Dirt Work (7 page)

Here's the twist. Those same bodies, so inhabited, provide us the ungendered moments, too, the times when cultural roles and physical parts deconstruct and we become people working side by side. The best times, with men and women, are those when the moment demands every last thing and there's no room in the brain, no will in the muscles, for the extraneous
who's stronger nice ass I'd sleep with.
We aren't checking each other out, and we even forget to evaluate ourselves, free for moments from awareness and appraisal. Self-consciousness dissipates the longer we know each other, when the initial mysteries of pheromone deepen into the mysteries of personhood. Such moments happen when there are miles to cover in pouring rain, a huge project all but done. They happen while we sweat buckets, if a bear's nearby, when dinner hits the spot. You can see it in our movements, that easy grace of a child at home in her body without a glance to the stands. Maybe we can release our assumptions and assessments in those moments when the physical world becomes so primary because our human skin has sloughed away. When sweating, moving, grunting, relaxing after it's done, stuffing stomachs or stretching our arms to the sky, we aren't men or women. We're animal.

Of course, the sniffing we do later, circling each other, pissing on fence posts, jockeying for position, yearning for contact, that's as animal as it gets, isn't it? But that's sex. Sex is simpler. Beneath the constant specter of gender, the best we can do is pardon one another small vanities, the missteps and awkwardness that arise when men and women work hard together, few of us altogether comfortable in our own skins, constantly negotiating our places on the spectrum between
opposite
and
same.

The historic Sperry chalet is an elegant two-story structure built in 1914, its native-stone foundation and wooden-railed porches perched on a cliff overlooking Sperry Creek. The headwaters of Sperry tumble west of the Continental Divide, through a hanging valley below Comeau Pass, and join McDonald Creek, 2,500 feet below. The chalet's design suggests, as it was meant to in the nationalistic early days of the Park Service, an American Europe, a destination rivaling Switzerland for the well-traveled elite.

There's a new cabin now, but in my day, the Sperry trails cabin sat behind the chalet, anchored to rock slab, rough-hewn and off-kilter, the bastard stepchild of local architecture. Made of painted plywood, absent the chalet's Swiss ethos and void the historical charm of patrol cabins in the Middle Fork, the Sperry cabin was the bare bones it takes to shelter a crew in an alpine area. The Granite Park crew in the alpine district to the northeast has a beautiful log cabin with a loft and a front porch, a hole blasted in the slab out front so that Granite Creek fills a frigid bathtub. No such luck at Sperry: old carpet scraps on the floor, mangy dish towels hanging from the p-cord clothesline, shelves behind the fold-down table housing leftover nonperishables from years of crews, including MREs from the forties and enough cans of Hungry Man to jack up the floor box, should the rotting foundation finally collapse.

In its favor, the cabin's humble profile protected the trail crew from the hordes of guests at the chalet, few of them curious about what appears to be a tool shed or a pump house, so we could maintain privacy in close range of tourism. Out behind the cabin, an unnamed creek flowed over bedrock in all but the driest years, and the view at night was clear and starry. The chalet folk went to bed and the night quieted, the waterfalls in the cirque below Comeau Pass a distant thrum. When I stumbled out at 3 a.m. to pee, the dark mountains seduced me from sleep to stand and listen to the night until my feet got cold. Even compared with the palatial digs at Granite or the rustic funkiness of the Park Creek ranger cabin, there was magic at the Sperry slum, closed in by plywood, capped by a tilting, rusted vent pipe. When you're dead tired and in love with the world, the shabbiest trappings can make for home.

The eight-day hitch song:
Day 1, trails is fun! Day 2, yahoo! Day 3, still some glee. Day 4, what a bore. Day 5, still alive. Day 6, in a fix. Day 7, feels like eleven. Day 8, ready to MATE!

My first season at Sperry with Reba was short. I was hired late, on a fluke, started in July, and by mid-September laborers were laid off. The next year, budget cuts were deep and I didn't make the list (Gabe did). Dejected, I made plans in Missoula, and by the time a trails job came through after all, it was too late to back out of them. No one can complain about summer in Missoula, but I missed trails like I'd been fired from my life's work. I worried I'd lost my chance at a future spot, labeled that worst of all tags: “short-timer.” But the next spring, new money came through, and I was offered reentry into a world I'd tasted just enough of to know I wanted in for good.

