Dirt Work (9 page)

Cassie taught me the Montana Cowgirl's Mating Song while hiking up the Sperry Hill in the heat. A perfect tune for the Dew Drop Inn or Packer's Roost, here's how it goes: tip back your head and shake your hair loose down your neck. Hands on slightly cocked hips. Now, tap the rhythm with your foot, a horse's drumming canter, and sing loud in a monotone, raising the last syllable an octave: “Get it up, get it in, get it out, don't muss my hair-doooooo!” Go find a dance floor and try it. If that doesn't get you bum rushed in a cowboy bar, nothing will.

Glacier has about 725 miles of trails, many more than most national parks, but almost three hundred fewer than the peak 1,000-plus miles of the park's early years, before the road, when most visitors traveled by foot or horseback. In those days, the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and local wilderness rangers and explorers built the trails network fast and furious, with painstaking artistry in some places and get-'er-done, bare-bones efforts in others.

The old-time rangers also did trailwork, which back then consisted of roaming with an axe or crosscut and blazing trail or clearing blowdown. Nowadays, miles of trails and constant use mean that trail crews do very little new construction; our bread-and-butter work is drainage and tread maintenance, brushing, and logging out winterfall. But once in a while, a washout or flood or persistent beaver colony would require a reroute, and out would come the dusty survey tools—the Abney level, the grade stake, the clinometer—and the trail crew would put in new alignment.

Neither Cassie nor I had ever surveyed trail when our foreman gave us a perfunctory tutorial and sent us up the trail to Gunsight Pass. When we zeroed out our clinometers outside the cabin, Cassie saw my eyebrows and I saw the spot where the top of her hair puffed up from her head. Out on the trail, trying to tie in a switchback corner with the prevailing grade of the miles of trail above and below, 12 percent was harder to manage than we'd guessed. We spent hours peering through the clinometer, one-eyed, while the other person tried to hold the stake and mark the spot and keep blowing dust out of her eyes. The alignment finally staked with wobbly pin flags in talus, we grubbed in the working tread, whipping up a cloud of fine dust that didn't settle until we left the site each day. Our eyebrows were devilish, skin two shades darkened and powdery to the touch, white T-shirts striped with sweaty dirt rings, lips chapped and sore.

At the end of the hitch, we hiked the finished trail. Halos of dust floated up from our feet. The grade was steeper than we'd meant it to be. Maybe our “zero ground” hadn't been level at all, or the clinometer got dropped and knocked out of whack, or one of us read the degrees instead of percent, so the finished product was somewhere between the 5 percent of a wheelchair ramp and the 32 percent of the upper Cutbank Pass section, an ancient Blackfoot thoroughfare and a calf burner for any hiker, even Max. Next time, we swore, we'd be better at the survey part, having learned from a mistake or two on this one.

But there was no next time. I never held a clinometer again for trailwork in Montana. The brush grew fast, trees fell every winter, and drains clogged with the rocks kicked up from horses' shoes. Maintenance versus construction, the constant seesaw—many trails desperately needed reroutes, which fixed problems for good and ended the constant annual repairs. Yet, there was rarely money for the large-scale fix: Band-Aids are cheaper than surgery. Even Band-Aids eat up time, though, and every year, because of diminishing funding and smaller crews, we lost a chunk of the historical miles. In the shop hung pitted black-and-white photos from the trails' heyday, thirty-person crews clustered around a crosscut, the days of mass tourism still outside the frame. Those hearty young men in stagged pants and suspenders (and one grinning woman with braids) could not have imagined the day when our tiny crews would work as hard as we could just to keep trails open, dreaming of where we'd put new trails, even while the old ones disappeared in the undergrowth.

What we want to say to tourists:
Yeah, we saw that bear who ate a hiker yesterday. Well, you're paying to vacation here and I'm getting paid. I'm not a ranger. Would I march into your cubicle and ask to take your picture? I agree, best job in the world. No, I can't spare any water because I'm working six more hours and I need it. Yeah, they take our leg chains off out here. No, we don't pick up the mule shit. In the winter, I ski. You're welcome, it's my pleasure. Nope, not a ranger. Yep, been to college. You're old and pudgy and sexist and how do you think your wife feels standing right next to you while you propose to me? No pictures, I'm on the lam from child-support payments. I probably can't get your son a job, sir. In the winter, I write. In one million acres, do you have to take your snack break in the middle of my work site? I'm not a fucking ranger!

