Dirt Work (29 page)

Wild is the coming of the new, blown in from far corners. It's the middle of a story that won't be quit, breath caught in the chest, empathy or anger near enough to touch. Wildness is red, it's purple, color against white, against black, against sky. It is fur on a tree branch discarded by an urgent itch. Wild is old, bones mulching themselves beneath the earth, the possibility of buried life, deep. Wildness is right there in front of you: there, right
there.
Wildness is gone.

Holly came to trails my third year in Denali. She was a twentysomething with some labor skills, a year as a ranger in the Interp division, and a hankering to learn trailwork. She distinguished herself as quick and eager to laugh. She moved faster than all four guys on her crew, first in line for a task, chattering, blond hair flying out behind. I realized it: I was the old girl now, the longtimer with a few tricks up her sleeve, aching joints, a chip on her shoulder. Holly was friendly and eager to please, much cheerier than my surly default, yet something about her—the hustle, the gusto, the wide eyes—reminded me of an earlier me. I love seeing women get in green, a little off-kilter, and then fall into a rhythm, a confidence, the excitement kindled.

Her second season, Holly was on Gabe's crew with Rico, an L.A. kid just out of high school. It was Rico's first time away from his close-knit Hispanic family. He was a good hand: he did what he was told and worked hard. Early on, though, he made the mistake that many young guys do: he tried to protect the girls from hard work. In labor's version of chivalry, he thought he should take two tools so Holly had to carry only one. He worried that her wheelbarrow load was too heavy. Holly assured him she could handle it, and proceeded to work him into the ground. Like most of the women I've known in my trails tenure, Holly made up for her size with focus and endurance and a determination that wouldn't downshift until the guys were flat on their backs. Behind every good man, twice as hard for half the credit, all that jazz.

At the end of the season, Holly took me aside: “Christine!” she said, “I have to tell you something so cool!” On his last day of work Rico had given Holly a shy little speech. I could picture it as she described him, eyes downcast, his mumbling laugh, the Spanish lilt beneath English words: “I remember the beginning of the season when you wouldn't let me help you and I thought it wasn't good for you to work like that, and then you worked harder than anyone! I never knew girls could work like that before!” Holly's grin was so wide it must have hurt. “Then he said, ‘You really showed me girls can do anything!' ” I listened with my arms folded across my chest, trying to swallow the lump in my throat, the embarrassing thing that wells up in me when this happens—when people outdo their limits, teach each other things, and themselves, when trailwork, hard work, is the conduit for a breakthrough. Holly finished with a fast breath in, her nervous laugh, rapid-fire chatter as one syllable tumbled into the next: “Anyways,” she said, “I couldn't wait to tell you that! While he was talking I thought,
I have to tell Christine!
”

I said something I hoped was sufficient, agreed it was an incredibly cool moment. But I felt clumsy and inarticulate in the face of Holly's excitement, and Rico's realization, and the fact that I was implicated in it, too, because Holly knew I'd care, because she knew that I knew that girls kicked ass. I felt in that moment a pride in mentorship, and sisterhood, and also in the fact that, for all it sometimes seems like just another job, being a woman in a “man's world” is an activism, a standing up to assumptions and limits and proclaiming with our bodies, our whole selves,
I can be however suits me.
And how that tells the men,
You can, too.
It's one of those rooftop moments, all of us hollering in corny solidarity: do what you love, be proud of what you do. Get after it!

How could I help but think of Reba and Cassie, then, the Glacier women I learned from, all the women since then that I'd taught, the whole relay line of us, all the way to Holly, baton from palm to palm to sweaty palm? I am still not quite ready to quit my leg of the race, to say,
Go, Reach, Stick
, and let go the wand into the next hand. But I'm pretty sure that when the time comes, there will be another woman in front of me ready to take it, arm outstretched behind, fingers sticky, a tough girl running from something and toward something else. She'll tear up the next leg, feet kicking gravel, chest high, while I stop, hands on my knees, pulse in my ears, to catch my breath.

Japanese carpenters refer to their tools collectively as
dogu
, which translates to “instruments of the way.”
The way
is the path to the heart of life, through the heart of spirit. Dogen Zenji, a thirteenth-century Zen master, said, “To study the way is to study the self, to study the self is to forget the self, to forget the self is to awaken into the ten thousand things.” I want to remember this. Tools. Self. Ten thousand things.

In a house with no plumbing, we imitate the pleasures of civilized life. Contrary to stereotype, an outhouse is a wonderful thing. A bathroom outside puts you in the thick of the world first thing in the morning, no matter the weather. A piece of closed-cell foam insulation cut to fit over the hole makes a fine seat, even in winter, as warm as anyone's indoor throne.

