Idiot Wind

by Peter Kaldheim

  I made camp that night beneath some willow trees on the bank of the Clarks Fork, the river made famous by Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It. The mountain air was chilly, but the night was clear, and as I sat in the lee of my tarpaulin tent, sipping camp stove coffee beneath the million stars of Big Sky country, I was a happy man. With a little better luck tomorrow, I figured I could make it all the way to Yellowstone Park. Only three hundred miles now separated me from the fresh start I’d been chasing for the past four months, and I could hardly wait to get back on the road in the morning as soon as the sun came up.

  I didn’t feel quite so lucky a few hours later, though, when the sound of rain pattering on my tarpaulin tent woke me sometime after midnight and I realised that while I’d been sleeping, groundwater had seeped into my tent and soaked not only my sleeping bag but my clothing too. I had no choice but to break camp in the dark and haul my gear downriver to the nearest overpass bridge. By the time I took shelter from the rain, however, the damage had already been done, and I was soggy and miserable the rest of the night. But just before dawn, I caught a break. The rain clouds cleared off, and when the sun rose there were blue skies overhead.

  As soon as there was light enough to see what I was doing, I pulled a dry change of clothes out of my backpack and stripped off all my wet things, hoping no early morning joggers would come by and catch me flashing. I could picture the report in the local papers: ‘Naked Vagrant Arrested Under Clarks Fork Bridge’. So I hustled, believe me – I hadn’t dressed that quickly since the night my girlfriend’s merchant seaman father came home from sea two days sooner than scheduled and nearly caught us naked in his empty Bay Ridge apartment.

  Once I was decent, I gathered up all my soggy clothes and my equally soggy sleeping bag and draped everything over some riverside boulders to dry in the sun. All I could do at that point was hurry up and wait. Four frustrating hours later, my stuff was finally dry enough to repack, and only then could I hike back up to the highway and get on the road at last.

  By now it was eleven o’clock. I’d lost most of the morning. But I knew my luck must be turning when I caught my first ride only five minutes later and discovered that the college kid who’d picked me up was going all the way to Red Lodge. I could hardly believe it when he said he’d have me to Bozeman in three hours’ time! Bozeman was only ninety miles north of Yellowstone. My odds of making it to the park before nightfall had just shot way up.

  His name was Tom, and he said he was an engineering student on his way home from the University of Idaho to his family’s place in Red Lodge for two weeks’ vacation before he started his summer job. For a young guy, he’d done a lot of travelling, and we spent the ride swapping stories about places we’d been to. He was particularly proud of a trip he’d taken to Nepal the previous summer and had a zealot’s gleam in his eyes as he described the remote Himalayan gorges he’d trekked down into with a kayak strapped on his back, all for the thrill of conquering whitewater rapids that no one had kayaked before.

  Must be nice to be rich, I thought. But he was a down-to-earth kid, so it didn’t come off as bragging. He seemed just as impressed by my train-hopping adventures as I was by his globe-trotting search for Class V rapids, so we hit it off just fine.

  ‘You sure you want me to drop you in Bozeman?’ Tom asked, as we reached the city limits. ‘If you’re heading straight to the park, you’d be better off getting out at Livingston. You’ll have to go through Livingston anyway to hook up with Highway 89. That’s the only road that’ll get you to the North Entrance.’

  ‘Sure, Livingston sounds good to me,’ I said. ‘The closer to the park you can get me, the happier I’ll be.’

  East of Bozeman, we started the long climb up to the crest of Bozeman Pass. Everywhere I looked, I saw nature putting on a show that a city kid could only gawk at in goggle-eyed wonder. Alpine meadows where chestnut mares were nipping at their frisky foals. Snow-swollen creeks rushing through reedy bogs. Red-tail hawks and bald eagles carving turns in the thin blue air above the dense green slopes of the Gallatin National Forest. And the peaks of the Rockies themselves, towering all around me, so much higher than the White Mountains of New Hampshire – which had impressed me in my college days, but now seemed Lilliputian by comparison. It was a landscape that could humble a man. Even a man grown accustomed to being humbled.

