Dirt Work (22 page)

He leased a 950 Cat loader for the season, hired Nic as the equipment operator, required commercial drivers' licenses for three leaders, and turned us loose. Gabe and I took notes on the work expectations, tasks inconceivable to backcountry traildogs whose Glacier repertoire consisted of maintenance more than construction and rarely required a Skil saw, let alone a backhoe. The shovel-pulaski era seemed long gone, leaving us, after all these years, beginners again. The first weeks of work blended novelty and nostalgia and we thrived on the fast pace of large-scale construction while longing for those quiet, long-mile, backcountry days. Lunch breaks at alpine lakes? No way. Instead we lounged on the loader's giant tires and slumped atop the Knaack box, more like a construction crew with minicoolers and Cokes than a trail crew with CamelBaks and trail mix. The Denali gang was union equipment operators and recent local high school grads, a potent blend of handy and clueless. Alec was the only other classic “traildog,” a seven-year veteran of Rocky, a hiking park with rockwork and alpine vistas, like Glacier. We bonded, of course.

The construction-reveg may have been different, but it wasn't boring. On the ground, we began with a rough trail alignment survey, then cleared the swath with chainsaws, and hauled the brush to the burn pile. We spray-painted parallel lines on the tundra to mark the sixteen-foot width of the trail, and to enable removal, we chopped lines through the root mass of the tundra mat with pulaskis and mattocks, grateful for handwork.

The timing of tundra transplantation is critical—once trees are cleared, the direct sun on tundra begins to warm the permafrost layer beneath. After the loader removed the tundra mats, the exposed icy ground fast melted into mud pits requiring chains on tires and logs laid corduroy-style under them just to keep the machines afloat. Flatbed trucks waited at the side of the road for the loader to deposit the sixteen-by-sixteen squares of tundra onto their beds, whereupon drivers transported the mats to predetermined sites on the VC complex, backing up mounded dirt hills and contours, lifting beds and draping the mats on the ground. Don't worry if you can't picture it. The whole thing took weeks to sink in, even while we were doing it.

The operation required people power: a loader operator, two or three on the ground cutting line and directing the bucket, three truck drivers, two shovelers to guide mats into place and mulch the edges. Miscellany ate up hands, too: haul brush, guy small trees, direct traffic as equipment crossed the road, and make constant runs to the shop for diesel can, shackles, tow strap, dunnage, chains, cell phone, hard hat, mattock handle, Griphoist, zerk grease. To keep things interesting, something was always getting stuck: truck, loader, puncheon, tools. Occasionally even a human went down big, by an inadvertent step too close to the edge of a mud pit or a calculated belly flop performed for lunchtime laughs.

Things changed daily. New reveg sites took priority over old ones. We ran out of mulch. Brakes went out, the power takeoff on the dump truck shit the bed, a rolled skid steer incited a safety shakedown. With complex logistics and a tight timetable, each day required innovative thinking and a ready store of cuss words to surmount inevitable glitches. Hurdles notwithstanding, it was great fun for those with a thing for big machines and playing in mud (most traildogs). Although I wasn't licensed to legally drive the Cat or the twelve-yard dump trucks, Nic schooled me on the sly on airbrakes and bucket controls. In the woods well out of sight, I lurched around in a twenty-ton machine like a giddy bull in a deserted china shop.

The project's end brought resounding success. We moved and transplanted over a square mile of tundra, the largest known such operation in the state. (Regrowth two years later at 80 percent.) The bike trail and the VC looked spit-shined and the finished product silenced the critics who thought we'd bitten off more than we could chew. Even the road crew, the guys who bemoaned us novices—a bunch of wing nuts borrowing
their
trucks, who forgot hard hats, traffic vests, seatbelts, safety glasses, those kids who
ran
back and forth on the job site—even they had to admit we done good. And the boss? Ralph leans back in his desk chair, arms in the air. He gets out of the office far less than he did when the project started, but that doesn't mean he won't get his share of the credit: “I
told
you we could do it!”

