Dirt Work (25 page)

“They'll grow in the trail, Jack! Mow 'em down!” I barked. I felt like Slim, but I was right. We were there, with loppers and handsaws and time. I'd stopped crying over every tree years ago. So, back and forth we went, all day, Jack trying to spare a few green things, Chip trudging through long sections with his loppers all but dragging in the dirt, and me at the rear, harping:
Farther back Chip, cut more, Jack, don't be so timid.
I focused on utter mayhem, bent over with a saw and a nipper, hand-powered destruction in my wake.

Midafternoon, the guys were out of sight ahead. I shouldered my pack and tools to catch up, passing through the quarter mile they'd just brushed. The corridor looked good, not as far back as I'd have taken it, but much better than the morning's tentative grooming. I picked up the pace, walked a ways before my bladder demanded attention. I was about to drop my pants in the brush, when just ahead, a single, bowed aspen sapling caught my eye, arched into the trail like a flag, its base ten feet off in the tundra. It would have hit a hiker in the face. Who on
earth
would walk past that with a lopper in his hand? Fucking slackers.

I stepped up my stride, hit the tree almost at a run, reaching up to lop the tip before I headed to the base to prune it flush. I spread the blades to fit around the trunk, muttering, I am sure, when the tree jerked back, up and away, and a witchy voice hollered from the brush,
Oh, no you don't!
I jumped two feet and nearly hit the ground before I made sense of it: Jack off trail, cackling his infectious snicker, clutching the base of the limb he'd used to set me up. And there I was, hook in my mouth, line and sinker halfway down my throat, worm dangling near my belly. My indignant mask fell off in shards, useless. First laughter, then tears, Jack red-faced, me holding my sides, Chip joining in from the other side of the trail where he'd watched it all go down: “You shoulda seen your face!” he said. I could see my face, no question: grumpy and smug, the ideal target. We laughed so hard I wet my pants, but just a little.

Once in a while, a hiker will happen by and ask, “Who needs trails, anyway? Isn't this supposed to be wilderness?” The question's subtext is most often a hands-on-hips, leave-the-land-alone stance, underscored with a purist dose of “Humans don't belong where they can't get on their own.” Usually, the gadfly is an idealistic postcollege environmentalist, a kid who's read a little Abbey and thought about more wild places than he (or she) has actually been. He needs wild places to remain “untouched” because he himself feels molested by the world.

I swallow the defensive retort that rises in my throat (idealist! pansy! academic! faux-hippie-frat-boy-never-spent-a-night-out-would-get-lost-without-a-trail-can't-use-a-compass moron!). I conjure my own college self, the girl who pulled out survey stakes and memorized Gary Snyder poems and saved saplings from driveway cracks and rinsed and reused a smooth rock for toilet paper (resting it on top of the tank between uses). I take a deep breath, ask, and listen: “So you like to hike?” and “What's your favorite wild place?”

I don't usually tell the critics the answers I'm thinking, which are that humans have been “building” trails, de facto, for as long as we've been traversing Earth (hunter-gatherers, Romans, Incas) and that, as the Taoist proverb says, “When many go in one direction, so a road is made.” I don't tell them that indigenous people and explorers and grizzly bears and ungulates—all totemic, for the questioner I speak of—are famous trail makers. That historically, a trail is less infrastructure than trace, the path made by passing.

I do tell them that when people all pass in one direction, the impact intensifies. Especially in weak spots. When a muddy section forms in a poorly drained area, people avoid it by walking to the side. When a tree falls in the trail, hikers don't climb under or over, they go around. The impact broadens. In highly used areas without maintenance or planned layout, the damage to vegetation and topography can be extreme—we've all witnessed the trampled grass and rutted gullies that crisscross the spots on the river where high schoolers go to party, or the hammered overlooks thronged by viewers with cameras. Trailwork can look a lot like development, but in many cases, it's actually preservation. This is where infrastructure comes in, accidental path turned to engineered thing. By channeling and minimizing impact, trails save places from the people who love them. If I can't convince you, before-and-after pictures would, a mud hole in one and a nature trail in the next, the users, slightly herded, none the wiser.