For a kitchen sink, drop a stainless steel basin into the counter, no fixtures necessary. Drain it with an open-ended pipe, five-gallon bucket poised beneath. Haul water from the well in plastic cubies, in summer supplement with the forty-gallon barrel that sits beneath a gutter downspout. Use the water (so icy cold out of the well all year long it hurts your teeth) to fill the Gatorade jug that poses as a faucet on the sink's edge, press the little spigot: running water. For washing your face or the dishes, heat water in the kettle or the big tin pans. Once used to it, you forget this isn't how everyone lives. The plates are clean. The chicken soup is made with rainwater. Paper towels are a guilty luxury. It's normal until the day you forget to empty the slop bucket, and you drain a can of beans or dump a soaking pan and that last drop brings the water over the top of the bucket, flooding, thick and stinky, onto the floor, the rug, your feet. It doesn't matter if it's warm out or cold, light or dark, there's only one way to vent the disgust and that is to yell at the top of your lungs the refrain favored by inhabitants of dry cabins all over the state, the admission, to the plumbed universe, that we're posers at best:
My sink drains into a fucking bucket!

What I won't miss: Stiff neck. 7 a.m. in the polyester uniform. Every night, making a lunch big enough to last a ten-hour day. Tourist questions. Being part of “the system.” Backing the trailer with the lift-gate truck. Bullshit paperwork. The constant odor of farts. Sandwiches that taste like saw gas. Picking up other people's trash from the trucks. Editing rants while wearing green and gray. Twenty year olds who think they know everything. Realizing I could have done something better. Oblivious bosses. Sharing tools with people who take shitty care of them. Aiding development about which I feel ambivalent. Stale trail mix.

Song of Ourselves
(with apologies to Walt Whitman)

I celebrate you guys, and toast you,

And what you call a good day's effort, I shall also,

For every tool belonging to me as good belongs to you,
And also my emergency Snickers, if you need it.

I work and invite my soul,

We sweat and eat at our ease observing the way the mountains look in this light.

My tongue, every atom of my blood, honed in this soil, this air,

Born here of my work, born here from your work, and all that work we do together,

I, now thirty-eight years old in hard-to-complain-about health begin,

Hoping to keep moving like we do—quick, at ease—till lunch break, at least.

Alaska, in its abundance, taught me the meaning of enough. Berries at lunch break as far as I can reach without moving from my tundra nest. Berries in the evening after work's done, berries on dog walks, on weekends when hours pass in rhythm (gather and pluck, eat and hoard), every spare minute near brush pulsing with flora's urgent command:
pick, pick, pick.
Low-bush cranberries lasso the spectrum of red, the Yuletide hue made for door wreaths, the deep burgundy lit up from within. Blueberries plump with liquid sugar bring to mind nothing as much as bodies—curve of ass in tight jeans or the gorgeous, blackish swell of a healing bruise.

Sometimes I feel like the apocryphal post-Soviet woman who had a nervous breakdown her first time in an American grocery store. Bounty can be paralyzing, the awful clench of
how to choose
and
I'll never get it all.
The Tao Te Ching says, “There is no calamity like not knowing what is enough,” and so I'm slowly learning to note what I need, to be satisfied with what there is time for, not cowed by what I miss. There is so much enough; enough for the bears and my neighbors and the birds, enough for pies and pancakes and two batches of jam and a freezer stash, enough for a winy twinge in the air and the drop-and-rot that foments next decade's humus.

The biggest berries still catch my eye and my greedy fingers sometimes drop a handful reaching for one better, like Aesop's dog on the bridge who sacrificed the bone in his mouth for the prize in his reflection. But I'm learning to quiet such urgent grasping, to move from one bush to the next with purpose. The same steadiness applies in the mountains. No need to climb them all, tick names off the list. There are plenty. I'm learning that abundance both dwarfs and ignites longing.

Satiation—the ceasing of desire—is rare. We constantly defer a sense of completeness, clamoring after the next vacation, face cream, aerobics class, next president, appetizer, child. Desire is alluring, but satiation a subtler host, one that allows contentment to enter and linger. There is radical comfort in the heavy cloak of
enough
resting on my shoulders. Maybe this is what authentic feels like: Subtle. Heavy. Enough.

In Alaska Native traditions, the earth provides for people, even in the skeptical modern age. Tlingit memoirist Ernestine Hayes writes in
Blonde Indian
, “Remember that the land is enspirited. It is quickened. When as you conduct your life . . . remember that it too is conducting its life, and it sees you as well. . . . The land loves you. She misses her children.”
I used to think I could not speak of the earth this way. In my white mouth, it tasted of giddy romance, magical thinking. But something in me has shifted. When I kneel in a span of bushes spilling berries like a handful of marbles, I know that plants do not need humans as incentive to grow (though they evolve with us, their flowers bright to seduce our taste buds, seeds hitchhiking in our shit). I know Earth's ecosystem is impassive, rain and sun without attachment to my jams, relish, muffins. Yet in the face of this knowledge, the world offers itself: here is the cranberry in snow, frozen with sweetness intact; fish hauled in, fistfuls of eggs in its belly. There is the summer sun, up all day, shining, and there is the winter night, tucked in around me when I crave long rest. It's the skeptic's guise in which I feel the most at home, but sometimes, the fit is ill. I can't shake the feeling that I am being cared for, waking some mornings with light on my face before I have even begun to give my needs their names.

