Two Medicine (11 page)

Ronnie eventually
wandered
upstairs to his room, but not
before inviting me later to join him and some girl he found to
watch a DVD. He told me to bring some beer. I glanced at Larry as
Ronnie left, but he didn’t seem to hear or notice.

I helped Larry the rest of
the afternoon and we left off around 4 pm, Larry advising me to get
a good night’s sleep to be ready to “take on the day” tomorrow. He
said he was going to have all of us working the next day, and that
Katie and Ronnie were off today because of them helping him out the
last couple of days.

He also told me as we
finished cleaning that if I got up by 5 a.m., I could see the most
amazing sun rises hitting the face of Mount Sinopah on most
mornings. I said “ok” but knew I’d never make it that early, ever,
for anything. I was a night owl and always had been. Hopefully the
sunsets would be just as good, I thought to myself.

I finally had a meal, a
sandwich heaping with cold roast beef and cheddar cheese I cut from
a big block in that late afternoon, and sat at the kitchen table
alone, thinking about what I had seen so far. Not a single person I
had met thus far had seemed to be “the outdoor type,” or seemed to
even be that interested in the distant mountains and beautiful
wilderness beyond. You could have lifted the entire store and its
staff, in fact, and dropped it down into a shopping mall anywhere
in the suburbs of a city and it would have fit right in, more or
less.

I took my meal out onto
the back porch in the back of the store, which also had some chairs
on it, and sat down to get a look at the distant mountains
surrounding the valley and our lake, called Two Medicine
Lake.

I felt better being
outside and seeing that, despite the store’s cheap, retail
garishness, I was nonetheless living in a stunning and uninhabited
place. Two Medicine was what the magazine had promised: the
little-traveled heart of a little-known National Park, in the
middle of nowhere, and I was surrounded by some of the most
stunning outdoor scenes I had ever seen.

I tried to buoy up my
feelings by reminding myself that I would soon be out hiking in
those hills and mountains, encountering nature in its rawest and
most vivid forms – even if no one else I worked with was interested
in it. There was an old map framed and hanging on the wall in the
store that had all the hiking trails lined in various colors and
meandering through the mountains and around the lake. As I rocked
back and forth on the back porch in my rocking chair, staring up at
the hills across the lake, I told myself that I had done the right
thing. Yes, this was going to be an incredible place, one I would
never forget.

I thought of Scott back
home, my plastic chair and my desk in my office, and of Holly, as I
sat there. The rocking chair creaked back and forth on its old
legs. It felt like years since I had seen them.

That night I crawled into
bed exhausted. Despite being nervous about starting the actual job
the next morning and not knowing what was in store, I fell asleep
pretty quickly. The traveling had mostly done me in. I couldn’t
believe, as I lay there, staring up at the wooden ceiling with a
little lamp on beside my bed, that I had been in Atlanta just the
morning before. It seemed weeks ago.

I thought of Holly, again,
as I lay there, staring up at the boards in the ceiling; she would
have liked this room with its rustic charm. I noticed to black
spots in the ceiling by the window, and first thought they were
knots in the wood or burn marks, but after getting up out of bed
and making a close inspection, I saw they were two little black
bats, balled up and sleeping. How they got in and out of that room
to fly around outside I couldn’t tell – the window was closed. I
left them to their sleep, and returned to bed to find
mine.

Nine

I slept like a rock until
sometime in the middle of the night or very early morning. A loud
crash of thunder woke me, and I saw a flash of lighting out of the
window that lit up the pitch-dark room for a fraction of a second.
I heard a scraping noise coming from the window, like somebody’s
fingernails scraping along the wooden windowsills and hitting the
glass, which startled me out of bed. But as I looked out the window
I saw that it was just a branch from a small tree that grew
alongside the store by my room. The bats were gone too, I noticed.
I returned to bed to get a fitful few hours of sleep after
that.

Later in the morning at
6:30 a.m., I woke up to an alarm clock that had been provided by
Larry, not surprisingly. Sunlight shone in from the window and cast
a rectangle of light on the opposite wall’s wooden boards. I looked
up at the ceiling for a few minutes, thinking about my first
morning in this new world. It felt strange to be lying in that
little bed hearing sounds of others moving around downstairs,
strangers that I was now living with, seeing parts of those
mountains out past my window.

I got up and stretched,
and then walked over to the windows. I found that you could push
them open – they opened from the sides and swung out like car
doors, and there were no screens. I was shocked to see a very light
dusting of snow on the ground and the shrubs around the store – it
was summertime in June, after all. But apparently that storm had
brought in some snow from the north up high in the Rockies and had
powdered everything a bit in a final reminder that a savage winter
was never very far away.

After showering and then
dressing, for the first time in my new burgundy polo shirt with a
logo of Glacier Park on it and my requisite khakis, I headed out to
start my new job.

I heard a cough in
Ronnie’s room and walked over to his door, curious to see how his
room looked. I saw him smoking in his room, leaning out of the
windows that were identical to mine. He was shirtless still,
wearing only the work khakis and sneakers. He looked me up and down
and smirked.

“
Well, how was your first
night buddy?” He snapped the cigarette out the window and grabbed a
wrinkled polo from off the bed.

“
Not bad. That storm
freaked me out for a second, a lot of banging on the
window.”

“
Yea? Well I slept like a
stone – and now we’re off to our first day serving the campers of
Glacier National Park…” He said, rolling his eyes as he looked
himself over in the mirror, running his fingers through his short,
brown hair, and then slapping himself on the face a bit to wake
himself up.

