by John Hansen
I paused as he said this, taken aback by his shift in tone. I then listened with disbelief as he described a story about how he and a friend had decided to drive from New York to Mexico City in 1963, to see his friend off to a graduate school program. I tried picturing the young version of my father riding shotgun in a VW bus, hair grown longer and a beard, listening to Bob Dylan or The Carpenters… I couldn’t square it.
“But,” he continued, his voice still softer and less commanding, “you’re young, and the world will be waiting for you when you come back. But just know that eventually you have to settle in one place and ignore the temptations to go for the next hill.”
Before I hung up he told me to make sure I had enough money. He never gave me money over the years, believing it was character building to support one’s self – and I had never asked him for any, even though he was wealthy I had no financial safety net, with him or anybody – net even a grandmother in Florida! I was on my own; and I would sink or swim with no life raft but my own ambition.
As I thought about my father’s words, I realized that I had just heard him drop his shield for a moment, and show a personal, intimate side. And however brief it had been, I never forgot that feeling I had when his voice shifted for a moment.
Holly’s call I made late – at midnight.
“Hello?” she said.
Such a sweet voice. I closed my eyes and shook my head slowly, sadly, as I held the phone. I always loved listening to that lilt in her voice.
“Hey baby,” I said quietly. “Sorry I haven’t called you back. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking.”
“I know, I figured,” she said. “You must think I’m totally crazy.”
“No, I don’t. I get why you said it; it just hit me hard and took a lot out of me.”
She paused for a moment. “I still love you, Will. I really do love you. I just don’t see us as really right for each other. I don’t know; do you know what I’m talking about?”
Even despite my move to Montana, the finality and decisiveness in her words hurt me.
“You think Jonathan’s a better match?” I asked, an edge creeping into my voice.
Another pause. “I don’t know. I mean we are in agreement on a lot of things you and are weren’t.”
“Have you had sex with him?”
“No.”
I pondered the carpet at my feet. “Taking him out of it, I think what we had was a one-of-a-kind thing, don’t you think so?”
“I know. But the closer we got, the more wrong it felt, in a way,” she said. “I just don’t think we’re meant to be together forever. We’re too different. That’s why I didn’t want to come on this trip to Tennessee this weekend. My sister told me you might propose and that I had better only go if I was ready to say ‘yes.’”
Lisa was her older sister and best friend, and Holly was always Lisa asking what she should do about anything in her life.
A small burst of painful angry boiled up in my chest. “Well I’ve had this job lined up in Montana; I’m moving there in a week.”
“What? Montana? What are you talking about?”
“I’ve been offered a position up in Two Medicine Valley, managing the area and working in Glacier National Park.”
I realized I wasn’t making any sense to her probably, but I plugged on, now just eager to get away from this whole conversation.
“I’ve quit the magazine and am packing things up as we speak,” I said hurriedly. “I’ll do some writing up there…” I trailed off and just listed for her reaction.
“Will, what are you talking about? What’s up in Montana for you?”
“It’s complicated – don’t worry about it. I’ll send you your stuff that’s over here.”
She was silent a moment more. “Ok. But we should talk about this more.”
“Yea, look, I’ll explain it more… later.”
I hung up as fast as I could, and set the phone down and stared at it. I had just completely separated from a girl I loved more than any other I had been with, for more than two years, a girl I had wanted to marry. It was the quickest and most sudden break up I had ever experienced with the deepest relationship I had ever had so far. I probably would never see her again, it occurred to me, and that made me feel so empty and very, very lonely.
Yet I still felt at that moment, behind all of that dreaded emptiness, like I was rushing finally towards a new life, like I was caught floating in a fast river rushing towards an unseen waterfall that led to… what? Disaster? Whatever it was it felt right.
I took my eyes from the phone and looked across the room at my apartment, which now seemed small, too small. This rushing river was strong, unstoppable, and it was running faster and faster each moment. Maybe a little disaster is what I need.
I barely slept again that night – a rushing sound in my ears kept my heart racing.
