Dirt Work (13 page)

My grandmother's admonition—“Don't waste your gifts, dear!”—included a reference to the New Testament parable of the man who buried his talents in the sand. In the parable's context, a talent was a biblical monetary unit, but it's widely interpreted to mean a gift of any sort, including a talent as we think of it today. “Don't bury your talents in a hole,” Grandma told me, and she meant, don't squander what you've been given. I appreciated her confidence, but I had to laugh at the allusion. She meant to spur me to a higher calling, to do right by my potential. But all I could think when I heard that phrase? If my talents needed burying, at least I could dig a hell of a good hole.

Glacier National Park is designated wilderness. Ask anyone—it's nature with a capital N. But as in most “preserved” places, traces of human impact—of culture—rustle beneath the pristine surface. In Glacier there are abandoned mine shafts on craggy passes, rusty machine parts along creek beds. Native tribal trade routes form the scaffolding for the trails network. The park's designation as wilderness owed much to the development of the railroad. Mossy foundation stones lie embedded in ground way off the trodden paths.

One of my favorite cultural relics in the park is the Doody Homestead, a dilapidated structure located off the Boundary Trail, a half mile downstream from the confluence of Harrison Creek with the Middle Fork. The ruin was Dan and Josephine Doody's homestead, built along Burlington Northern's Empire Builder train line before Highway 2 went in. Dan was a one of the first rangers in the park (fired later for poaching) and Josephine was a moonshiner and a “hostess” long after her husband's death. Approaching the structure from the forested trail, you can't see it until you're almost in it: two stories high and rotten, a staircase topping out to a punched-through upper floor. Rusted bedsprings and tin cans with antique labels, a collapsing double-seater outhouse visible through a glassless window. You don't even have to close your eyes to imagine miners and fishermen tipping back shots in the guestrooms, a curvy hooker doing the two-step with a top-hatted investor canvassing the Wild West. Mixed in with the present—gusty wind in the grass and the
chip
of red squirrels— there's the past: twang of phantom honky-tonk, the smell of pork chops frying.

Evidence of human impact is another layer of this wild place, like the stratum of volcanic ash in the soil or the inland fossils that prove this arid forest was once a sea. Human history is palpable in the Middle Fork. Wilderness, the empty kind, is rare anywhere, and most of our places are not really untouched; we have always lived amid cultures on land. Old tin cans may undermine the claim of virgin wilderness, but they are relics that point us toward a candid way of seeing nature: not a distant diorama of a wilder place, but a home.

When I stand at the Doody Homestead, history feels concrete, but at the same time there's a spooky, ethereal vibe, as if it were haunted not by a person, not even by a specific psychological presence, but by a version of ourselves at an earlier time. I imagine what it's like to be native to this land, to know that your people and their stories have coexisted with a place for so long as to be inextricable, for good and ill—an autumn hunt rich in antelope meat, but the baby died later in a cold snap. A pass to cross for summer grounds, also an alley for enemy ambush. Food you ate because it was there. Seasons that triggered decisions, rivers that, some months, couldn't be got across, and so you stayed. Imagine it's no stretch to be interwoven with place: unbound by the present moment, terrain as physical receptacle for memory, geography as palimpsest, a layer always visible beneath the current story, home-making possible in all but the most inhospitable settings. Peel up nature, and there's culture beneath it. Scratch culture, and it's nature that will bleed.

Wild will fight for itself. Wild is unhemmed, cuffs dragging in the mud, fist balled up, thumping. Wilderness may require paperwork to bolster it, but wildness is wisp of instinct, a hunger silhouetted. Palm open. It is both cusp and center.

On hitches deep in the Middle Fork, the packers stayed overnight because fifteen miles in was too far to round-trip in a day. They'd tie off the mules to the hitch rail or trees and stay the night with the crew. On the trail, Slim ate cold fried chicken brought from home in his saddlebag and, at night, drank a half rack of Oly and bullshitted with the crew until he passed out near the fire and slept wrapped in a manta cloth, his boots for a pillow. A packer in socks made you feel a little uneasy, those bony, socked feet a secret you'd rather not know.