  There was still plenty of daylight left when Tom dropped me off in Livingston. I hiked down from the interstate and took up my station on the southbound side of Highway 89, right in front of a big green sign that said: ‘North Entrance, Yellowstone Park, 52 Miles’. So close, I felt sure I’d be there before sundown.

  You’re on the home stretch now, Hat! I grinned to myself as I straightened my toboggan hat and stuck my thumb out in the breeze. After five thousand miles of wandering, and twenty state lines crossed, I had finally found the place I’d been looking for all along, and as each ride I caught that afternoon brought me closer to the finish line you couldn’t have pried the smile off my face with a crowbar.

  A mile south of Livingston, perched high in the cab of a logger’s boom truck, I got my first look at the Yellowstone River, and as we followed its course through Paradise Valley I thought of all the nights I’d sat dreaming over Field & Stream in study hall at St Mary’s, imagining what it would be like to cast for trout from the banks of such a legendary river. Well, now I’d find out for myself – as soon as I cashed my first pay cheque and could afford to buy a rod and reel.

  I was twelve miles from the park’s North Entrance when the logger turned off the highway onto a gravel road that would take him up into the forest at Tom Miner Basin. I thanked him for the lift, he wished me a good summer at Mammoth, and two minutes later I was climbing into the back of a rented VW camper van driven by a young German couple on a honeymoon tour of the States. The two of them seemed as awestruck by the scenery as I was, and as we cruised through the rocky gorge of Yankee Jim Canyon and followed the river upstream to the little town of Gardiner, where a great stone arch marked the entrance to Yellowstone Park, the bride turned to me and asked, ‘Do you live here?’

  ‘I do now,’ I said proudly.

  ‘Lucky you,’ she said.

  ‘Yes,’ I smiled.

  Lucky me.

  AFTERWORD

  The rusticated stone arch at the North Entrance to Yellowstone Park is inscribed with an excerpt from the Congressional Act that established Yellowstone as the world’s first national park in 1872. It reads: For the Benefit and Enjoyment of the People. Millions of visitors to Yellowstone have passed beneath that inscription since the Roosevelt Arch was built in 1903, but I daresay none of them ever got more benefit or enjoyment from the park than I did during the five years I worked at Mammoth Hot Springs Hotel. From the moment I climbed out of the German tourists’ VW bus on that long-gone afternoon in Gardiner, my life took a turn for the better – just as I had hoped.

  By happy coincidence, the executive chef in charge of all the park’s kitchens, David Rees, was a fellow refugee from Brooklyn and under his tutelage I honed my kitchen skills and moved up quickly through the ranks. In two years’ time, I went from line cook to head chef, and the experience I gained at Mammoth was my springboard to a culinary career that would span the next two decades. Though it wasn’t the literary career I’d envisioned for myself during my college days, it was a creatively challenging and rewarding profession nonetheless, and I never regretted the path I chose to follow once I’d put the idiot wind behind me.

  Except for one scary night of backsliding when the hard-partying actor Dennis Quaid turned up at the Blue Goose Saloon in Gardiner during my first summer in Yellowstone, I’m glad to say I never snorted a line of cocaine again. And all the backcountry hiking I did on the steep mountain trails in the park soon had me feeling stronger and more fit than I’d been in years, so my health took a turn for the better in Yellowstone too. Then, to my surprise, so did my emotional life.

  During my second summer at Mammoth
– the summer of 1988, when more than two hundred forest fires blackened a third of the park’s vast acreage – I met and fell in love with a big-hearted young Californian named Kathy Brunn, who worked in the hotel’s reservations department. On the face of it, ours was an improbable romance, since Kathy was fifteen years younger than me. But she had what Buddhists would call an ‘old soul’ and the more time we spent together, the more I realised that fate had sent me the life companion I’d never thought would come my way after my wife Kate’s untimely death.

