Dirt Work (8 page)

Here's a favorite story in the trail crew canon: an east-side crew is doing rockwork on a busy trail, six or seven spread over several hundred yards. Two hikers approach, one lagging behind, so the first hiker stops near the crew, panting, hands on his fleshy hips, safari hat with a wide brim, bear bells jingling. The comment comes:
Who's the boss around here, anyway?
Somebody, let's say it's Kent, gestures down trail at Marcy. She's edging a rock step with a chisel. Near forty, she's been leading Glacier crews for more than fifteen years.

“Her?” The hiker pauses. “You're sayin' the
girl's
the boss?” Kent nods. Of course Marcy's the boss. Who else?

“The GIRL'S the
boss?
” the hiker asks again. He shouts back to his friend: “Hey Joe! Guess whut! The girl's the boss!”

Joe stops. “Whud you say?”

“Ah said, the girl's the boss!”

“Whud's that, the
girl's
the boss?”

“Yeah, I said the
GIRL.
Is. The
BOSS!
” It goes on, at top volume. Joe catches up, pink-faced and sweaty. They cackle longer, trying to get a rise out of Marcy, failing. When the men finally hike out of earshot, the crew loses it, rolling in the dust, tools helter-skelter. They can't breathe.

We choose certain stories for retelling, like any subculture; not every anecdote gets codified. Why this one? It's hilarious, for one, with the pleasure of reenacting ridiculous behavior: stories with dramatic potential get the most replay. Also, it gently mocks tourists, or better yet, lets them mock themselves, and if there's a uniting factor among seasonals, it's that we love to laugh at tourists. In a world where our status is tenuous and somewhat stigmatized—hourly wages, little recognition, no guarantees—we have the power that emplacement grants. Most of us are not “locals” by strictest measure, but no matter how short our time here, whether we hail from Kalispell or Kansas, we aren't visitors; for now, we belong.

But in this case, even the tourist is incidental. “The
girl's
the
boss
” is the part that matters, the relic, the fox's grapes. This simple phrase gestures toward a complexity we rarely talk about but instinctively know: the subtext of rank, who answers to whom, the realigning assumptions about gender, and the distance left to go before we're all so equal, we don't think about it anymore. There's something perfect about this story, the hiker's disbelief, and the truth of what he finds so difficult to grasp. Despite the parody, the ignorance even, the story's truth stands: the girl
is
the boss. While the crew howls, Marcy smiles, taps her chisel until the shard falls away.

The dictionary says argillite is sedimentary rock, fine-grained and made up of hardened clay particles. Geology says argillites are mud turned to stone, compacted silt, kin to shale, slate, schist. Art says the Rockies' argillites are pink and green (iron oxidization, science interrupts), bright in rain, colored in Gauguin's palette. Traildogs say argillite is plentiful along the trails that skirt the passes and ridges of the Lewis Range; unlike many sedimentary rocks, it doesn't split easily, but when it does, leaves angling planes ideal for tight-jointed rockwork. Experience says at the top of the last rise before Comeau Pass, the trail winds across a bench where rocks look dropped from sky like huge dice—hulky blocks you can climb up on for lunch and look over the three miles of trail below, down to the tiny chalet, out past Lake McDonald to the Apgar Hills, to the North Fork. History says that Precambrian Belt sedimentary rocks were displaced during Tertiary time eastward onto Cretaceous rocks by the Lewis thrust fault. The rangers say the park has been the setting for at least ten periods of glaciation. Hazy late afternoon says it's 90 degrees down in the valley, so sit a while longer on the rocks in the sun, let your hair get hot while the breeze dries sweat on skin. The wind says
sun water dust rest stone.

Packers are cowboys; ours were Sheldon, Slim, and Greg. Slim was tall and skinny and hard as chert; Greg, round and jolly with a huge belly, a handlebar mustache, and a redneck twang; and Sheldon, the fairest, quiet and dapper, with sandy hair and a singsong mumble. Sheldon wore a white felt hat and, on days off, fancy western shirts tucked into pressed Wranglers. Greg usually sported a summer straw, and was prone to expressions like “cotton-picker” and “sumbitch.” Slim wore a black hat swiped right off the villain in a fifties western. At first it was his foul mouth that caught you off guard, and later when you'd come to expect the cussing, his high, girlish laugh would do the same.

