Squatters in Paradise: A Yellowstone Memoir

by James Perry

  The staff, as it turned out, had indeed been sleeping off a drunk, and when they began to show up at work they were a sorry sight; bleary-eyed, grim-faced, and still reeking of alcohol. When they realized what had transpired in their absence, that James had lashed himself to the wheel during the tempest and saved the ship while the crew were retching below decks, they shook their heavy heads in wonder. "The legend!" they said sardonically. For my heroics, management gave me twenty-five dollars’ worth of bear bucks (redeemable in the gift shop or dining room - alcohol not included) and their undying gratitude for having covered their asses.

  While it's pretty to work in a place where one has only to show up for work on time to be regarded as an exemplary employee, it does tend to leave one with a sense of being patronized, like a doting mother praising her child's fecal painting. I mean, the standards are so low.

  * * *

  Thousands of people lost their homes in Louisiana when hurricanes Katrina and Rita ravaged the Gulf Coast within weeks of each other during the late summer of 2005. The outpouring of sympathy and monies for the victims of the tragedy was rivaled only by the generosity of Americans who wanted to help the families whose lives were destroyed by the terrorist attacks of 9-11. Close to a billion dollars was raised by The Red Cross and other organizations. People around the country opened their houses to shelter those left homeless, and in Yellowstone a collection was taken in the employee dining room and the proceeds sent to the Red Cross. Everyone wanted to do their part.

  Almost everyone.

  On the morning of September 27, Ginger, a server in the Snowlodge dining room at Old Faithful, didn't hear her alarm go off at 5:45 and was late for work. It was her fifth late, and she was fired. She'd been up the night before trying to get in touch with her mother, who'd been displaced by hurricane Rita, and was still trying to find out what remained of her belongings (if anything) in her brother's house in New Orleans after hurricane Katrina had caused the levees to break and left half the city underwater.

  When Ginger heard the news that she was terminated, she called the Human Resources Office to plead her case. She was homeless, she had nowhere to go. Could she possibly stay in the employee dorms for a week or two, considering the extenuating circumstances, until she located her mother and had a place to go? After all, she had seen the flyers posted in the EDR asking for donations for victims of the hurricanes. She'd in fact made a donation herself while she was employed. Would the company extend the charity to a victim who was, until recently, in their employ?

  In classic corporate fashion, the functionary at the other end of the line said, "That was not a company-approved fundraiser."

  * * *

  On the occasion of my official 20th year in the Park in 2005 I received a notice via interdepartmental mail to this effect:

  We have decided...to honor all employees with twenty or more years of seniority with the company. Since you are a member of this elite group of employees, I am delighted to invite you to attend this function. This year's reception will include the awarding of all 20-Plus Bear pins, some special recognitions and an array of delicious hors d'oeuvres and beverages.

  The invite came from the General Manager of Yellowstone National Park on the 28th of July. The reception took place on the 27th.

  I related this anecdote to a co-worker who also had a few seasons under his belt. He just shrugged. “And you were surprised?”

  * * *

  One of the sure signs of season's end is when the message board in the EDR starts to fill up with items for sale. Everything from cameras to computers are pawned off at bargain rates. Generally one finds smaller items, but there are also cars and even mobile homes offered from time to time (usually when a long-term employee has finally decided to call it quits and needs to rid himself of his more oppressive effects). It's a good time for the savvy shopper, but you'll never see the seller again so it's caveat emptor to the nth degree. There have been many autumn mornings at the end of a season when I've woken to the sound of car ignitions turning slower and slower as the battery dies in a "bargain car" to the accompaniment of heated cursing in Slavic as another envisioned American road-trip goes up in smoke.

  * * *

  In the spring of 2005 The Discovery Channel aired a television docudrama about the imminent eruption of the Yellowstone caldera called Supervolcano. It was produced in cooperation with the BBC, which explains why the chief doomsayer was screaming about the coming catastrophe like Scotty on Star Trek: "I canno' stop the eruption, cap'n! We're up shite creek!!"

  * * *

  Every summer there is a contest to come up with a staff T-shirt. The best designs, of course, never see the light of day. The Recreation Staff only accept "acceptable" designs, which preclude any mention of overworked employees or tourons. They prefer happy, anthropomorphic animals - just like what you’d find in the gift shops around the Park - with cheerful, outdoorsy themes. My favorite submission was the brainchild of my friend Audrey, a fellow server in the dining room. It traced the physical and emotional devolution of the employee through the course of a summer season. The first panel was May, and showed a fresh-faced employee saying, "Ah, the Yellowstone Experience!" The following panel was June, which showed the same employee looking a bit disconcerted. July was a take off on Edvard Munch's The Scream, while August showed the employee huddled in the fetal position, shaking and sucking his thumb. September showed the employee lying supinely and mumbling to himself. The final panel, October, was the one that made the entire design work. The employee, disheveled, with bags under his eyes, missing teeth and grinning like an idiot, says, “Piece of cake! I’ll be back next season.”

  And so I was.

