by James Perry
As the season progressed, The Triangle became smaller and smaller. We became sick of seeing the same faces day after day. The lack of privacy. The cold. People would sit in their rooms and watch the snow falling outside their windows for hours. There were fights in the pub. Alcoholism was rampant. Little things irritated us. I began to understand the murderous motivations of Margaret Trischman who, in 1899 in Yellowstone, slit the throat of her youngest child with a hunting knife. She did it because he didn’t wash behind his ears like I told him to.
I kept my wits about me that winter thanks to the calm presence of Wilfred. He was a middle-aged Native American dishwasher who practiced the traditional ways. He took it upon himself to look after me and Augustine, another Native American, who was young and wild, often getting drunk and finding himself in trouble. Wilfred had a way of calming the boy down, which was good because Augustine's manager was a typical redneck who enjoyed giving him a hard time for sport, making Wilfred's counseling more difficult. He pointed out the manager one day in the dining room and assumed a serious expression.
"He better watch out," he said. "Or else."
"Or else what?" I asked.
"Bad things."
Later that week, Augustine's manager was caught in a blizzard while skiing in the backcountry and was forced to spend the night in a hastily fashioned ice-cave. He arrived the following day with frost-bitten feet and missed several days of work. When he returned, Wilfred and I were in the bar having a drink. We watched as he hobbled past in evident pain. Wilfred raised his glass to the obliging Spirits and gave a knowing smile.
"I warned him," he said.
Hosting
THE pilot show for the old television series TAXI opens with Alex (Judd Hirsch) explaining to a new employee that there are no taxi drivers working at the garage; there are actors, boxers, artists…but no taxi drivers. Waiters experience the same sense of denial, and in the summer of ’93 I joined their ranks.
I'd really wanted to be a bartender, and one of the reasons I'd agreed to work the previous winter season was that I was told it would give me first crack at the choice summer jobs. When the manager in charge of hiring for the bars refused to answer my phone calls during the winter, however, I was forced to take whatever position was available by the time I threw in the towel in the spring. I was told that there were several “entry level" positions left to choose from: making beds, scooping ice cream, scrubbing toilets. It was a letdown, but it wasn’t really a surprise. I’d become jaded after my third season and had no illusions about the Company. I ended up accepting a job in the dining room at the Old Faithful Inn as a host. I figured it would eventually lead to a server position where I could make a decent wage for a change, and while I was right about that, I still had to pay my dues as an entry level employee - again - before I’d be let into the Big Top.
So I spent the summer of ‘92 in a vise; caught between the tourists (who see the host stand as an obstacle between them and food) and the waiters (who would charge the host stand to complain about the too-many, too-few, too-cheap, too-fat, too-high-maintenance diners in their sections). It was a thankless job. When Old Faithful erupted during lunchtime we’d experience a geyser rush with hundreds of hungry vacationers lined all the way across the lobby. Invariably someone would traipse to the front of the line and stick their face inches from mine to ask, “I don’t have to wait behind all these people, do I?” (“Oh, of course not sir! Why, you’re special! You just ignore all this rabble and waddle right on in!”). As long as the crowd milling in front of the host stand was small - say, less than a dozen people - things went smoothly. Any more than that and they threatened to become an angry mob. Their griping would gradually become more vocal, like the hissing and burping of a mud pot, until someone would fly out of the crowd like a steaming piece of ejecta and confront me with their contorted red face.
"This is unacceptable! Who's in charge of this operation? I demand to see a manager!"
etc. etc. etc. ad nauseam.
It was as silly as a Monty Python sketch at times, and I could imagine myself responding to these outbursts in character: "Oh, I'm sorry sir. You want the Argument department. This is the Restaurant. The Argument department is just down the hall, next to the Getting Hit On The Head With A Halibut department. Good day."
It was, in the end, a good tune-up for waiting tables, and when I landed that job I made a vow never to bug the hosts. I broke it of course, but not too often.
My Bear Story
AFTER twenty years in the Park and over a thousand miles of trails hiked, you know that I have a bear story. You’re right, and this is it.