  When the forest fires forced the two of us to evacuate from Mammoth in mid-August, Kathy and I moved down to the town of Gardiner and set up house together in a rented two-room cabin up on the Jardine Hill. Then, like all the other eight hundred residents of Gardiner, we spent the next few weeks praying that the fires wouldn’t sweep down into town and force us to evacuate yet again. But by the first week of September the fires reached the coffin-shaped crest of Sepulcher Mountain – the last natural barrier shielding Gardiner from the fire’s advance – and it began to look as though our prayers would go unanswered.

  I can still vividly recall the Saturday night when the top of Sepulcher erupted in flames. Kathy and I had gone to the Blue Goose Saloon with a crowd of other Parkies to hear a local band from Bozeman, the Hyalite Blues Band. The Blue Goose was on Park Street, on the edge of town closest to Sepulcher Mountain, and by the time the band finished its first set, the firestorm had crested the mountain. Suddenly, everyone was calling out requests for ‘Fire on the Mountain’, one of the Hyalite Blues Band’s most popular Grateful Dead covers, and as the boys in the band obliged, most of the crowd rushed out onto the sidewalk, drinks in hand, to watch the fire show. It all bore a chilling resemblance to that scene in Titanic when the doomed ship’s orchestra keeps right on playing, even as disaster engulfs them.

  By closing time at 2 a.m. all of us left the bar convinced that we’d soon hear the three blasts of the emergency alert horn. We’d all been advised to pack getaway bags a few days earlier, so we’d be ready to evacuate to Livingston High School’s gymnasium at a moment’s notice. But by some miracle a freak snowstorm blew into the park early the next morning, and on Sunday, 11 September, we got the reprieve we’d been praying for, as the flames on Sepulcher died down and the wind shifted, chasing the fire back into Yellowstone and away from town.

  In autumn of the following year, Kathy and I got married twice in one day – which is something I doubt many couples can claim. We held the first formal ceremony in the historic stone chapel at Mammoth, but because our marriage licence was issued in Montana and the chapel was located in Wyoming, the only way to legitimise our union was to drive back down the Mammoth hill to the state line at the 45th Parallel, where the entire wedding party reassembled on the bank of the Gardiner River to watch us repeat our vows on Montana soil.

  The only thing that marred that otherwise perfect day was the absence of any members of the groom’s family at the festivities. Of course, Kathy knew it would be that way. Early on in our relationship I’d told her all about my estrangement from my parents – how, when I was locked up on Rikers, I’d written a long apology letter to my parents and expressed my strong desire to make amends with them once I got out of prison. Alas, it had done me no good. My father had always left the letter-writing to my mother – during my seminary and college days, he’d never once answered any of the letters I’d dutifully written home – however, this time he broke with precedent and replied with a terse, handwritten note that left me in no doubt that he and my mother had written me off as their son and wanted nothing further to do with me.

  I could hardly blame them, but the finality in my dad’s tone was still a blow and I had made no other attempts to contact them in the four years before I married Kathy.

  Nevertheless, when the Christmas season rolled around that year, Kathy insisted that I send my parents a card and a few pictures from our wedding in the hope that enough time had passed to soften their hearts toward me. She was always an optimist.

  Though my parents never responded, I will always be grateful to Kathy for having nudged me to make the effort because, three years later, when my Aunt Mary was going through my mom’s effects, she found that old Christmas card and used the return address on the envelope to contact me with the crushing news that my mother had just passed away, four years after my father’s death from prostrate cancer. Which meant that my dad had died the same summer I met Kathy – and this was the first I’d heard of it.

  Thank God I had Kathy to lean on, or I’d probably have crawled into a bottle and never come out. Kathy did her best to comfort me by pointing out that my mom must have still loved me because she’d saved the Christmas card instead of chucking it in the trash. And my Aunt Mary, my mother’s oldest sister, said the same thing when I called her that night, so I took some small consolation from the fact that I’d followed Kathy’s advice and had made one last attempt to reconcile with my parents, even though that attempt had come to naught.