One rimy morning, world encased in fragile hoar, Slim stumbled around outside the cabin in his union suit, hollering, “I can't find m'gaddam pants!” Sleepy and cold. Staggering in baggy underwear. It was the most vulnerable he'd ever seemed.

Another time the packers stayed over, Brook came from the hitch rail gesturing to Slim and a few laborers about a mysterious mule. “Last night, Curly was hitched up on the far side of the rail, and this morning, he's on the other side.”

“So?”

“He's in the middle of the rail, and he's short-roped!” He paused for effect. “He must have jumped over!” Brook cracked up. Tristan looked at him, his blue eyes round. “Cool!” he said, but Slim glared. He hated it when the mules did anything out of the ordinary. “Cool?” he withered. “There ain't a gaddam thing
cool
about it!” This phrase serves, in any context, as the perfect way to express disdain.

For centuries of work in the woods, including the logging of this continent's great forests, the crosscut was the felling tool of choice. A five-foot-long flexible saw blade (with a curved back for felling or a straight back for bucking), a toothed edge, and a handle mounted on each end, the two-man crosscut dropped big trees with more control and efficiency than an axe, with less likelihood of the tree falling backward and crushing the sawyer (the leading cause of beaver fatalities). Crosscuts still get plenty of modern use, in wilderness areas where mechanized tools are forbidden, in remote settings where a constant supply of gas and oil is not feasible, and in instances where a noise ban protects wildlife—nesting eagles, migrating songbirds, denning wolves.

The crosscut is a beautiful tool, perfectly engineered for a sawing duo and its single task. Using a crosscut takes muscle; cutting earns you big arms and lats and the kind of soreness that results in one of the tool's nicknames: the misery whip. But it also takes delicacy; don't overmuscle it or the saw blade will buckle or bind, and don't fight your partner—let the push stroke gently float away, make the pull stroke true and hard.

Across the highway in the Bob Marshall, the Forest Service uses crosscuts solely; the Bob's wilderness designation prohibits motorized maintenance. The history of old woodscraft is beautifully preserved in that reliance, but there's a cost. Trail crews in the Bob spend all summer logging out deadfall, with barely time enough to get trails open for traffic, let alone repair damage or upgrade structures. The trails are historical and quiet, but hammered. With trails budgets as they are, it's only a matter of time before work overtakes workforce. Slowly, more miles of trail succumb to lack of maintenance, eventually too impacted, obscured, or degraded for ordinary use.

The park, though it contains designated wilderness, has a chainsaw exemption for trailwork, and our crews did most clearing with power saws. Even with mechanized assistance, keeping the trails open was an annual challenge. Back in the crosscut days, the trail crews were three, four times as big as they are today. If we were to use only crosscuts now, half of the trails would never get cleared, resulting in greater resource damage. So, we trade off. A little historical value sacrificed for a little modern access. Hikers appreciate it; the growing burden of industrial-scale tourism demands it. With a burgeoning population seeking respite in nature and an ever-shrinking agency budget, the days of sustainable land use are long gone, so what option is there? No matter our preservationist bias, for these months we're laborers, not lobbyists. Short a major change in policy, there's nothing to do but fire up the saws.

Forest Service crews like to play superior, and sometimes I think they are, calibrated honestly to the slow, steady drone of handwork, what's possible in a day dictated by their own limits. But although there's less vintage cachet to the chainsaw than the crosscut, running a power saw is an art, too; this is clear when you watch someone who's really good at it. Even without nostalgia to buoy its value, skill is compelling, and moving wood is good work. There are places where it's best to do it by hand, and places to do it faster. Whether in the Bob or the park, a long day of sawing is a wearisome and admirable thing, and work does what it does—helps keep cynicism at bay. Visitation numbers and crew budgets and land designations fall away; crosscut or chainsaw, the things that have always been true remain true. Don't cut through holding wood. Stand uphill of a log when bucking. Keep the teeth out of the dirt.

