Two Medicine (8 page)

“
So this is a ‘jammer?’” I
asked.

“
Yep, gets its name from
grinding the gear shift – which you’ll hear pretty soon as we climb
some of the hills on the road to your stop.”

The guy sported a scruffy
beard and was wearing a safari-style khaki outfit - obviously some
hokey kind of uniform the park fashioned for the jammer drivers. I
worried as I took a side-ways glance at him that my Two Medicine
job was going to have me wear something like that all summer. It
occurred to me, not for the first time, and not for the last, as
the driver ground the gear stick into second gear as we climbed a
road out of the Lodge parking lot shaking us back and forth in our
seats, that I hardly knew anything about my new job. I felt another
wave of nervous doubt creep up into my chest.
What was I doing?
In the haste to get
packed and booked out there, and with limited information to start
with, I had never actually nailed down what I would be doing
day-to-day, other than “working in the camp store.”

“
So you’re working at Two
Medicine?” he asked again as we bounced along, as if reading my
mind through his bushy, blonde mass of bouncing hair. The shocks on
the old bus creaked loudly over every pothole in the
road.

“
Do you know anything
about it out there? About the store?” I asked.

He glanced over at me and
smirked, “It’s way the heck ‘out there’ alright, the farthest
outpost in the park – and right next to the Blackfoot reservation
too. You picked a doozy of a place to get roped into. Lotta’ crazy
shit happens on the res…” he said.

I didn’t really catch his
warning, unfortunately, because we suddenly crested a hill and I
was greeted with my first full view of the real Rocky Mountains –
the Northern Montana sort – which are the most beautiful and most
harsh of the whole rest of the vast Mountain chain, which stretches
from Canada to New Mexico from beginning to end.

On either side of the road
as we drove up higher was thick forest, some hardwoods here and
there, but many more pines than anything else, especially where the
ground was rockier and drier. Lodgepole pines that could cope with
the dry soil shot up straight from the dense grasses and blocked
out the sun; green and brown shrubs and smaller trees bunched in a
thick riot at their base. The land had a dustier, stonier look to
it than I expected – more “Western” than I had seen in the tourist
pictures online. But, I liked it. It looked… rough.

Rolling hills a little
ways off past our road led to up to enormous mountain peaks far off
in the distance, dotted with white patches of late snow – even in
June. It was hard to get a sense of the hugeness of the far-away
peaks as they rose in front of us and beside us along the valley in
which we were driving. As the jammer bus lurched over another crest
of asphalt, a wide stretch of deep indigo sky spread out overhead
above the peaks and made the green, brown, and, in some places
white forest stand out even more starkly, more striking and
hard.

How do you
describe a mountain? It shouldn’t be attempted
lightly, lest the glory and imminence be lost in shabby metaphors
and threadbare adjectives. At the risk of doing so, however, I will
say that the mountains’ sides and the peaks were mostly a stony,
dark brown and tan, and had a disordered, craggy rockiness that
revealed and confirmed that they had been jammed up high into the
air by crushing, inevitable geologic forces millions of years ago,
leaving them at-once brittle and crumbling, exposed and naked,
while at the same time diamond-hard and concrete. And the forest at
their feet was marching up the mountains’ sides, only to be held in
a line, almost perfectly even, across the mountains’ sides where
the forest ended and the stark brown skin of the neck of the
mountain was exposed. As I watched from the rolled-down jammer
window, I had the urge to climb to the top of one of those peaks
and lay in the sun above the world.

“
That’s your mountain,
there,” the jammer driver was pointing out his window to the left
at a mountain that stood somewhat alone and had a slight conical
shape. “Mount Sinopah.”

“
My mountain?” I asked,
snapping out of my daydream and the distant peaks.

“
Two Medicine camp is down
below that one.” He pointed out across the tops of the distant
trees to our left.

I looked over at my
mountain. “Where’s the name come from –
Sinopah
.”

“Dunno, Indian chief way
back when I think,” the driver said, shrugging.

I had read that these
jammer drivers were the park’s tour guides, and would provide
commentary about the park and its history to riders as they drove,
but my guide wasn’t very expansive about anything to say the least,
but I realized he kind of already thought of me as one of the team,
not to be treated like some slack-jawed, awestruck yokel from the
city.

I sat back into the bench
seat of the bus as we drove on, grinding gears up the now-steeper
hills, and I felt lost in the vast wildness of the place. However,
tooling down the road in my weird red bus I felt the nervousness
that had now become a deep part of me – the expectation of what lay
out there in below “my mountain” was worrying me. I wondered if the
others on staff at the store would be nice and decent to work with,
if the job was going to be ok… I glanced at my bushy-haired driver;
would my coworkers be crazy? But mostly, as the bus lurched down
the road toward a chain of lower hills, I wondered if I had made a
huge mistake and come all this way for nothing.

We drove for
two hours more, and the mountain peaks didn’t seem
to get much closer. After yet another hour we drove into a large
gravel lot that lay next to a long lake which spanned all way
through a valley and stopped at the feet of Mount Sinopah himself.
I recognized the scene from my internet searches in Atlanta. There
it was – the two-story, very big log cabin next to that very lake I
had seen in the magazine. It was
the
store and
the
lake, no doubt about
it.

After I got out my things,
the jammer drove off, beeping his horn twice as a sendoff, waving
his hand in a flourish and the disappeared past the trees. I stood
in the gravel parking lot next to the store, holding my suitcase in
one hand and my guitar case in the other, feeling completely out of
place. I listened to the birds chirping off in the distance, to the
wind blowing across the lake and getting entangled in the trees
beside me. There were no cars in front of the store, no cars
anywhere, and I could see no other people around. An aluminum canoe
was tied to a tree near the store by the lake.