Glacier has a lifetime's worth of mountains to climb. My first was Lincoln Peak, just above our Sperry cabin. Anyone who knows Lincoln will smirk; it's hardly a peak at all, just a bump on a ridgeline punctuated with craggy outcrops and a window-size hole in the rock where sky peeks through the ridge from the other side. I had climbed a few peaks before, scrambled a scree pile in the Sierra as a college student, snowshoed low summits in the White Mountains, seconded a six-pitch classic in Yosemite. But I hadn't been alone in the mountains much, not enough to trust my judgment. What was too steep? Which way was best? Where was the danger?

From Lincoln Peak you can see Gunsight Mountain farther up the ridge, at 9,000 feet, and across Comeau Pass from Gunsight, Mount Edwards at 8,900 feet, and massive Jackson, visible to the southeast, one of the five 10,000-footers in Glacier. I would climb those three several times each over the course of my hitches in the district, but few summits in the park are as memorable as my short hike up Lincoln. A windy evening, a little rain spitting. Reba below in the cabin eating dinner, tourists at the chalet milling about, Gabe up the divide at Granite Park, and me, alone on that tiny bump, part tentative, part brave, squelching my vertigo, daring myself against the wind to tiptoe along that unfamiliar skein of sky.

Reba gave me my first trails nickname:
#2
, like the pencil. Lanky with a fuzzy blond eraser on top, I was second on the crew, so it fit, the slight mockery ensuring I'd remember that I was not #1. (As if I'd had the slightest delusion.) Mitch called me
Half Scoop
, a riff on Laura Ingalls, earned one hot afternoon in a rocky fill pit where I could hardly fill my shovel.
CB
was common, suggesting a trucker's handle.
That girl,
the packers' favorite. Later,
Stretch
, for my long stride,
Throttle
, for my tendency to gun lagging diesel engines on a cold start, peeling out like a teenage boy.
Snick
was bestowed upon me by backcountry skiing pals, for the Snickers I ate whenever we were out longer than ten minutes.
Trouble
, because, supposedly, I was always asking for it.

The Sperry crew spent at least one hitch per season at Lake Ellen Wilson, a turquoise tarn so cold you'd shout when swimming even on torrid August days. Once Cassie and I paddled to work in an inflated one-man fishing raft we'd hidden in a manty load—two of us and our daypacks and rock tools jammed in between the rubber gunnels. We moored the raft under a cliff band, scrabbled up scree to the job site, and relished the coolest commute in the world. By 5:30, though, the up-valley winds kicked in, and like a freeway at rush hour, the evening trip took more than two hours, our rock-work-weary arms hardly able to paddle against the gusts. I watched ospreys and golden eagles coasting on the drafts above, the same wind that stopped us short boosting their flight to acrobatic levels. After that, the raft stayed at camp. Instead, we'd hike the twenty minutes home from work and take turns drifting out in the lake, Cassie in a bikini with the straps pushed down to counteract her farmer's tan, and me in a sports bra and the worn-out Carhartts I'd chopped the legs off of with a pulaski, having forgotten shorts.

The storms off Lake Ellen Wilson were intense. One hitch, it poured for seven of eight days. Cassie stayed high and dry on an air mattress so thick she'd wedged it inside her tent half-inflated and blown it up the rest of the way from inside, but Bernadette, the newest laborer, had a puddle on her floor that soaked her sleeping bag and she worked the last two days with borderline hypothermia. Ellen Wilson could be such a bitch.