Five of us stand in the parking lot at the trailhead, shovels and pulaskis over our shoulders, awaiting the crew leader. A man approaches the trail and passes the cluster of us, looks us over, keeps walking, then, just before heading into the woods, he stops and asks: What are you looking for? We glance at each other, blank. No one gives a derisive snort, or leaps to the usual explanations about maintenance, about drain dips and turnpikes. What
are
we looking for? It's a damn good question, isn't it?

Glacier National Park belongs to the traditional territory of the Niitsitapii
.
Translated as “the real people,” the Blackfoot Indians of Western Montana call these mountains the backbone of the world. The Blackfoot traditionally used Glacier's passes as travel routes and rarely lived in the mountains, steep as they were, glaciated and inhospitable. Some peaks have sacred purposes—vision quests, celebrations—but home was always the plains, where long vistas made enemies easy to spot and prevalent game surrounded the settlement. The current towns of Babb and East Glacier mimic that historical range, lying just east of the divide on the Blackfoot Reservation. To an outsider's eye it's a desolate and hardscrabble place; rustic, undeveloped, perched on the edge of the gust-scoured plains as if it's only there until the wind moves it again.

In my six seasons in Glacier, Dwight was the only Blackfoot I worked with for long. He did trails for years and his nickname was “The Surgeon,” for his prowess at chainsaw repair. He was a quiet guy who spoke with the distinct lilt of Blackfoot speech, and when he laughed, his upper body ratcheted from the waist.

Dwight had a drinking problem. Many traildogs binge-drink on days off, and most can't go a night without beer. But Dwight came to work hung-over, checked out. He smelled like liquor distilled through flannel. He was often late; once, still drunk, he passed out at lunch break, pale and damp-faced. His crew leader held it against him, as was his right. There was tension. The leader felt his hands were tied: if he came down hard on the only Native for being late, would he be racist? Was giving him a pass because he was a Native any better? The whole thing made him nervous.

It made me nervous, too. I wished Dwight didn't have a drinking problem. Partly because being around drunks of any race makes me uneasy and sad. I wanted Dwight to be able to look his leader in the eye. I thought I was rooting for him:
There's not much on the reservation, Dwight. Don't get fired.
Now it's so clear to me, the condescension I missed back then—I'd assumed my elective career was a job he felt lucky to have. I never asked.

I didn't know much then about addiction's vice grip, or the burden of only-ness. I never asked Dwight how it felt to come from the rez to work in the park. I never asked him if he liked his job. Under that, if he liked us. And under that, if he liked me. I wanted him to like me. It would mean that I was a good white person. But Dwight didn't offer much, a reticence partly cultural, partly personal. Who could blame him?

I remember a joke I heard, maybe twice, in those days. How do you starve an Indian? Answer: hide his unemployment check under his work boots. This falls into the category of despicable jokes prized by a group of people who find nothing too dirty, too shameful, too rude to laugh at. Sexist jokes, politics jokes, pedophile jokes: traildogs tell them all. We push too far. In our way, we're snatching after some of the nuance that “correctness” stifles. We're eager to see difference, tension, to name it the only way we dare. (We're weeding out the easily horrified, who won't last long on a trail crew.) Some jokes, especially when told to or by the target, can be liberating. When I screwed up on the work site, I could trust one of the guys to say, “Guess you'd better give the boss a blowjob.” That pissed me off. But it also made me laugh. We all howled when the only queer guy on the crew told jokes about butt pirates. There's nothing like rapping on the wooden head of taboo.

When I think about the starving Indian joke, though, I cringe. I don't recall it being told in front of Dwight. Humor can be a great equalizer, but maybe that's true only if you already feel equal, and all the conventional wisdom about racism said Dwight couldn't possibly have felt equal. But maybe he did. Maybe Dwight felt better than us, and we couldn't look him in the eye. In any case, the subtext of the joke was clear: Indian=lazy=worthless=drunk. Reality made it more ridiculous than funny. For one thing, most of us collected unemployment checks. And Dwight wasn't lazy. He could hike fast, and he was strong. He wasn't worthless; he knew things a lot of us did not. But I couldn't gloss over drunk. It stunk up the cab of the truck. It frayed the crew bond.