Returning, I was not exactly a newcomer, but anyone could see it: I knew very little. Experience teaches, after all, and two months in the woods two years before is not much experience. Reba wasn't back at Sperry, where I'd been hired to return. Instead, I'd be working for Cassie, who'd come from the east side to lead our two-woman crew.

The first things I heard about Cassie were “she's hot” and “her boyfriend died.” As little information as that is about the person who is to become your boss, it's enough to make you worry. What does hot have to do with trailwork, and will she make you feel clumsy and second-rate, or worst, what if she's the kind of girl who hates other women, competitive and flirty? Then there was the boyfriend. Tristan had been a traildog, too, a kid Gabe had worked with the summer before, young and strong and quick to laugh. He'd died that year in a climbing accident on a peak in the North Fork. He was Cassie's high school sweetheart. It was a tragedy that the trail crew had processed together then, when I was not around, and I didn't know how to frame it on my own. Would she be paralyzed by sadness? Should I broach it, or pretend I didn't know? The hurdles seemed many. It could have been very awkward, working with a hot and brokenhearted woman. I have to admit, I worried.

But I liked Cassie right from the start. She was tough, with a fragility belied by ripped biceps and a brutal hiking pace. She had only a few trails seasons beneath her belt, and she seemed young, which was saying something, since I myself felt young. (She had just graduated from college, while I had been out for two years.) The older sister in me could imagine looking out for her, even though she'd be teaching me. We bonded early, oddly early, looking back at what I know about us then—me shy and eager, her guarded and sad, both under pressure, often just the two of us working for days on end. I've had similar situations that went poorly, the two-person crew with a barely tolerable mate, personalities mismatched, outside-of-work stresses insurmountable. We were lucky.

From the outside, we were a funny pair. Cassie was almost aggressively feminine—jewelry and lipstick and sports bras for work—while I was a tomboy in baggy T-shirts and a ball cap. (In one picture of us, standing arms around shoulders at a high pass, I could be her brother.) She'd grown up in nearby Whitefish, the park her hometown backyard, while I knew it as a breathless latecomer. She read
Cosmopolitan
, knew about skin creams and Manolos, familiar to me only from furtive grocery-line perusal. Her lost Tristan was a palpable sadness, and dear Gabe, his presence in my life, must have augmented that empty space.

But the differences crumbled before the bricks that helped cobble together a foundation for a trust that would grow deep over four years working together. Both English majors, we read voraciously, British comedies of manners and courtroom thrillers, and we discovered a mutual penchant for word games, which we'd play hiking to and from job sites. I was a goofball, and under the surface, serious. Cassie was serious, and under the surface, a goofball. We were small and fast and tenacious, competitive to a fault, but also good sports. As we grew to trust each other in the field—
she knows her stuff, she'll pull her weight, she's got my back
—so we let each other into the rest of our lives. She talked me through tough spells with Gabe, and on the anniversary of Tristan's death we toasted him and I hugged her hard.

The clincher, though, was our raging appetites, a product of genes and the ramped-up metabolism that accompanies manual labor. Weighing a buck twenty-five a piece (in boots) we packed lunches you could barely carry with one hand, containers overflowing with bloated versions of the school lunch: Dagwood sandwiches, cold pizza, string cheese, animal-shaped gummy snacks, candy bars. On cold days, I ate hoarded restaurant packets of butter and Cassie spread cream cheese so thick it looked like Styrofoam on her bagel. On eight-day hitches at our backcountry cabin, we'd devour an entire smoked trout with a box of crackers after work, crunching tiny bones while we prepared “real dinner.” We mounded cheesy casseroles and fat burritos in our big steel bowls, which we called troughs. One night, after filling out a
Cosmo
quiz that gave us the right caloric needs for our frames, we calculated our intake for the day at around 6,800 calories each, more than three times the highest thinkable allowance (for active pregnant women). To this day, when I hear the phrase “the way to a man's heart is through his stomach,” I think of Cassie, how we weaseled our way into each other's hearts over those two-quart Tupperware boxes at lunch time, how our friendship flared over a Coleman stove where rice, ravioli, dumplings boiled in quantities large enough to stun us both.

