from accumulating on Geyser Hill so I left my skis at the visitor center and walked to the viewing area, stomping around in my boots to keep warm. When the eruption came at last it looked twice as big as it did in the summer as the superheated water touched the bitter cold air and the steam expanded like a genie billowing out of a magic lamp. It was then that I noticed the sound of breaking glass. Another moment and I realized that what I was hearing were chunks of ice crashing to the ground from a great height; the boiling water was freezing in mid-air and shattering on impact around the base of the geyser. I could see individual jets shooting out of the clouds of steam like comets with smoking tails, arcing gracefully to the ground where they splintered. The extremes of hot and cold meeting in a beautiful and violent dance.