To the
why trails
question, for me only one answer sticks. Trails get people to places for experiences, and experiences in places help people know places, and people who know places will sacrifice so those places can thrive. The conservation movement wouldn't have a prayer if it relied only on mass mailings with free address labels and lawyers taking coal companies to task. Preservation efforts succeed because people come into contact with land, and begin to remember it, and want to protect it, the way we will protect children we know and love from harm faster than nameless children on the news. Trails in national parks and state forests and city preserves help people be “in” nature in a way they don't dare, aren't able, or don't have time to on their own. A woman on a wide asphalt trail leans from her wheelchair to press cheek to the bark of a tree. Noisy children stoop to brush the velvety cap of a mushroom on a forest floor. I know people shifted by a snake that slides across their path, unmade by the moon over an oxbow, no noise but the hammer-headed ramming of a woodpecker, or their own breath in their throats. I've leaned, stooped, been shifted and unmade.

In the best of all possible worlds, our homes and our daily lives would bring us into close contact with the natural world and we would stop to notice it—the birds in our backyard trees, the way winter has changed, wild plants along the foundations of our houses. In the best world, we would treasure it, participate in it, even. But for many, many of us, rushed lives of mayhem and macadam do not nurture such relationship with anything. For others, nature is destination more than home. Constructed trails and trips to parks are certainly a function of lives that have drifted away from wholeness. Nonetheless, they are paths.

Trail building feels right most of the time. I examine my life's work with the stern eye of a Protestant—the vocation, the calling—and the open heart of a Buddhist—the hope of right-livelihood, of doing no harm. If I felt my work aligned with damage and asphalt over trees and space, I would like to think I could never have done it this long.

But, sometimes, the questioner is not a twentysomething crusader, or Abbey's ghost. It's my own shadow self. The one who helps build a bridge for trail users to access a place that would be better off without a bridge at all. It's the one who drives a Bobcat and pumps cans of diesel in service of “wilderness.” The one who hammers in survey stakes along a new alignment, and curses the idealist who pulled our flagging from the trees. For the skeptic and my shadow, I have plenty of answers, but no last word. Trails and parks, my life's work, my whole entire life, is bound up in these intersections: wild and managed, dreams and paychecks, ideals and reality, world and home. At every crossroads, a sign: Hazards in trail. Fork in path. Junction ahead, ½ mile.

SHOVEL

Basics
   One of the most rudimentary and useful objects in the history of tools, a shovel is a hand cupped for scooping, perched at the end of a very long arm. It manages tasks our ancestors did on knees—hollow out a cook spot, dig up roots, bury a loved one.

Etymology
   From Old English,
scofl
, of Germanic origin, describing the same tool; related to the Dutch,
schoffel
, German,
Schaufel
, and connected to the English verb
shove.
“Shovel” is both noun (spade, trowel, scoop) and verb (dig, move, scoop).

Maintenance
   Most people rarely think about shovel maintenance. This is as it should be. One who spends much time thinking about the care of a shovel is probably avoiding the work that needs doing with it. That said, a shovel head's edge, or digging blade, can be sharpened with a standard bastard file. A sharp edge aids in the cutting—of vegetation, consolidated fill—that a shovel must sometimes perform to get at the digging it's made to do. A wooden handle should be checked for cracks and splinters, and kept well oiled. Re-handling of a shovel is possible, though harder than re-handling an axe because the head is riveted, not wedged, into place. The basic rule of thumb is to use a shovel without thinking too much, until a problem presents itself. Usually, the problem with a shovel is the shoveler.

List
   Things I have shoveled: sidewalks, snowdrifts, holes (for outhouses and bridge abutments and potatoes), driveways, fill pits. Also, footings for rock walls, tie-ins for cribbing, horse shit, dog shit, mule shit, a grave for a songbird caught in an early frost. Coal, gravel, dirt, straw, mud, cedar chips, muck, bark, left-over acorn hulls from a squirrel's midden, water from a gooey ditch. Once, I lifted a dumb spruce grouse from the middle of the road in a shovel, carried it twenty yards to safer ground.

Users
   As tools go, shovel is the great equalizer. Almost everyone has used one. The daintiest gardeners use trowels. Kids shovel snow to build forts. Bulk-aisle grocery shoppers fill spice jars with scoops. A shovel is intuitive. Easy to figure out. Little tricks are gleaned from years of use—how to stack hands, leverage dependent on the weight of the load: choked up for wet gravel, high and loose to fling sawdust into a trash bin; how to brace elbow on knee and pivot the shovel from pile to destination. Not everyone knows to use a shovel blade for cutting through tough material, or the back for tamping and smoothing, and not everyone is fast, or strong enough to dig all day. But everyone knows what to do with a shovel. Give one to a kid at the beach and watch.