A week later, after forcing through a few more days of work at the magazine office in a zombie-like state, I received confirmation that I had the job. That was on a Tuesday, and I booked a flight for that Sunday to Montana.
I wound up my affairs and turned in my notice at work, which caused less fanfare than I had expected. All the better. In those days leading up to leaving each time someone reacted with a questioning look and mild shock when I told them where I was going caused a small crack of doubt to form in my choice to leave, in a tiny but nagging way. But it was inevitable and unavoidable now, no matter what. Scott had said I was nuts at first after I called and told him but, of course, he ended up saying he was jealous and knew that I’d made the right choice. He told me he was going to drive me to the airport, no matter how early in the morning it was.
As I packed my final things, I let the rushing water take me further towards the edge of the falls, not knowing how long or how hard the landing may be. I was just about to tip over the edge.
Six
Scott picked me up Sunday morning to drive me to the airport. I could see that he was horribly hungover, hair disheveled and bloodshot eyes, and he hardly said a word on the way. He sipped a Miller Lite tallboy beer out of a brown bag with one hand as he drove with the other, staring grimly out the windshield at the oncoming traffic, barely moving his head. He seemed to regard the world ahead of him through the windshield with disdain mixed with a tired boredom. I, in the other hand, felt a charge of excitement and optimism, as I had gotten ready that morning and rode with him on the way. His dour mood and horrible hangover were just more confirmation that I needed a change, too, just one more confirmation.
He pulled up to the departures bay at the airport and I got out all my worldly possessions I was taking with me, which all fit in one suitcase and a guitar case, I had decided to bring my old Yamaha acoustic guitar with me just for kicks. I pictured myself playing it on some grassy, sun drenched mountainside, maybe a pretty hiker girl lying next to me, listening in rapture, a bright flower stuck in her hair...
But I thought of Scott as I unloaded the back seat, there he was sitting silently in his hungover, painful-looking haze, sipping his now-warm beer. I wondered what he was feeling, what he was thinking of my move. I knew that not being around anymore, at least for a while, was going to be… not good for him. Besides Brooke, I was the closest thing, and probably the only thing, he had to a reasonably-good influence, for what that was worth. I bent down at the passenger window and looked over at him, “Scott, you gonna be okay?” I watched him, trying to read his thoughts on his face.
He looked over at me and said, “Are you?” He smiled slightly.
“I am,” I said, “and when I get situated, you need to come out there for a weekend or two and hang out – get out of this town for a while and get some fresh air.”
He chucked briefly and said, staring back out in front of him. “Maybe I will, but don’t worry about me in the meantime, I’ll keep on truckin’.”
I slowly stood back up straight as he accelerated and drove off. I saw him light up a cigarette as he drove, the car swerving slightly before he j
erked the wheel back and corrected it. The sun was rising higher in front of him, but hidden a bit behind a haze of fog. I had a feeling that I would see him again – it didn’t feel like a permanent goodbye, this, despite the fact that I had no specific plan to return to Atlanta, ever. But, as I watched Scott go, I wondered sadly if he would survive much longer, and I surely hoped that he was going to get a hold of his demons and find some peace before a permanent “goodbye” finally did happen, the last goodbye.
Seven
I arrived at the entrance to Glacier Park, Montana by the use of all mechanisms of travel available to mankind at that time: via a plane from Atlanta to Billings, then a smaller plane from Billings to Kalispell, then a train from Kalispell to Whitefish, then a bus from Whitefish to Glacier, and then a cab from Glacier to Two Medicine.
I didn’t make it all the way to Two Medicine the same day I left; it would take two days in fact, and by the time I actually got to Glacier Park on Sunday night I was completely exhausted. My new employer had saved a room for me at the huge, hotel-like Glacier Lodge that housed tourists who arrived at the southern end of the park. The Lodge was the entry point for all locations north in the Park, but many tourists who preferred a bed, shower and air-conditioning to camping in the backcountry would stay at the Lodge the entire time.