It is beautiful, isn't it? It is so beautiful.

The Sperry cabin had a mouse problem. Or, I should say, the residents of the Sperry cabin had a problem with mice. A sticky night in mid-July, sleeping atop the sheet on my bunk, I woke to a mouse on the run from the tip of my foot up the length of my buck-naked body into my hair, where it paused in the tangles long enough for me to grab it and chuck it at the wall as hard as I could. Cassie woke up to my hollering and laughed at the thought of a mouse trapped and horrified by my knotted, gritty hair. (My old buzz cut would have been easier to navigate.) In the morning, a greasy spot on the plywood but no signs of mouse. It was probably licking its wounds, along with WD-40, in the tool cache. We thought we'd seen the last of it.

But the next evening, our dinnertime soundtrack was skittering feet in the walls. Cassie and I were not prone to shrieks and
eeks
over rodents. We dutifully cleaned up the mouse shit on the first hitch of every season, bandanas tied over our faces to prevent the dreaded hantavirus from roosting in our sinuses. We dealt with dead voles found in the outhouse without drama. Still, we postponed the inevitable task for hours, hoping the mouse would go away and we wouldn't have to kill anything. (It's much easier to dispose of dead pests than to kill them on purpose.) But with bedtime approaching, the dirty deed was unavoidable. We had to take back our home.

We carefully prepared the traps; the wooden one with a plastic bait platform shaped like a cheese seemed the most deadly. (Gabe's crew nicknamed theirs
Fromage de Mort.
) Before bed we placed the trap in the center of the cabin floor, peanut butter smeared on the platform, and that night I woke to the
snap
,
tried to tune out the clatter and squeak, fell back to sleep pretending that my comfort didn't demand a small death. Cassie was a fish-eating vegetarian and in the morning as she fried croissants in butter on the iron skillet and I cleaned out the trap, I teased her ethics: if she killed an animal, she might as well honor its spirit by eating it. She poked out her tongue at the mouse and me, so I carried it to the rocks by the tail and slung it into the woods, stiff ballast that hurtled above the scrawny trees. On the cliffs across the creek, I saw the huge male mountain goat that patrolled the area, a handsome specimen we'd nicknamed “Big Balls” for the swinging sack he proudly displayed while perched on rocks in silhouette. The irony was blatant. So long, crappy mouse. Hello, beautiful goat.

Context is everything. Had the mouse stayed outdoors, hauling bits into its nest to feed its young, we'd have thought it tiny and cute. But for all our desire to beckon animals close enough to witness, distance dignifies. The habituated family of goats that practically trampled us in order to lick our urine off the trailside rocks was pesky, despite majestic looks. The pika that tried to drag away Cassie's lunch box was menace enough for me to huck a rock at it and knock it out, as if Goliath had the stone. The grizzly bears that broke into our tool cache and punctured the fuel cans and chewed on the bar oil did not seem wild. The marmot that tore holes in a left-behind fleece at the job site triggered one crewmate to brandish a pulaski and threaten, “I'll make a sweater out of you!” They were all too close, too much. The real irony is this: what made those animals seem less wild was us—our cabin, her lunch box, my piss on the rocks. The closer our lives edged, the more complicated our relationship became. Adoring, annoying, adversary, companion, wild, pathetic.

On the cliff across the drainage, Big Balls foraged tundra plants, looking regal. Somewhere in the scrubby forest below the cabin porch, the dead mouse lay in the duff, awaiting something hungry. I went back inside for my croissant.

Gabe and I spent summers in eight-day stretches apart. Wednesday mornings came and we'd head into the woods for another long week of shit work with crews we were slightly sick of, six days off not long enough to get back the enthusiasm. Morning goodbyes were rushed and tense, running late, and the breakfast spat over
You finished all the granola
or
Why didn't you put my boots on the dryer last night
went unresolved for a week before we could revisit
I'm sorry
with enough time for it to mean anything. The first days were lonely, best companion several watersheds away and no one to talk to about the thing with my sister, worry over this winter's work, the pressing urge to get a dog. No one to cut some slack on the day my period started, no one to rub my shoulders and say, Of course your ankles aren't fat. The scheduled radio rendezvous fell through, the transmission cut off, or it felt rote and intensified the faraway. We'd come out of hitches to a reunion fried and crabby, or the six days flew by—washing Ziplocs, paying bills, stockpiling groceries, never just a quick trip to the store for what sounds good, always the bags of apples, cases of Clif Bars, enough pasta to choke a horse. No time to be alone, visitors leaving, coming, leaving, and the pressure,
be sweet, feel loving, give him a massage,
only two days until we're gone again.