Past
   Early modern shovels had wooden heads reinforced with a metal “shoe” along the edge, called a shod shovel. Many shovels in many hands make history. Early civilizations used pieces of wood and animal bones for digging and scooping. Shovels leaned against the Colosseum and Angkor Wat, at the base of the Eiffel Tower, at the foot of the Great Wall. Shovels dug gold, built railroads. The Ames shovel, an early American prototype still manufactured today, was issued to US troops in World War I for tunnels and foxholes, digging latrines, hand-to-hand combat, and burying soldiers at battle's end. Look around—an urban subway system, the pilings of a shipyard dock, the basement of your house. Shovels, more than bootstraps, are the secret to success.

Chapter 6. Denali: Home

(Why I stayed put)

When you commit yourself to transience, mobility becomes a kind of home. You learn to thrive in the space hemmed in by movement, like the hobo, Gypsy, beatnik, the beggar monk, the traveling salesman, long-haul truckers: icons all. Yet the search for a resting place undergirds equally compelling narratives. The Homeric quest, the Buddha's odyssey, Dorothy in Oz, the armchair genealogist's discoveries. Whether we move or whether we stay, most of us are trying to know some place, to get our hooks into a home. Home found me when I wasn't even looking anymore.

Three years after our arrival in Alaska from Montana, I slogged to the end of my master's degree, the unlikely thing that had lured me north. In May, Gabe and I moved out of our Anchorage apartment, our home for two-thirds of three years. We met Alec in Talkeetna for a trip on the Ruth Glacier, a south-flowing ice field on the flanks of the Alaska Range, the perfect place to celebrate my graduation beneath thousand-foot granite faces with glacier travel and summit ridges and whiskey-spiked hot cocoa made from melted snow. After the trip, all of us would return to Denali for a second season. For Gabe and me, beyond that was anyone's guess. I'd always thought—insisted, a few years back—we'd return to western Montana. But on the Ruth, climbing peaks together, in love with Alaska, I wasn't sure what fall would bring.

Summer passed. September came. Other seasonals left. We stayed. Gabe and I had worked ten seasons in three different places, moving every six months from park to town to park. But that fall, we had no reason to leave when the trails season was over. Grad school finished, Alaska not letting go. No pressing need for a winter job. A cozy log cabin with cheap rent north of the park. We stayed.

On paper, we were still seasonals, temporary employees, trail crew leaders laid off when gloves wore out and snow flew. But for the first time in our twelve-year history together, six months passed with no move. No biannual novelty shot, no sorted possessions, protracted goodbyes. No identity based on being about-to-leave. The realization was as striking as sun in my eyes: though the job was seasonal, I was not. I lived in Denali. Since then, we've sallied forth, of course: trips abroad, holidays with family, arts residencies, a semester of teaching Outside, a winter cabin-sitting for a friend, but always returning in between. Six years past that first choice to stay, I know all four seasons here, back to back, year to year. Digging in.

I have no story for my apprenticeship with a shovel. The first anecdote I know about using one involves the toy shovel in my childhood backyard sandbox, which I used to pour a scoop of sand (1/100th of a yard?) down the throat of the neighbor kid. With that tool, at least, I had prowess early, and an instinctive understanding: move material (sand) from the place where it is (sandbox) to the place where you want it (mouth). Some things are too simple to require narrative.

Summer in Denali is fast and furious, a drunk on a spree before he quits for good, a kid out past bedtime in beckoning light. Mid-April, it sets in that winter is on the wane and then,
boom,
the upward climb toward solstice, June 21, the longest day: light until 2 a.m. and again half an hour later, nightfall just a thicker dusk. The mountains thaw and rivers burgeon and tourism rages by June. Hotels and shops throw off window boards, winter's toothy bite a secret most summer folks will never guess at. RVs and bus tours flood the highways. Elderly folks clutch each other's arms in crosswalks. Newlyweds buy cheap T-shirts, snap photos near anything that says “Alaska.”

At work, we get serious. One week there's the indoor organizing and training, the buttoning up of winter's projects (notching logs, fixing tools), and the next week, the full-throated roar of construction time. The ground thaws day by inch and we move dirt with Bobcats and shovels and backs, applying ourselves to trailwork in a fury adrenalized by the ticking clock. Bridges, switchbacks, survey, rockwork: there won't be time for all we have to do.