It was the first time I had ridden a train, that mode of transportation being largely used only for carrying freight in the South – public transportation trains had never caught on down there. I enjoyed the rattling smoothness of the ride and the large windows that introduced me to a surprisingly flat and prairie-like Montana. Most of Montana, I had learned by now, was as flat as Kansas, and filled with farms, oil derricks, or just empty prairie. But as the train sped northwest I could start to see mountains looming off in the far distance, past endless miles of rolling prairie grass dotted with barns and separated by small roads and cattle fences.
As I travelled through the Atlanta airport, as I rode on the wind 30,000 feet above the country, and as I flew along the metal rails on the prairie, I felt a creeping, nervous apprehension growing in my mind. The rushing of the waterfall had changed to a slow drifting down a dark tunnel. Not having the familiar Atlanta around me now felt worrisome, and I began to really doubt my decision. I felt, at times, like I was lost, drifting aimless now. But also, at times, I felt a reemergence of the rushing excitement that I was final living the right way! So, I repeatedly pushed down my doubts and hesitancies – my endlessly-repeating question of had I done the right thing? I sat back in my seat and focused with a determined eye on the landscape instead.
The bus I was to take after the train was a Greyhound and was almost completely empty as I boarded it. Someone had told me, as I was waiting for the bus in the station, that most of the visitors to the park didn’t know what was in store for them, that it was a much more rugged and wild place than people thought, and wasn’t like Yellowstone as many expected, with Yellowstone’s wide roads, easy beaten-down paths to fenced-off attractions, and numerous easily-findable restaurants, rest areas and slick hotels. No, the man had said, Glacier “was a huge freaking mass!”
I liked the sound of that word “mass,” it denoted a weighty, unchangeable, and nonnegotiable force. I needed something heavy and unchangeable now, to calm my doubts, as I rocked back and forth on the highway riding the swaying movements of the big bus. The weightier the better for me, since I had just ripped my life up by the roots and was about to plant it in unknown and wild soil.
In any event it was dark for the latter half of my trip to Glacier, and so, as I approached those looming mountains that I had read so much about, I lost them in darkening sky the nearer I got. The land was getting higher and more patches of forested hills were rushing past me in, but soon it was too dark too see much of anything outside of the edges of the road we were on. I saw, instead, only my own reflection in the big window of the bus under the little lights above my seat as we sped along, and I thought to myself that I already appeared a little younger now, wilder, rougher like I used to be.
I sat back in my seat and I imagined that in shrugging off the chains of society, I had shrugged off some of the weight on my shoulders and the bags under my eyes. I didn’t really believe I looked any different, but I enjoyed the fantasy, and I did feel better knowing that I was living the old way I had.
Later that night I disembarked from the bus and checked in at the big Park Lodge, which I could barely see beyond the dim streetlight at the edge of the parking lot. I walked over to the desk and gave them my name, and then up the elevator to my room, which was disappointingly very hotel-like, and I collapsed onto the bed as soon as I had dropped my bag on the floor. I fell asleep within minutes, barely processing the fact that I was now but a few miles from my wild new home, somewhere out there in the dark.
The next morning my phone rang early, and the hotel clerk’s voice on the other end of the night stand’s phone told me that a “jammer” would be by in 30 minutes to collect me to take me to Two Medicine. I mumbled “what’s a ‘jammer?’” was in a groggy voice, but he had already hung up.
I dragged myself out of bed, showered quickly with cold water and threw on some clothes, shoving my old clothes from the day before back into the suitcase with my clean ones. I rushed downstairs, worried I might miss my ride, whatever it ended up being, and went out onto the sprawling wooden deck that encircled the Lodge.
I was feeling a cautious tenseness but I also felt a thrilled jolt shoot through me – I would soon see the place I was going to live – in Montana! And there, at the bottom of the Lodge’s big staircase leading down to the road was my ride, it had to be – my own “jammer.” It was a very old-looking, long, multi-door bus, painted bright red, something from the ‘40s or so it looked like. It was about the size of the old VW vans from the 60’s, but sloping in the back, and with a long Rolls-Royce-like snout serving as the grill on the front – a very odd-looking, slightly European-esque, archaic vehicle.