Wildness is taking things back. Wild is giving it all away.

I am a writer made by work. My sentences and stories are dictated by the body's rhythms; by rain, wind, sun, dirt; by the smells of animals and engines, the feel of feet in boots, a tool in hand. Proximity to wilderness has given me analogy for the way story finds Spirit, that alchemy by which the known world merges with the unknown through effort, imagination, and being in the right place at any time at all. God bless manual labor, for my lungs and legs and my bank account and my friendships, and yes, for my mind, which wanders while I do my tasks, which tinkers while expectations wane, which, unwatched, partakes in that inexplicable sorcery: wind and sweat in a pot with idea and image, mix them until they bubble and steam.

Dirt work is foundation work. On construction sites, dirt work happens before other work begins. Dig hole to examine layers. Is the soil well drained? How much rock? Excavate trough where sills will lay. Bury logs, build a berm, outslope so water will flow here, not there.

Dirt work is easy to overlook, unless you're the one doing it. Not everyone wants to:
Don't give me the dirt work, the shit job.
But someone else steps forward:
Dirt work is the best work. Give it to me.

Dirt work is the last work. When the project is finished, the site plan complete, then dirt work resumes. Mound up mulch, scarify soil to prepare for seed. Push excess fill to edges, load it and truck it away. Smooth out tire tracks. Back drag windrows. Inslope the turn. Deepen the ditch line: water must flow there, not here.

Dirt work is final. Dirt work is never done. No one can do all the dirt work. No one should do none.
Dirt work is good work. Give it to me.

Afterword

Since I began this book, years have passed. People in these pages have moved on, things have changed, in Montana and Alaska both. And Gabe and I don't work for the Park Service anymore. That era is past, partly our choice—eager for new challenges, out from under the watchful eye of the feds—and partly a sadder story, a book I haven't written. It's not easy to divulge that “America's Best Idea” has a dark side, as subject as any corporation to the march of development, the ruses of ladder climbers, and the misuse of employees. Trust me, I'd rather talk about tools.

Often, especially for seasonals, leaving a job means leaving a place. But Denali doesn't belong to me via the NPS anymore. I belong to the place, via the claim made by time spent and things learned. Such changes have prompted a career that giddy girl in Glacier could never have foreseen. Done with the park, but somehow, still not done with trailwork, Gabe and I started a trails business, doing survey, design, training, and construction across Alaska. Running a business with a spouse when between us we have a nickel's worth of business sense has been interesting. (To quote Paul Newman, “There are three rules for starting a business. Fortunately, we don't know any of them.”) Recession aside, we're paying bills due to the combinations that serve one well anywhere: sweat and patience, humility and confidence, good mentors, a little luck, very low overhead and duct tape. Shovels and machines bring home our paychecks. We keep on building bridges. So far, we're too small to fail.

Statewide work means travel, and between the busy field season and wintertime forays, I feel less rooted than in the NPS days. Still, Healy remains our home. Over the past few years, figuring out a way to stay, we moved out of our rental, built a tiny studio on our tundra, and in lieu of the house planned when the park job seemed permanent, put up a sixteen-foot yurt. Off the grid, we have a woodshed built of salvage, fenced raised beds, and a killer outhouse. The park, that old ground zero, feels like another world. We still end up in C-Camp occasionally, to bring the recycling, or poach a shower after a winter trip. When we drive past our old cabin, I think back to my first summer with fondness, introduction to a landscape, the edge of community, by way of a park entrance. There's a swath cut through C-Camp now, a wider-than-it-needed-to-be road corridor leading to a bigger parking lot, the new trails shop I had to see to believe. Nothing stays the same. The old days always seem like the good ones. From far off, it's easy to mistake rust for gold.

As it turns out, to know a place is a tough and complicated goal. It means more than knowing all the hiking trails or where to get a cheap beer, what transplants learn first. In part, knowing a place means knowing its seasons and what indicates them: when the Sandhill cranes pass over on their way from Arctic to equator, when the cranberries ripen, which two weeks the wood frogs sing loud. Knowing when to put out the rainwater barrel because a hard freeze is unlikely, and when to harvest carrots because a hard freeze could come any time. Knowing a place means investing in it like you aren't going anywhere, even if you might: volunteering at the library, going to community meetings, trying to find the owner of a lost dog. Knowing a place means knowing what I love (the smell of tundra plants in rain), what I hate (small-town gossip), and what has nothing to do with me (when the bears den up). Mostly it means tuning into a place beyond what it can offer. This takes daily effort, daily noticing. Annie Dillard says, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives,” and that's exactly why a seasonal life can also be a permanent one.

Looking back the sixteen years since I first showed up in a trails shop with new Carhartts and soft hands, I can see all those days stacked up like cordwood, built into months, and then years, and now, here it is, this hunch growing in me all along, Glacier, Cordova, Denali, and on: living somewhere doesn't mean you know it, and a job alone doesn't make a place a home. It takes work to do that.