At home, summer to-do lists are as epic—building projects, fishing trips for the winter's freezer, peaks to climb, gardens growing, visitors coming, going, coming. Weeks pass, blurred. Days go by with four hours' sleep until I collapse for a weekend of deep breaths, wonder how long this pace can go on even as I pull the light in close, rub it into my skin, save it up against the craving dark. After June's longest day, we're over the apex and dropping to the bottom of the bell curve, first slowly—July lingers, some years warm and dry, others rainy and cool—but August hits and even when it's warm, the light is leaving. Berries ripen overnight; tourists lessen, trickle, then stop, as if their source dried up. Wolves and bears scarf all the calories they can find. Snowshoe hares and ptarmigan change to the white that will conceal them in snow. In Denali, summer is intermission to winter's concert. We guzzle drinks in the lobby with friends, buy CDs, and make a quick trip to the bathroom; any minute, the lights will flicker and the rest of the show will begin.

Trail crews live for pranks. Along with dirty jokes, practical jokes are bread and butter, and over the years in Glacier, I'd tasted the classics. My first year with Reba, I hiked all day with a melon-size rock she'd hidden in the bottom of my pack. If you left your boots outside your tent, they'd be on top of the outhouse by morning, courtesy of the early riser who found them unguarded. Watch your lunchbox closely or Mack would steal your Snickers and hide it in the saw kit.

But the Denali crew, with its merger of loose cannons and heavy equipment, raised the stakes. My crew stuffed Nic's truck cab with tree limbs and we returned to our pickup at the end of the day to a six-hundred-pound rock in the truck bed, heavy enough to squash the tires. No way to remove the rock without the Bobcat (long gone), so we drove back to the yard with evidence of Nic's triumph hulking over the tailgate. Crews traveled across Riley Creek to a job site via a zipline, and pranksters were always tying the pulley on one side or the other, hiding the harnesses, the tensioning lever, anything to strand someone or force a hand-over-hand along the 110-foot cable. On top of the railroad trestle that spanned another crew's work site, we patiently awaited their lunch break and, from stories above, upended our water bottles on their heads. One kidnapping spree lasted four months, as crews swapped two stuffed mascots, a snowman and a multi-colored teddy bear, which appeared in photos with duct-tape gags and glued-together ransom notes. By season's end, the snowman had been decapitated and the teddy rocked into a gabion wall, visible only to those of us who know where to look.

Birthdays gave carte blanche
;
the more elaborate the trick, the higher the honor to the recipient. People got thrown in the creek, force-fed rotten concoctions, duct-taped to furniture, blindfolded for an X-rated piñata, and locked in a Knaack box. Sometimes it's hard to believe that the median age of the gang was late-twenties, and that all of these schemes went on during work hours with no drop in our renowned productivity. When I think about quitting trails or imagine those office jobs I've seen on TV, I know that along with labor and nature, this is the stuff I'd miss the most: hiding someone's clothes while they're skinny-dipping at lunch break, a parade of floats made of power wheelbarrows, climbing trees to drop onto an unsuspecting crew mate passing below, or filling the truck's defrost vents with sawdust so that, on a wet day, the driver turns it on to a face full of woodchips.

Nic is the oldest of the gang at fifty-six, and claims he's never felt younger than he does on the trail crew. But no one can do trails forever. Neil Young says it's better to burn out than to rust, and the old trails adage holds that
It's a good life until you weaken.
Everyone in it knows this career isn't endlessly sustainable. Bodies wear out, people move on. But I could laugh like that for another fifty years. Please, hide bear scat in my boots. Okay, sure, jury-rig my truck for a harmless explosion. Yes, fine, stuff spruce needles down my pants while I'm sleeping at lunch break, you sneaky bastard. Please.

Near the end in Glacier, burnout threatened: same tasks, the constant repetition of work, marching orders from a maintenance schedule set in stone. In Denali, leaders were far more involved with deciding the way things got done. We ordered equipment, designed and gave trainings, kept inventories, surveyed trails, wrote evaluations, and oversaw progress. Most of which was satisfying stuff. Gabe, whose job became subject to furlough a few seasons in (a step up from seasonal, yet blessedly, still impermanent), did even more logistics—parkwide presentations, all-employee meetings, NPS indoctrination trainings. In exchange for these upgrades, Gabe got us health insurance and the first 401(k) plan of our lives, and we both got new challenges. The trouble is, sometimes I'd go a whole day without picking up a shovel. Between the supervisory role and light-duty months because of persistent injuries, I often traded the mattock for the keyboard, the chainsaw for the camera.