I had just climbed the Middle Teton in our sister park to the south and was coming down the trail in the early evening with my thoughts on a juicy cheeseburger and a large pitcher of cold water when I saw a black bear on the trail ahead of me. I stopped dead when I saw it, about thirty feet away. It wasn’t all that big, but it was a bear and it had claws and sharp teeth while I was a skinny human with sore feet and blisters. It was sniffing the ground and seemed oblivious to my presence, but it kept approaching even as I slowly backed away. After a few minutes and a few more yards lost between us I decided to make my move. I didn’t want to run away because the rangers always tell you, “It will trigger their chase instinct, and they can run much faster than you.” I didn’t want to stand my ground because, well, do I really need to explain this? So I looked around for a tree. I know that black bears can climb trees but I figured that I stood a better chance of fighting back if I held the high ground. To my left was a sturdy-looking pine with a lot of jutting branches. I hopped off the trail and scampered up the trunk. I climbed so fast that I think I even startled the bear, who stopped to watch me with his mouth agape. When I got to what I thought was a safe height, I waited, and listened. I could no longer see the bear below me on account of the intervening branches but I could hear him crunching in the underbrush. Then I heard the unmistakable sound of claws tearing into bark and something heavy pulling itself up towards me. In that instant I accepted the fact that I was going to have to fight something that was stronger than me and impossible to reason with. I had a brief flashback to junior high school and Brian Ocks, the class bully. I hoped that this would turn out better. Then I saw it. The bear moved up the tree so quickly that I felt completely outclassed, but it wasn’t in my tree. It had climbed the tree next to me and was now about six feet away, staring at me across the void. I felt a wave of relief followed by fascination: I had never been this close to a bear in the wild. I studied its coat, which was jet-black and glistening in the sun. Its eyes were fixed on me with a kind of wary curiosity. I smiled. It growled. I realized that making direct eye contact was probably not a good idea as I saw again those sharp claws digging deep into the bark. I was reminded of a line from Paul Schullery's book, Mountain Time, in which he makes the observation that "being mauled by a bear has always struck me as one of those wilderness experiences where the novelty wears off almost right away." I lowered my eyes and in that same instant saw two hikers coming up the trail below me. Before I had a chance to shout out a warning they spotted us and sprang to action - they pulled out their cameras and began snapping pictures. The bear went down the tree like a shot, hit the ground and charged them. The hikers, a man and a woman, took different tacks. The man stood his ground and waved his arms, shouting at the bear. His companion shrieked and ran. The man’s courage lasted about four seconds before he, too, bolted for the hills with the bear on his heels. I lost sight of them and realized that I was suddenly all alone. I slowly climbed back down the tree and dusted off my pants before going on my way. I remember thinking that I should probably be concerned about those other hikers, but to be honest, I only wished that I had their pictures.
C.U.T.
A FEW miles north of Gardiner, where we check in for work each season, is a small but well-funded religious community that calls itself the Church Universal & Triumphant. It’s a New Age cult that turns up in the local
papers every now and then, usually getting bad write-ups because of their penchant for weapons procurement and building fallout shelters under their sprawling compound (from which they plan to emerge following the apocalypse).
They relocated here from California, purchasing the land - some 15,000 acres formerly owned by financier Malcolm Forbes - when it became available in the early 1980s. The federal government had a chance to snap it up first, but demurred; land acquisition for wilderness protection not being a high priority under Reagan. The cult quickly turned heads in the region by erecting what resembled an armed camp, complete with barracks and watchtowers. Hiking trails and animal migratory routes through their property were fenced off and geothermal wells were drilled into local hot springs in order to utilize them as a cheap energy source. They kept to themselves and disdained contact with the local community, thus raising hackles even further by ignoring the Western tradition of good-neighborliness. Having arrived with a siege mentality, predicting the coming apocalypse, they created a local variant by alienating the established community, which became hostile towards them.
Normally very secretive and suspicious of outsiders, they were holding a summer seminar at their compound, optimistically called the Royal Teton Ranch, which was nominally open to the local community. It seemed to be a calculated opening designed to improve their image, but it was an opening that I wanted to exploit.
Most of my friends were against the idea, and a few tried to warn me off as well. “They’ll brainwash you,” they said, evincing real concern that I might return with glazed eyes and bearing pamphlets of Church literature. Two of my friends, co-workers in the dining room, proved more adventurous. Carolyn and Carla drove with me up to the Ranch on our weekend. Our preparations encompassed nothing more than following Carla’s apocryphal advice to “wear purple”. When we arrived at the compound we parked the car and checked in at the trailer that served as the welcoming station. The man behind the counter smiled and said that a bus would be coming by shortly to take us “to the Heart.” We beamed at this welcome news and went outside to wait in the sunshine. It was, after all, a beautiful day, and what could be nicer than a trip to the Heart? In a few minutes' time we noticed an old yellow schoolbus rumbling down the road along the river. It stopped in front of us and we climbed aboard. There was no one else around and the driver soon had us on our way. We rolled through the gates and across the bridge spanning the Yellowstone River, then up a dusty road toward their inner sanctum. After a couple of miles, however, we stopped at another compound and the driver opened the door. We looked at each other.
“Is this the Heart?” Carolyn asked.
“Oh no,” the driver answered, and made a wave toward the hills. “It’s over there. A beautiful place. This is just registration.”
We got off and followed a couple into a large auditorium where giant pictures of Jesus and other divinities stared down at us with unnaturally large, all-seeing eyes. Tables were set up along the walls and people were milling about on the floor or sitting in the common area filling out paperwork. Except for the pictures it was just like add-drop at college; the tables had placards above them announcing a variety of seminars being offered at the Heart and people were lined up in front of the more popular venues like Macrobiotic Cooking and Building Your Fallout Shelter.