I trudged across the
gravel to the steps of the store, taking in the place as I walked.
The store was, as I mentioned, built two stories high with a big,
slate, A-frame room. The whole place was made of enormous wooden
logs, like unfinished telephone poles stacked horizontally, with a
dark slate roof peaked by a glass skylight. Across the front of the
store was a wooden porch stretching across the entire face, with a
wooden railing going round and two or three large rocking chairs
set out on it, empty. The store was painted dark brown with a
light, tan trim around the large windows, kind of a Swedish-chalet
style, like the big lodge I had slept in the night before. Logs cut
in half made up the heavy staircase that lead up to the front door.
It looked as good as any place to start with, so I walked towards
the entrance and put one foot on the first split log
step.

A girl suddenly stepped
out of the front door above me and walked onto the porch. She
shielded her eyes with her hand from the sun and squinted at me.
She looked to be in her early twenties

“
Are you Will?” she
asked.

“
Yep.” I stood there
holding my bag and guitar.

She came down the stairs.
“I’m Katie – I work here too.” She offered me her hand and I
grasped it for a second and gave it a slight shake. She was short
and fit and had natural sandy blonde hair with brown eyes set in a
youthful, thoughtful looking face. She had a good figure, a nice
compact little frame, with fine, full boobs under a tight park
shirt that I couldn’t help but notice. An unavoidable little wave
of interest shot through me involuntarily.
Forget it,
I told myself.
You are done with that messy business, pal, at
least for now.

She was looking at me in a
quizzical way, as if studying a science experiment that was turning
out different than she had planned.

“
The lodge called this
morning and said you were on your way out. You’re not what I
thought you’d look like.”

“
Good…” I looked back at
her at a loss for what to say.

She looked doubtfully at my
bag. “You packed a
suitcase?
Everybody here just has backpacks.” She shook her
head slightly, “A regular Daniel Boone huh?”

That was a bit irritating.
To change to the subject I nodded at the store behind her. “How
long have you been here?”

“
Two weeks ago, and it’s
already been pretty crazy.” She turned back to the store and
gestured for me to follow her up the stairs. “I’ve been stocking,
cleaning, and getting the place ready non-stop since I set foot off
the jammer.”

She spoke in a strangely
flat, hesitant kind of voice, like she was reluctantly speaking out
of obligation and making an effort to say as little as possible,
but also awkwardly trying to be friendly at the same time. I
wondered how it was going to be living with her.

She turned and looked back
at me as if reading my thoughts. “You’re going to like it here,
though,” she said as she held the front doors open, and then gave
me a cautious look. “But it’s gonna take some getting used
to.”

She then disappeared back
inside the dark interior of the store, letting the doors close,
apparently having forgotten she had been holding the door open for
me, and leaving me alone outside again.

It was quiet
in the valley. The mountain peaks around me seemed
at once close and an impossible distance away. The cold breeze made
a whisper through nearby pines, sunlight peeping down through the
branches and dotting the pine needles on their feet; the lake
surface rested glassy and still.
Perhaps I
should just wander into those trees, and never stop wandering…
wouldn’t that be simpler?
I looked around
at the store again and let loose a sigh. I set my foot back onto
the first split-log stair and climbed up. I walked across the porch
to the front door.
Here goes.

As my hand rested on the
door a nervous expectation and fear built up to a point that I
wanted to grab hold of something immovable and just think for a
moment… just for a moment. To think about what I was doing… I had
given up so much to be here, I had given everything up for a new
start.
What was I doing here?
I had talked and dreamed for so long about living
in Montana, and now here I was feeling like I was lost.

I pushed the heavy wooden
door open walked in. I saw that the store itself was mainly a
large, open room all the way up to the A-frame roof, until you got
back to the further end to a second floor of rooms. The same long,
telephone-pole size beams stretched across the roof, were held in
place with metal braces, wires and thick steel bolts.

I saw that the large room
consisted of three major sections of stuff for sale, separated only
by a big stone fireplace and sitting area in the middle on the
right side. As I walked further in I saw that the area nearest to
the front doors held tourist merchandise like stacks of park
tourist books and DVDs, picturesque mugs, candles and other
knickknacks for sale. A bit further in were shelves with t-shirts,
jackets, sweatshirts and other wearable park souvenirs for
tourists. It was kind of an odd assortment of stuff all stacked and
displayed together, some of it seemingly not organized in any
discernable way.

Beyond the clothes and off
to one side near the wall was a large, glass counter with a cash
register. The stone fireplace had a couple of rocking chairs set in
front of it, just like those on the porch out front. At the back of
the building was a little grocery and camp supplies area and a
snack bar kitchen with a few tables and chairs in which people to
relax and eat as they stared out the huge windows that lined the
log walls on either side of the store. The ceiling was about 30
feet above.

No one was in view in the
store proper, but I could hear Katie speaking from somewhere in the
back near the kitchen hidden from view, so I followed the sound
through aisles of postcards, past little wooden carvings of bears
and eagles, and by rows of CDs and tapes of outdoor-themed music,
gripping my suitcase and guitar case.

As I walked I looked with
dismay at the plastic and cheap touristy crap that was being sold
here – in such a pristine and wild place! I felt disappointment at
the message these things near the front of the store were saying to
me, to anyone that came in here – that I was going to be working in
a
gift shop
. I had
imagined something more like the back of the store, I suppose,
selling camp supplies like food and propane gas, tents and sleeping
backs – the honest, rugged and respectable outdoor necessities –
not key chains and license-plate covers... I averted my eyes as I
passed some plastic, mountain goat Montana magnets for the
fridge.