  Part Six

  The Real World Closes In

  LATELY, Yellowstone hasn’t provided the same insulation from the outside world as in the past. The arrival of the portable satellite dish set a venal precedent, quickly followed by cell phones and - the most rapidly spreading weed of all - the Internet. The isolated Brigadoon that I've gone to pains describing in this book is quickly becoming a thing of the past. While the physical isolation remains, the encroachment of technology has adulterated the experience of being apart.

  Or maybe not. This could just be a fanciful way of compartmentalizing the end of my tenure as a seasoned seasonal employee in Yellowstone. The company won't be giving me any gold watches when I leave, so I might as well gild the narrative a bit.

  What is unnerving is the way my anonymity as a Park employee has been compromised by the unusual length of my sojourn. People recognize me now, hailing me in the Inn like an old friend:

  "Hey, James! You're still here! Remember us? We're the Pokemon's from Iowa! You waited on us in '93!"

  I don't remember them. I don't remember any of them. I feel like an amnesiac accosted by incredulous family and friends: "Surely you remember me, don't you? I'm your wife for god's sake!"

  Just this summer I picked up a lunch shift in the dining room, and as I was taking the order from a table of Japanese tourists the translator explained why they seemed so happy to have me as their server:

  "They recognize you from your movie," he said.

  Things were getting weird.

  If I had a nickel for every time I declared at the end of a season that I would not be coming back, well, I'd have about a dollar. The point being, I never really accepted the idea of Yellowstone as a career. I would just find myself back here year after year, as if by magic, but it was a spell that I always intended to break. Now that my co-workers have begun regarding me as a permanent fixture ("You'll never get married. You're already married, to the Park!"), and the tourists look for me in the restaurant like kids seeking out their favorite rides in an amusement park, and the managers defer to my judgment...it’s just become too respectable.

  But there I go compartmentalizing again.

  I've often wondered how the end would come; under what circumstances I would leave the Park for good. I always used to assume that I'd be fired
- they won't let me sleep in their cabins anymore - and so my ruminations tended to orbit around what offense would bring my downfall. Beating a tourist insensible with a peppermill ranked high on this list. Or perhaps the end would come suddenly, as I was carrying twelve entrees during a madhouse lunch and my overburdened spine would snap, leaving me to expire amidst a clutter of broken plates and scattered special requests. The last sound I hear being a lone plate cover spinning to a stop on the wooden floor in front of the fireplace (which would signal the onlookers that the show was over and they could resume their dining experience). Another, certainly milder, possibility was that I would meet a girl who would shatter the Park's siren song and whisk me back to civilization. It's only recently that I've begun to realize that I'll have to take matters into my own hands, due to the extreme tardiness of Princess Charming.

  But why leave at all? Why all this talk about turning the page on what has really been a marvelous run of luck? Part of it is wanting to get out while I'm still on top of my game, before I become like the elderly father of Stevens in The Remains of the Day, relegated to an entry-level position because he just can't cut it "at table" anymore. The rest has something to do with a comment one of my managers made when I let him read a couple of chapters from my manuscript: "When this book is published," he said, "you won't be rehired."

  Autumn

  AUTUMN is easily my favorite season in the Park, when the elk start bugling and the aspen turn golden in the north and in the Tetons (but not at Old Faithful, where it’s all pine and burnt pine). That's when I know that another long season is coming to a close. I never lament the end of warm days. For me, the coming cold season marks the arrival of welcome winds that blow the tourists back home. While the Labor Day weekend is the official close of high season, it's the first snowfall that really culls the crowd. When people see snow falling in the mountains it triggers a basic survival instinct for them to seek shelter. They abandon the Park like a sinking ship, leaving the employees to contemplate the strange silence. By this time many of the employees have already departed as well; having been fired, quit, returned to college or gone back home, or having made other arrangements in other parks and ski resorts. Our exodus follows close on the heels of the tourists and soon the Park is handed back to the animals, who no doubt sense our absence. They raise their wooly, horned, antlered and feathered heads and exchange glances which seem to say, "I thought they'd never leave."

  It's strange to walk through the Inn after it's been emptied of guests and tucked in for the winter; its chairs and tables covered in white sheets, its windows boarded up, its heat turned off. Walking the creaking floors above the lobby, feeling the cold, the Inn seems fragile. Recent renovation work has seen the addition of several supporting walls in the lobby meant to shore up the sagging tits of the Grande Dame. After a summer of impressing visitors with its peaked eighty-foot-high ceiling and its fireplace of five-hundred tons of rock, the cold weather reveals it for what it is: a frail shell which must be nursed through the harsh winter season by squads of maintenance workers and winterkeepers. One feels a tenderness toward the venerable structure, as toward a grandparent, and wishes it well.

  Underlying this business of winding down the season is a sense of cycling death and rebirth. We repack our cars beneath flocks of Canada geese heading south in crooked V-shaped formations. Their excited quack-quacks seem familiar, like our own sanguine conversations about the off-season adventures we have planned. And like us, there will be many who don't make the return trip, so that these departures are also in a sense conclusions. Whether we come back or not often seems to have less to do with inclination than chance. There've been many times I would have bet money on the imminent return of an employee - though never on myself, oddly enough - only to hear off-season rumors of their apostasy in the form of a marriage or a well-paying job in some far-off city. Picking the returners is as confounding as trying to pick the geese who'll be spared from the hunter's bullet.