As always, new tasks meant new vocabulary. Large-scale mechanized trailwork brought with it the diction of road building. Who knew there were so many kinds of gravel? Pit run, aggregate, screened, three-quarter-inch minus, D-1, trail mix, washed, fine. And the trucks gravel comes in: ten-yard, five-yard, end dump, belly dump, side dump, some with a “pup” trailer pulled behind. Using heavy equipment meant hauling heavy equipment, and there were words for trailering (itself a new verb): tilt top, ball hitch, ratchet strap, low boy, chain binder. The words for trails mixed with the words for road and construction-site work until language blended into one fluid mass, and a shift happened: we traildogs seemed less the blue-collar cousins of rangers and more the woodsy siblings of trade laborers. The old rule, brought from Glacier's barn to Cordova's harbor to Denali's yard, held true: the only way to enter a new world without humiliation or offense was to keep ears open and mouth shut. Quiet is better than stupid.

Nicknames ruled the crew's roster. It began with Alec, the crew leader from Rocky hired on with Gabe and me. He was an übercompetent traildog, the biggest goofball either of us had ever met on a job, an able mountain partner, and soon enough, a dear friend. Two days into the season, he admitted that his distinguished name, Alec, had long earlier been replaced with “Krusty” because of clownish antics and some unrepeatable high school legend involving his underwear. Krusty set the bar low and nicknames proliferated. Nic, the oldest of us, and an incorrigible womanizer, became Dirty Uncle Nic. Evan Owens had a puff of blond hair that went fuzzy in the slightest heat; we called him “Frowens.” (His wife called him “fucking Owens,” with great tenderness.) Pretty dark-haired Mara nicknamed herself “Elvis”—with her full lips and wide-set eyes, well, you could see what she meant. Felipe was “Flip,” the biggest wiseass of us all (which was saying something). Jack Roderick came with the nickname “Nice Guy Jack” because of his affable way, but the new job let him rechristen himself and he chose “The Rod,” whose irony he savored for its anti-nice-guy bluster. Gabe went from Gaberiferous, to Riferous, to Gaber, and me, well, nothing sticks, so anything goes. Nic called me a number of standards—Stretch, Throttle, sister, Trouble,
woman
(earning a punch in the gut). For any “lady” on the site, Nic used Gretchen, Matilda, Henrietta: whatever old-fashioned name came fastest to mind. Conventional wisdom says you can't choose your own nickname, and the more you resist one, the longer it'll stick. Krusty, like it or not, will have his for life. Even his mom back east goes, halfheartedly, by Mama Krust.

Of course, it was different. Glacier, eight-day backcountry hitches, with six days off; Denali, four ten-hour workdays, three-day weekends. Glacier, a modern two-bedroom we spent little time in; Denali, a one-room cabin without running water that we came home to every night. Glacier had one million acres with trails crisscrossing every USGS map quad; Denali had six million acres nearly void of constructed trails.

In Montana, we'd commuted half an hour from the park to town for staples; in Denali it was a two-hour drive north to the nearest grocery store. Glacier saw one million visitors in six months; Denali had four hundred thousand visitors all year. No more salty mule packers and telemarking stoners; now we had truck drivers and stoners on four-wheelers. Glacier, hand tools and familiar, backbreaking tasks; Denali, heavy equipment and a new challenge every day. Who could separate the rewards from the drawbacks after a while?

The Denali trails shop is a conglomerate of slapdash structures salvaged, borrowed, begged from other worlds. The power tools, workbench, and rehandling station occupy a dusty metal shipping container, the omnipresent Alaska building-in-a-pinch (commonly referred to as a Conex after the trade name emblazoned on its side). The saw shed is a plywood shack that contains chainsaws and their tack, a cabinet full of Griphoists, block and tackle, winches, and come-alongs. The walls are lined with miscellany: haul chains, tow straps, forty kinds of fasteners (carriage bolts, turnbuckles, all-thread). Then there's a passel of poorly organized safety gear: a metal trash can full of brain buckets, caution tape, orange vests, and traffic signs. A long, brown building with a rotting front porch holds traditional trails hand tools, hung in racks by their heads. Broken tools lean in a corner, awaiting someone on light duty.