As I walked toward the bus a young guy with a big head of blonde, bushy hair stuck his face out of the driver’s window and leaned an elbow out and nodded.
He smiled as he said, “You must be my ride… Going to Two Medicine?”
“Yeah,” I said as I walked over, cautiously surveying the jalopy.
“Nice suitcase,” he said, nodding at my gear with a not-unfriendly smirk, and then told me to throw my things in the back.
I tossed my bag in a back seat and then climbed in the front next to him. The bus actually had four passenger doors on each side and five bench seats, not counting ours in front. Besides me it was otherwise completely empty as we started off down the street.
“So this is a ‘jammer?’” I asked.
“Yep, gets its name from grinding the gear shift – which you’ll hear pretty soon as we climb some of the hills on the road to your stop.”
The guy sported a scruffy beard and was wearing a safari-style khaki outfit - obviously some hokey kind of uniform the park fashioned for the jammer drivers. I worried as I took a side-ways glance at him that my Two Medicine job was going to have me wear something like that all summer. It occurred to me, not for the first time, and not for the last, as the driver ground the gear stick into second gear as we climbed a road out of the Lodge parking lot shaking us back and forth in our seats, that I hardly knew anything about my new job. I felt another wave of nervous doubt creep up into my chest. What was I doing? In the haste to get packed and booked out there, and with limited information to start with, I had never actually nailed down what I would be doing day-to-day, other than “working in the camp store.”
“So you’re working at Two Medicine?” he asked again as we bounced along, as if reading my mind through his bushy, blonde mass of bouncing hair. The shocks on the old bus creaked loudly over every pothole in the road.
“Do you know anything about it out there? About the store?” I asked.
He glanced over at me and smirked, “It’s way the heck ‘out there’ alri
ght, the farthest outpost in the park – and right next to the Blackfoot reservation too. You picked a doozy of a place to get roped into. Lotta’ crazy shit happens on the res…” he said.
I didn’t really catch his warning, unfortunately, because we suddenly crested a hill and I was greeted with my first full view of the real Rocky Mountains – the Northern Montana sort – which are the most beautiful and most harsh of the whole rest of the vast Mountain chain, which stretches from Canada to New Mexico from beginning to end.
On either side of the road as we drove up higher was thick forest, some hardwoods here and there, but many more pines than anything else, especially where the ground was rockier and drier. Lodgepole pines that could cope with the dry soil shot up straight from the dense grasses and blocked out the sun; green and brown shrubs and smaller trees bunched in a thick riot at their base. The land had a dustier, stonier look to it than I expected – more “Western” than I had seen in the tourist pictures online. But, I liked it. It looked… rough.
Rolling hills a little ways off past our road led to up to enormous mountain peaks far off in the distance, dotted with white patches of late snow – even in June. It was hard to get a sense of the hugeness of the far-away peaks as they rose in front of us and beside us along the valley in which we were driving. As the jammer bus lurched over another crest of asphalt, a wide stretch of deep indigo sky spread out overhead above the peaks and made the green, brown, and, in some places white forest stand out even more starkly, more striking and hard.
How do you describe a mountain? It shouldn’t be attempted lightly, lest the glory and imminence be lost in shabby metaphors and threadbare adjectives. At the risk of doing so, however, I will say that the mountains’ sides and the peaks were mostly a stony, dark brown and tan, and had a disordered, craggy rockiness that revealed and confirmed that they had been jammed up high into the air by crushing, inevitable geologic forces millions of years ago, leaving them at-once brittle and crumbling, exposed and naked, while at the same time diamond-hard and concrete. And the forest at their feet was marching up the mountains’ sides, only to be held in a line, almost perfectly even, across the mountains’ sides where the forest ended and the stark brown skin of the neck of the mountain was exposed. As I watched from the rolled-down jammer window, I had the urge to climb to the top of one of those peaks and lay in the sun above the world.