  Unlike summer and winter, which are immutable seasons, spring and fall are revelatory. They are times of movement and change, which makes leaving the Park seem right. We feel that we're part of a greater migration affecting all the beasts. Such an itinerant lifestyle seems natural in this setting and it's the rest of the stay-at-home world that seems out of step. Joseph Campbell referred to these accented moments in his famous interview series, The Power of Myth, conducted with Bill Moyers. He told the story of an American astronaut who was working on the orbiting space shuttle. The astronaut was busily effecting some repair or other outside the craft, keeping his attention focused on the job at hand when word came from Mission Control to hold off on the task for a moment while they ran some tests. In the few moments he had to himself the astronaut glanced around and was confronted with the entire cosmos; its vastness, the utter silence, and moving slowly beneath his feet was the luminous blue disc of the Earth itself. Kept oblivious of this ineffable scene by his toil, his mind reeled at the revelation. He was quite simply blown away with wonder and found himself asking the rhetorical question, "What have I done to deserve this?"

  It's not often in a conventional life that these accented moments occur when one has the opportunity to reflect on the passage of time and consider the checkered roads ahead. For most careerists living in early twenty-first century America the only chance they'll have to look back with anything approaching reflection is on their deathbed, when they'll grope for something trenchant to say to their estranged children and blurt out a lame platitude instead ("Seize the day, Billy. Seize the day. Urk...").

  No. Change is good. Change is painful, yes, but as any dominatrix worth her salt can tell you: pain is necessary in order to reach the deeper levels of pleasure.

  Survivor’s Party

  DURING the summer we employees have our little disagreements amongst ourselves – shouting matches, breakups, fights, the rare hospitalization – but in mid-October we gather together at the Survivor’s Party as one big dysfunctional family. Like a wrap party at the end of a high school play or a Hollywood film, we put aside the accumulated ill-will of the past few months and show each other a grudging respect for having made it through a rough production. Yes, the director was fired early on and the script had to be re-written several times and the stars all had breakdowns and the funding was pulled, but by God we made it!

  A band is usually hired to play in the employee pub for this final affair, but half the time they don't show up because a blizzard closes the passes and we have to make do with a DJ dance (which is just as well since the bands hired by the company tend to be local talent who normally play for beer).

  The Survivor's Party is also a time of heightened emotional states. We all realize that this is it. The Park is like a vacuum about to be breached, an event that will scatter its inhabitants - ready or not - to the four corners of the real world. What usually happens is that this night bears witness to many passionate and ill-conceived liaisons which are hurriedly carried off under the protective mantle of inebriation. "I'm wearing my fuck-me pumps tonight!" said a friend of mine as she slipped into her party clothes. Painted faces, costumes, and bared flesh often give this night the feeling of a bacchanal (followed the next morning by the inevitable walk of shame as employees return to their own dorms under the pitiless light of day). On a more prosaic level we all exchange addresses in a flurry of scribbled scrap paper. This practice has increased with the rise of the Internet; e-mails being of a more impersonal nature than the physical addresses of the previous millennium. A friend of mine once made the mistake of giving his parents' home address to a girl he hardly knew except as one of the hosts in the dining room. The girl had always been a bit odd, but she really didn't stick out all that much in the Park. A couple of weeks after the Park closed, however, she turned up at his house and took up residence in one of the spare bedrooms while he was away. The parents just assumed she was a friend of their son from the Park and accepted her. When the girl's supply of lithium ran out though, she had a
psychotic break and tore up the room, precipitating a late-night call to the police and an embarrassing scene in front of the neighbors. My friend received a letter of reprimand soon after from his scandalized parents which read in part, "Your Yellowstone friends are no longer welcome here. P.S. We are having the locks changed."

  Even if we do stay in touch after the summer, there's no guarantee that our friends will return for another season. In fact, the best bet is that Brigadoon will reawaken with an almost entirely new cast of characters. This is a community in flux, with Europeans, Asians, Africans, North Americans and South Americans all dancing together in a brief display of global harmony and great sex.

  The Survivor's Party tends to be the most raucous of employee gatherings, and most managers steer clear of it. Recognizing the tenuous hold they have over us at this point they are loathe to incite the savages with their presence. Besides, they want us to show up for our cleaning shifts in the morning. Yes, before we can leave we have this one final hurdle to clear. The day after the Survivor's Party is cleaning day, when the employees straggle in to work like flotsam after a storm. We're put to work shutting down the stage: piling tables and chairs into corners; deep-cleaning; sorting and bagging odds and ends and covering everything in white sheets and plastic wrap. So that when the company finally washes its hands of us we're exhausted, having had the last ounce of work ungenerously wrung from us. We re-enter the world tired, hung-over, and reeking of chemical cleaning agents, with most of us destined to be snapped up by bargain-hunting seasonal outfits all across the land.