No one wants to be a grunt forever. The longer you work, the more opinions you have. You crave responsibility, and then you get it. But for a die-hard laborer at heart, who'd rather work than talk about work, the slippery slope into oversight is terrifying, because before you know it, you stop doing the things you love, the reasons you've stuck out the downsides of the job all along. It happens to everyone who climbs the rungs. Cell phones, daily planners, and spreadsheets close in. Meetings about jobs supplant jobs. The crews wait in the field while we stand in the doorways of management offices, one foot out, one in.

There are wonderful things about rising in the ranks. Mentoring is a highlight for me. Nothing beats seeing a new laborer's confidence rise when his tree falls as planned, or the delight on someone's face when she unlocks the mystery of the log scribe, the clinometer, the skid steer. I like when my input is sought early on, instead of after it's too late. I like to choose the new saw to replace the one that burned out, what equipment to rent, for how long. I like to sketch plans, stockpile materials, line out the steps, see the job through, critique it when it's over. It's nice to be asked how something should be done. Nicer still to have an answer, backed by years of work.

But with the challenge of responsibility comes bullshit, in delicate balance. Some days in the office I longed for the era of the simple task: dig a hole, right there; fell a tree, peel it; hike this far and clean the drains, as fast as you can. Gabe arrived home at the end of a day, brain fried and body restless. Human-resources meetings trumped miles walked that day. Where's the tipping point, when the seesaw drops to the ground with a teeth-jarring bang? I want to do my job for the reasons I always have: because I'm good at it, because it fulfills me, because it's important. Not just for the paycheck, a promotion, or the stability. I've never wanted to climb any ladder for the NPS except the one leaning against the tool shed. I'll know when I'm done, I told myself. The toolless days were still the minority. I hoped I'd have the sense to throw in the trowel before they disappeared.

Our first summer in Denali, we lived in C-Camp, the NPS seasonal housing compound just inside the park entrance. Brown cabins lined the road to the maintenance lot where out-of-state Subarus plastered with bumper stickers sat parked next to ten-yard dump trucks with Peterbilt mud flaps. We walked to the trails shop from our one-room log A-frame, the rent invisible, taken directly out of our paychecks like chits at the company store. We showered in the public washhouse, planned backcountry trips for weekends off. My reality was defined by the park, the job, the parameters of a transplant, up for the summer. I knew few locals from the nearby town of Healy—Ralph, in Denali ten years; Owens, the fellow trail crew leader born in Alaska; a handful of permanents from other divisions.

Returning the second summer, Gabe and I left C-Camp in search of privacy, a place we could have a dog, neighbors, a life beyond the park's rhythms. We moved north, outside Healy, population 984. Healy's year-round employers are the coal mine visible across the Nenana River, the power plant (coal-fired), and the park, “protected” from both of them, twelve miles south. The two-lane Parks Highway passes through the middle of Healy and its face to the world is the quintessential small-town one—two gas stations, a ratty bar, a truck-stop diner with the usual gut-bomb breakfasts served all day. Off the road, a K–12 school whose small library is open to the public four afternoons a week, a community center with a tiny clinic, a VFD. Healy booms when summer tourists flock to Denali, but people pass through quickly. Despite its scenic backdrop, Healy is as invisible to travelers as the apartment buildings outside a New York City subway car, or the neat ranch houses off Interstate 90.

Residents cluster in town on gravel streets or up creeks and on ridges, tucked into aspen groves, hidden in brush. We live up Panguingue Creek, or “out Stampede,” as we say. Stampede Road tees west off the highway toward the park on the skyline, turning from pavement to gravel to two-track to trail, finally passable only by mountain bike and ATV, or dog teams and snow-gos in winter. Out Stampede there are a few big houses, but most people live in modest homes and tiny cabins they've built out-of-pocket, a tarp-covered lumber pile far more common than a heated garage. Our first rental was particularly rustic—a sixteen-by-twenty log cabin with no running water—but by no means unusual. Septic systems and wells indicate longevity, money socked away or borrowed to get three hundred feet deep where the water table lies. The rest of us shit in outhouses and collect rainwater in fifty-gallon barrels and haul drinking water from the well house with five-gallon jugs or PVC tanks in the backs of pickups. Friends with showers offer them freely. At dry-cabin potlucks, people bring their own full water bottles so as not to burden the hosts with more hauling.