We walked down
the creaking wooden stairs together and I could
hear Larry already going on about something down below. Down in the
kitchen, he was standing by the metal kitchen table and Katie was
already sitting there – not looking at Larry but reading a book,
ignoring him apparently. Phyllis was cooking breakfast, and I hoped
it was for us. Smells of pancakes and sausage cooking filled my
senses. We said our hellos and Ronnie and I sat at the table next
to Katie. Larry stood before us; those burgundy shirts he wore were
too small for him! His huge belly and flabby pectorals were
emphasized by the tight fabric – why Phyllis didn’t try to get him
fitted right I couldn’t imagine – but she probably couldn’t tell
him to do anything he didn’t want to do. He was wearing his thick
glasses with black frames and white sneakers. Phyllis was dressed
in the park uniform too.

As Phyllis set pancakes
and syrup in front of us three, Larry cleared his throat. “All
right people,” he rumbled, “get ready. Today is a big day – we’re
opening for the first time this year, and I want it to go
perfectly. It’s easy to get flustered out there the first few days;
you can get a lot of kooks and oddballs coming at you, among all
the decent folk. So, first rule – any problems, find
me!”

Ronnie and I began to eat.
Katie just sipped some tea and read her book. I wondered how busy
it could possibly be since I had seen nobody around whatsoever the
day before when I had arrived, no tourists or anyone.

Larry continued, “Katie,
you’ll be on the cash register in gifts. Ronnie you’ll be cooking
with Phyllis,” he nodded his head in Phyllis’s direction as she
dumped the scrambled eggs from a steaming pot into a large bowl.
“And Will, you’ll run the register in the snack bar.”

Larry went on for about 20
minutes about handling money, answering the phone, answering
shopper’s questions, especially questions about the park and Two
Medicine, which Larry said he’d rather answer personally, and other
notes about the operation in general.

The snack bar served only
lunch and dinner, I found out, and the menu consisted mainly of
burgers, fries, chili, chicken “fingers,” roast beef sandwiches,
macaroni salad, and a final item that was a unique Two Medicine
original – a creation called “The Mountain” – which was an odd
assortment of ingredients. It would start with rolling out pizza
dough into a flat disc, dropping that into our fat fryer – which
was where most of the things we cooked ended up, then pouring chili
onto the fried dough, then lettuce, cheese, peppers, and a festive
dollop of sour cream. It wasn’t bad, actually, I eventually
discovered after trying one. A bit heavy, but definitely filled you
up after a day of hard climbing. Customers ordered it constantly.
Also, we sold shakes, and one of them was made with a famous local
berry – the huckleberry – that made the shake purple; those were
good too.

I watched Phyllis as she
stepped around Larry to clean up the breakfast. She struck me as
the mother of some childhood friend who always treated you like you
were one of her kids – warmly, naturally. She was so dominated by
Larry though, that I doubted if I would ever actually get to know
her. He barely regarded her as he spoke that morning – and seemed
to consider her one more employee, although one who knew the
operation up and down, like him.

The two of them were
Kansas through and through, and had that kind of simple, homey,
awkward, “out-of-placeness” that Midwesterners have, especially in
such a vivid landscape as our little valley in the
Rockies.

Larry guided me
through the store after breakfast for my delayed
“official tour,” before we officially opened the doors – which was
going to be at 9 a.m., that day since it was our first day open. He
would re-position a hat here and tweak a post card stand there as
we meandered around, him talking in a steady Kansas monotone, and
me just listening with my eyes wandering around the
store.

“
This building was built
in 1914,” he explained, “and it’s the oldest structure still
standing in the entire Park.” He pointed up to the ceiling. “These
logs were taken right from the ground where the building sits, and
around it. President Franklin D. Roosevelt gave a national radio
address from this building on August 5, 1934, while on a visit to
Glacier.

“
The actual national park
is vast,” he continued. “It extends over the Canadian border,
actually, although that part of it is called ‘Waterton Park,’ but
it’s the same park, looks a little different up there
though.”

He indicated the aisles of
shirts and other souvenirs by the front doors. “You have your park
stuff up there.” He waved his a hand vaguely around the aisles to
our left and right. “More knick knacks around here; and groceries
and the snack bar way back there. I don’t like that we sell that
booze, but you have campers who want to drink and the park lets
them, for some damned reason.”

I followed along with his
tour quietly, wondering if many people actually bought the
souvenirs we had up front. I looked over at the shelves of liquor
and saw a variety of colors and sizes of wines, cheap liquor like
“Mad Dog 20/20,” and more expensive, high-quality whiskeys, beers
and some other boozy selections.

“
Employees of my store shouldn’t be allowed to drink either,”
he said looking at me sourly, “but a couple years ago the park
chastised me trying to fire the whole lot of them for a bonfire
party they threw nearby and got drunk at – with
our
booze!” He shook his
head as we walked up to the front doors. “Didn’t even pay for it.
So it’s allowed, but technically it is frowned up,” he said,
frowning upon it as he spoke.

“
It can definitely make
things more complicated,” I said.

He showed me how to work
the giant fireplace flue, and admonished me against using too much
wood during the day. “Loafers like to sit in the rocking chairs and
just vegetate – they aren’t buying anything if they are sitting
here,” he muttered.

The fire logs were
enormous, about four feet long, and weighed a great deal, and they
would burn all day. We would usually keep a fire going, even in the
summer, but it would be kept small, tamed. But at night the place
was ours – the staff’s – and Ronnie, Katie and I would often get it
going pretty good and sit around enjoying the ambiance, enjoying
the fun of burning up Larry’s big logs.

Larry finished my tour by
bringing me up to the front door, where I had first come in. He
drew out a keychain from his pocket with about 50 keys on it and
unlocked the swinging, wooden doors. Sunlight poured in like white
gold when he opened them both up wide, jamming wooden blocks under
them with his white sneaker to keep them open. I liked that there
were no screen doors, just an open threshold to let all the nature
air in. I would find out later that screen doors would be
eventually used – for a very good reason.