The Sperry Hill is steep. It winds from the McDonald Lake trailhead through cedar forest, then rears back and pitches six miles up the Sprague Creek drainage, leveling off only a few times before terminating at the chalet. The lower section is the worst, rutted, dusty even after rain; but the middle section has killer switchbacks and the final hill below the chalet is gruesome because it comes after you've already given away everything you had, and tourists who rode up on horseback stand at the top in a chatty gauntlet. The Sperry Trail always gets a groan in the early season—
Y'ain't even roughed-in yet
, the packers would say—but a month in, it's doable, easy, even, nothing like the legendary Trout Lake Trail, uphill both ways and always demoralizing with a saw on your shoulder, or Cut Bank Pass, which could use a handrail to pull against.

Early my first summer, we hiked four miles up Sperry for the annual blast. A permanent snowdrift blocked the trail and melted out slowly; without dynamite, it would impede summer hiking traffic all season. The blast was exciting and novel every year, the drama of explosion, the break from early-season digging drains, a big group of traildogs from different crews all sent up to play in the snow for a day. But first we had to get there, and I wasn't thinking about explosives or snowballs as I sucked wind, throat full of bile, the packers closing in. I could feel horse breath on my neck. I still remember this hike as one of the hardest physical challenges of my life—worse than backpacking up out of the Grand Canyon with a hangover and no water, worse than day five of a three-week winter ski trip with frost-nipped, blistered toes, worse than picking through a crevasse field on an Alaska glacier in a whiteout—because on the Sperry Hill that day, I had no idea what lay ahead but I knew I was flailing. So did everyone else.

I've hiked that trail probably a hundred times since then, with a rock bar, a chainsaw, a brusher, packing a seventy-pound Pionjar that pressed my heart flat, with a wheeled litter carrying a sobbing, heavy hiker thrown from horseback. I've hiked it trying to dust twelve new laborers, and trying to catch Jake Preline, the Sperry Hill record holder. I've hiked it with a migraine, in 90-degree heat, with giardia (shitting every half mile in the bushes), in thunderstorms that shook bedrock. Though Sperry is relentless and steep, it's much less formidable once familiar, once you can hike it in your mind, each section memorized—when to breathe deep and conserve energy, when to bow your head and drop the hammer. When to drink water so you won't belch it up again, which curve hides a straightaway where you can make up some time, or a series of short pitches that'll burn your quads.

The day of the blast, the packers finally passed me with their load of ANFO in Ziploc bags. At the time I didn't realize that the string passes everyone now and then, whether because you're having a slow day or Slim's spurring hard to stay on your ass. Narcissist that I was, seeking distinction even in humiliation, I thought I was surely the weakest link in the entire history of traildogs. Later, Reba told me Slim said,
She's got grit, I'll give her that.
Such a begrudging compliment, high praise from a surly packer, but I'd have none of it. Damned grit! Fucking tenacity! I'd happily trade pluck for sheer strength, for technical prowess, for usefulness of any kind. They say I'm scrappy, determined, tough. Yet surely everyone had guessed my secret, which is that it wasn't innate, which is how many times I wanted to veer off the trail and hide in the brush, which is the only thing that kept me from lying down in a pile was pride. Still, in the absence of anything but the famed tenacity, I had to cling to it. Whether or not it came natural, if I gave up grit, I'd have
nothing
.

Gabe and I spent summers together in six-day stretches. That first night off hitch, a week stretched ahead endless, long enough for the first day at home doing nothing, the exquisite luxury of laundry and showers, an elaborate meal in a real kitchen, sex and foot rubs, swimming in the river on a hot evening, renting a movie on a rainy one. Then, four days left for trips, cragging at the reservoir, nights out in the tent, or a bunch of day hikes, climbing peaks, remote traverses, guiding out-of-town visitors to favorite places. The last day meant town, for groceries and supplies, a stop at the bookstore, then home to portion out food and prepare meals together for the next go. We packed the truck the night before, snuggled in cool sheets with the pre-hitch feeling mounting, the dawning idea of work in the morning, so long ago now we forgot we had jobs at all. Six a.m. came and we slipped sweet notes into each other's duffels, buried treats in the bottom of daypacks, snuck a quick kiss at the barn. On hitches, the occasional veiled radio contact, the “10-4, got your message, 253 clear” meant to us “All good on my end, I'd jump your bones if you were here,” and the eager pitch to the stomach on day eight, hiking out with the adolescent quease,
This afternoon I'll see him again.