“Split my finger open like a grape.” I've heard that phrase, and it's perfect: the thin membrane, slow yield, then wetness. I split open my right middle finger while working on a retaining wall nine miles in the backcountry. The rock hammer lay just out of reach, so I used a small rock to pound in a larger wedge, and
wham.
Three miles above the cabin, it was nearly quitting time anyway, so I didn't have to suck it up and finish the day. Cassie packed a bandana with snow from a nearby drift and I held the finger above my head, wrapped tight, blood running down my arm. Good thing the hike was downhill, because I was unsteady on my feet, my face pale and clammy. Hikers parted for me and turned to watch as I stumbled down, trailing bloody splotches on the rocks behind me. Outside the cabin, I retched. Inside, humming nonsense to keep from screaming, I cleaned the pulp of skin and flesh in a bowl of warm water, then splinted it, took four Advil with chocolate milk for the throbbing, and passed out on my bunk. The next morning the grape had swelled to an unripe plum, the kind you pick from a backyard tree, skin taut, and I could feel my pulse in it for the rest of the hitch. I cut the middle finger out of my glove for the bandaged digit; my grip on the rock hammer was loose and awkward. It hurt longer than I'd have guessed it would, the nail obliterated, sore to the touch for months, and years down the road still prone to frost nip.

When we got out of that hitch, I heard that Sheldon had busted his finger when the packstring rodeoed at Lower Nyack cabin, and he loaded the mules one-handed and rode home eight miles without mentioning it, as the story goes. (The reason there's a story at all is that he passed the crew on the way out; someone noticed blood on the mannies and asked about the hand clutched in his lap.) Stoicism is admirable, and it should be obvious by now that I'm no hero, but for Pete's sake, Sheldon, not even a whimper, no subtle gambit for a sliver of sympathy, the story dragged out like an ornery mule from the barn? Maybe alone at the cabin he yelped loud, kicked the porch, hopped around, and cussed his head off. Without any witnesses, we'll never know. If a cowboy complains and there's no one there to hear it, did he make a sound?

A Zen saying captures the music of the barn coming home from a hitch: “How refreshing, the whinny of a packhorse unloaded of everything!”

The Sperry Trail leads to Comeau Pass, terminating at a fifty-foot set of narrow stairs blasted into the headwall by the CCC crew in the 1930s (from back in the day when a depression could get you a government job in the woods). Every spring we installed a rope handrail, tightening the turnbuckle at the top to support a tired hiker's weight, and then we removed it in the fall before winter turned the stairs into an icy chute. Such rock handiwork is evident through out the Sperry district; trails wind past decades of drystone masonry. Rock walls ten courses thick with a keystone the size of a couch, a squared chunk of pink rock that it took five of us to move, climbing turns with stairs on a slight batter, retaining walls that bear up slopes of scree. Countless hours of work over even a single season, let alone five, let alone twenty.

One summer Cassie and I hiked out of a hitch we'd spent building rock stairs and came back six days later after a hundred-year rainstorm blew through, a toad-strangler that blasted the alpine trail network to pieces. Currents of water rushed through switchbacks leaving crevasses that took ten minutes to drop into and climb out of again, more topography than trail. If I hadn't seen it the week before with my own eyes, I'd never have believed water could change something that quickly. The rocks we'd cached for our stairs were gone, as well as the section of trail the stairs had climbed. We paired up on the rock bar, four hands and 250 pounds reefing on debris the size of kitchen appliances—Refrigerator Rock, we named one, taller than me by a foot. We leveraged precarious rocks over the ends of switchbacks, hooting as one-ton boulders catapulted like tumbleweeds into gullies that swallowed them up. We spent days grubbing, prying, digging through fill ten feet deep, cutting our hands through our gloves on rough edges, falling into our bunks at night too sore to move. Talking to tourists, we shook our heads:
Never seen anything like it.
Even our foreman, working trails since the seventies, agreed it was epic. It seemed as if every single piece of sediment on the whole mountainside had traded places with something else. As if heft were weightless. As if permanence, fleeting.