Rumors of a new shop persisted. Ralph alluded to it. We helped clear the site (more tundra to transplant), but despite blueprint on the wall, I'd believe it when I saw it. What would we do with a brand-new shop, anyway? Who needed a concrete slab free of oil stains, unmarred drywall? A conference room, or God forbid, an ice machine? How on earth could we remain true to our grimy underdog status in a glossy shop, the structural version of new Carhartts? We borrowed tools and space from everyone else—a garage from the utilities crew, table saw from the carpenters, drill press and welding bay in the auto shop—and maybe they would have rather we stayed out of their way. But the back corner suited us, rusted and warped, falling down, out of sight, where we could thrive on getting things done however it worked: borrow, stretch, invent, replicate, brace, scrounge, reinforce, weld. Return. Repeat.

Back and forth from grad school to woodswork, my vocabulary changed. In cusp months—May, September—I used the wrong words in the wrong settings. My raunchy trails mouth carried over to the first sessions of fiction workshop when I was tempted to write on manuscripts, “This is total bullshit,” and while vernacular does make for vivid writing, I couldn't pretend that “fucking awesome” was a useful phrase for discussing aesthetics. By the time months of school passed and art openings and poetry readings had given me more appropriate language for scholarly discourse, I'd be back to work again, explaining to my crew that the season's project would require a “paradigm shift,” and parsing the ubiquitous grammatical errors in NPS memos.

It's true that some academics swear and some seasonal laborers have killer vocabularies, but the linguistic well I draw from in each arena tastes of different minerals. This necessity of dialect is satisfying, the way diction gets woven in with the spirit of the endeavor. There's no language bond like looking at a finished piece of trailwork and slapping your crew high fives with a “hell yeah!” just as there's true pleasure in crafting well-turned arguments and hearing the ring of complicated syntax. I like hauling up these opposite buckets; the challenge, when both modes are intuitive, is to blend them ably, to use the right words in the right contexts, to consider audience, intent, relationship. In each realm, a quote from the opposite one guides me. For trails situations, pithy writing advice helps translate wordy directions: “Say it plain.” When in academia, a trails favorite is a good mantra: “Obscenity is the crutch of the illiterate motherfucker.”

A ninety-one-mile road cleaves Denali's northeastern corner, the only developed road corridor within six million acres. Beginning at the north entrance and terminating just east of Wonder Lake at the old mining settlement of Kantishna, the mostly gravel thoroughfare weaves over passes and across river bars, paralleling the Alaska Range through some of the wildest country it is possible to enter by road vehicle. And with few exceptions (researchers, permitted photographers, park staff) that vehicle is a bus. Private traffic is prohibited beyond the initial fifteen-mile stretch, leaving visitors these options: an interpretive tour bus for packaged cruisers who want to stay put, a shuttle bus for visitors who want to get on and off, and a camper bus for backcountry users who just want to get out.

Traffic on the park road has been managed this way since 1972, when the completion of the George Parks Highway connecting Anchorage and Fairbanks doubled visitation to the previously remote area in just one year. In the forty-some years since, tourism has morphed from large-scale to supersized, and it is only because of foresight and a road plan that Denali's wildlife remains relatively unharassed and its visitors' experience enhanced. As I write this, park management is proposing more-lenient road capacity parameters under pressure from tourist-industry big guns and the constant march toward growth: more buses, more rest areas, more access, more exceptions, more.

As a ranger at Arches in 1968, Edward Abbey lobbied to halt all road construction in national parks, and to make existing roads accessible only by foot, bicycle, or shuttle (his concession to children, the elderly, and the disabled). Abbey's hope has clearly not come to pass; development in parks has exponentially increased since his death in 1989. Now the norm is the Going-to-the-Sun Highway in Glacier, choked in summer with bumper-to-bumper traffic and mountain goats licking antifreeze in sweltering parking lots, or the Valley in Yosemite, where a line of glistening autos flows at the base of the big walls like a metal river. Amid the grim realities of a burdened national park system and a public obsessed with the private vehicle, Denali's progressive road policy is a respite. To properly honor Edward Abbey, though, I should not use his name in the same paragraph as the phrase “policy is a respite.” Abbey would probably say that policy talk is a respite for small and fearful minds. Though Denali's road is far better than many, I know that for Abbey, this is still too much. And though I love getting out into the park quickly, I know what I'm trading. When I tuck my monkey wrench into my pocket, I wince.