  In the months after I received that terrible news, I spent a lot of time fishing the Yellowstone River in the solitude of Yankee Jim Canyon, trying to distract myself from the grief and guilt I felt over my failure to be a better son. Eventually, I made peace with what I could no longer change, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that for all the positive steps I’d taken in my life since moving to Yellowstone I was still a loser. That chink in my self-esteem was just wide enough to let the idiot wind come whistling through – and suddenly my life was in turmoil again. And so was Kathy’s, through no fault of her own.

  I had left my job at Mammoth Hotel the year before to take a higher-paying position as manager of the Blue Goose Saloon, which, like most bars in Montana, derived a good portion of its monthly income from the rolls of quarters its gambling patrons pumped into the gaudy row of slot machines that were strategically placed just inside the front door. I’d never been tempted to waste my time or money playing the slot machines – whatever quarters I was willing to part with went into the coin-op pool table. But in the year after I got word that my parents were gone I began obsessively squandering my tip money playing the Keno machines, chasing the high that every gambler seeks – the adrenaline rush of hitting a big jackpot, which momentarily makes you forget that you’re still just a loser in the grip of a destructive habit. Before long, I was as addicted to Keno as I’d been to cocaine, and unbeknownst to Kathy I’d racked up so much debt on credit card advances that we were thousands of dollars in the hole by the time my guilty conscience finally forced me to confess what a selfish fool I’d been.

  To make matters worse, I’d also been fiddling the books at the Blue Goose and pocketing the bar’s money to support my habit, so I would have been facing jail time if the Goose’s owner hadn’t mercifully given me the opportunity to avoid criminal charges by repaying my debt to him in instalments over the next twenty-four months.

  For me, it was a welcome relief to finally confess the secret I’d been hiding for many guilty months, but for Kathy there was no relief. My revelations blindsided her, and she was devastated – not just by my betrayal, but also by the damage I had done to her clean credit rating. I feared she’d wash her hands of me right then and demand a divorce. And I wouldn’t have blamed her if she had. I had turned her world upside-down. But divorcing me wouldn’t have freed her from the debts I’d run up on our joint accounts, so in the end she stuck with me and reluctantly agreed to go along with the only plan I could think of that might quickly restore us to solvency – a move to Las Vegas. It might seem like an outlandish proposal for a compulsive gambler to make, but logistically and financially it made perfect sense. My good friend Greg Hahn – the former pastry chef at Mammoth, and best man at our wedding – had recently relocated to Vegas with his wife Mary and the two of them had been urging us to do the same. Greg had landed a well-paid position in the bakery at the Stardust Hotel and Casino and, according to him, chefs in Las Vegas were earning salaries more than double what I was bringi
ng home in Montana, so a move to the desert seemed like the best solution to my problem.

  With Greg and Mary’s generous help, we settled in Las Vegas at the start of 1996. The town was going through a boom at the time and there were plenty of jobs available for trained chefs and professional reservationists. Kathy landed a position in the Luxor’s ersatz pyramid on the downtown Strip and I was hired as head chef of the Stockyard, the high-end steak and seafood restaurant in the just-opened Texas Station Casino, the Fertitta family’s latest venture out on the north end of town. It was a high-pressure job that kept me in the kitchen sixty hours a week, but the salary was good and the quarterly bonuses I earned helped us pay off our debts at a steady pace. And thankfully, despite the fact that we spent two and a half years in the gambling capital of America, the hard lesson I’d learned from my folly in the Blue Goose kept me from squandering any more money at the slot machines. I escaped from ‘Lost Wages’ unscathed – and once again solvent – when we finally moved back to Montana in the spring of 1998.

  For a couple of years, it had been nice to escape the snow and sub-zero temperatures of Montana’s six-month winters, but by the time my Blue Goose debt was paid I was longing to get back to the Rockies. When another of our old Yellowstone Park friends, Paul Mineau, turned up in Vegas for a visit and offered me a position as catering chef at Montana State University in Bozeman, I used all the persuasion I could muster to convince Kathy to move back north.