On day eight, we'd break camp: lower the coolers from the bear pole (wilted bits of lettuce, limp string cheese, a slice of iridescent roast beef afloat in melted ice), flatten the tents, secure the tools in their special boxes. While waiting for the packers to inch down the long, steep descent into our camp, we'd take a dip in the lake in preparation for the scorching nine miles between us and the truck at the trailhead. On the hike out, the string of mules not far behind, the trail passed a tiny kettle pond much nearer the Sperry cabin, nicknamed Lake Willie Nelson. Coming from Ellen Wilson, we laughed remembering hitches where we'd parted the algae from the top of this pond in order to swim. The raft would have filled half of it. Could we really have been that desperate?

What tourists say to a female traildog:
How'd a pretty girl like you get a job like this? What, are all the men too lazy? I wish I could have done that when I was young. My, you seem strong! Well aren't you something. I've always thought a dirty girl was pretty sexy. Who carries your tools up here? I'm gonna divorce my wife and marry you both. Can my boys have their picture taken with you? If your mother could see you! Can my girls have their picture taken with you?
For shame!

Midsummer, after a grueling hitch—long miles, heavy rocks—I looked down at my body and could see that it had changed. I had muscles: me, the shrimp of my family, the one with thin skin and angular bones. Over the first season of trailwork, it felt as if I had finally shifted from girl to woman, not with gentle rounding, the fatted ass and softer weight that many women describe, but instead with a taut curve of shoulder into bicep, the imposing loaf of thigh muscle above bony knee. My body felt purposeful and competent in a way it never had, as if it could take control, set the terms. I could hike twenty miles at a quick clip, move uphill bearing burdensome loads. I could lever large rocks, carry with one hand what used to take two arms close to the chest.

That summer, I showed off my arms for anyone. I parodied the strongman's pose, inviting irony to take the edge off my pride, but in a tank top at the bar, I flexed when asked, let total strangers squeeze my biceps. I'd never been drawn to the passively feminine wiles, and in my new arms I felt the intoxication of latent power, the knowledge that I didn't just
look
a certain way, but could force something to happen—lid from a jar, hand off my ass—that I could take the world into my own hands, give it a firm grip, kick it in the balls if I chose. Women have long been told that our bodies are to be presented, arranged for viewing, and that our power comes through flirting, a psychological dominance that stands in for physical strength. Goodbye to all that, which had never suited me. I felt power
in
my body. By itself.

I pondered explosive behavior out of context; I looked at my hands and wondered what they were capable of. Could I break a spirited horse? Chop a board in half with my bare hand? Wring somebody's neck? The violence surprised me, and to any onlooker, I would have seemed still laughably slender, no one to run from in a dark alley. Yet what I imagined I was capable of had changed; I lifted without thinking, spurned the grocery bagger's assistance, reefed on tight lug nuts, lit into a task without fear of failure. In trailwork, this meant I could quickly get in over my head, because I was by no means invincible (few people are, though Max seemed close, and kept me striving). Sometimes I got a log into my arms before I realized I couldn't go anywhere; with the rock bar, I could convince myself I was indomitable instead of just aided. Though I had long admired tenderness and vulnerability as much as strength, that summer I relished the bravado of muscle, the swagger of
look what I can do.
This is why the nouveaux riches spend their money so quickly, I thought. It's hard not to use wantonly a thing you've always wanted, slightly out of reach.

By now, I'm long used to my body and its rhythms, the way it's shaped and remade by a task. In a summer with lots of uphill hiking, my quads are hard as sandbags, and it takes a bit to raise my heart rate, steady as she goes. After a month of rock projects, my lower back twinges in the morning but my abs are something to write home about. Log work shoves my lats along my spine, bricklike but tender to the touch, and my hands are coated in pitch. On a front-country project with power wheelbarrows, backaches heal and arms revert to noodles.

In my midtwenties, growing strong, I couldn't foresee the aches and cracks and surgeries and convalescence that would come, couldn't know that time and labor would do the same thing to my body that it had to others, older or longer at work than I. But I was learning a lesson I'd carry with me through the invincible periods and the hobbled-up times, one of the many things manual labor taught me that my library self did not know. I learned that my body can do good work. That if I am patient, if I note its limits, tend its frailties, and push past them when I have the hunch it's right, my body is not just a partner I can trust. It's actually me. Both a tool and a home.