We found the registration desk and said we wanted to visit the Heart. The woman greeted us warmly but when we explained that we weren’t members of the C.U.T. (and had not paid the $300 registration fee) she cooled noticeably and said that visitors were not allowed access to the Heart.
“I can give you a guest pass,” she said, pulling three blue cards from a stack on the desk and handing them to us. “It allows you to walk around the University and see what we have to offer in the way of classes and so on.”
University seemed a rather flowery phrase for a few rooms in a warehouse and Carolyn began to protest, but the woman remained firm.
“The Heart is for Church members only.”
Another woman came up and stopped Carolyn’s further protestations by calling away our hostess. We looked at one another glumly until I had a brilliant idea.
“Steal some yellow cards,” I whispered to Carolyn, who was still hovering over the desk.
She gave me a quick look, smiled comprehendingly, and after making sure no one was watching, slipped three cards off the stack and into her pocket. Most of the people milling about had yellow cards pinned to their shirts and it seemed a good bet that they were the ones who had paid the registration fee.
The woman returned to her desk and seemed agitated.
“Well, was there something else?” she said, passing a hurried glance over her desk.
“No,” Carolyn smiled. “We’ll just look around.”
The woman watched us move off and then returned her gaze to the desktop, straightening papers and patting her stacks of colored cards.
“Do you think she saw?” Carla asked.
Carolyn shook her head. “Her back was turned, but she might be suspicious.”
I noticed a box of plastic slipcovers for pinning the cards to your shirt. Everyone was wearing them, and the box was unguarded. I gave a casual glance back at the registration desk and saw the woman eyeing us darkly. I told Carolyn to block her view, and as soon as she was between us I pilfered three of the covers. Just as quickly the woman was upon us, irritation playing over her face.
“Why are you standing around here?” she blurted out. “The brochures are all over there.” She motioned to the common area.
“Oh, thank you very much,” Carolyn said sweetly, and we moved off in the desired direction, to the apparent relief of our hostess.
We spent a few minutes in the common area, feigning interest in the brochures and gathering up a handsome quantity of literature, before going back outside to write our names on the passes and pinning them to our shirts. It wasn’t long before a bus arrived and we joined the small crowd continuing their journey to the Heart.
Everyone was smiling and chatty as the bus turned away from the compound and headed up the narrow track into the hills. We were feeling pleased with ourselves and in high spirits. Then a woman stood up at the front of the bus and clapped her hands.
“Let’s all join in the Count-To-Nine Decree,” she said.
Instantly the air was vibrating with the peculiar high-speed chanting that no one understands save for the initiates. We pretended to sing along and gave each other half-amused, half-anxious glances, glances that became rather more anxious the further into the hills we traveled. There were checkpoints along the way. Gates had to be opened by men wearing sidearms and occasionally these men would step on the bus to exchange a few words with the driver and give the occupants the once-over with business-like eyes; none of which seemed to intimidate the faithful who kept right on smiling and chanting and clapping. We were going to the Heart, and it seemed like the only concern.
The narrow track finally opened out and the bus rolled to a stop on a hill overlooking a beautiful mountain meadow. Above the surrounding green hills stood the blue-gray eminence of the Gallatin Range. Sunlight bathed the valley and highlighted several white tents, including a large revival tent at the center.
This was the Heart.
Everyone piled out of the bus and started down the path toward the tents, talking excitedly. We followed them a little behind, talking in low voices. I had the feeling I was a virus that had yet to be detected by the body’s immune system. We were all feeling a little vulnerable and paranoid, a feeling that increased at the final checkpoint: a bridge over a small stream where another armed man was inspecting nametags. We put on our smiles when it was our turn and the man greeted us politely, glancing at our forged passes with a quick, appraising eye. Carla distracted him with a question.
"How are you today?"
“Joyful,” he replied quickly. “And you?”
“Very joyful,” she said, giving him a beatific smile which he returned as he waved us through.
Our false smiles became real as we crossed the river. We’d all performed admirably and now we were taking our first strides across the soft grass into the Heart itself. In the meadow were several people practicing t’ai ch’i. We watched them and I noticed that no one was wearing purple. It didn’t matter, though. There didn’t seem to be any uniformity in their dress at all: t-shirts, dress shirts, saris, fatigues… At least we wouldn’t stand out. Strolling past the small tents we paused to look inside each one. A yoga class was just finishing up and the instructor was saying, “Let’s give ourselves three I-Am-Immortals.” Their chants were just dying away as we looked into another tent with a television set playing a recorded message from Elizabeth Clare Prophet, the head of the Church. Heads were bowed in prayer while others knelt before her image and made the sign of the cross.