Читать книгу Summer of Fifty-Seven - Stephen C. Joseph - Страница 12

I carried the Gladstone over across the dusty yard, seeing nothing more animate than a pair of Levi’s-clad legs sticking out from under a Chevy truck, and hearing nothing more than the sweet whang of Hank Williams’ “Your Cheating Heart”, emanating from the truck radio, accompanied by occasional and desultory metallic clangs from under the chassis.

The bunkhouse differed from the other buildings in that its logs were painted white. The screen door banged behind me, and I was immediately standing in the ‘dining room’: concrete floor with several long white wooden tables with detached white wooden benches; sugar bowls, salt and pepper cellars, and metal napkin dispensers on each table, enough seating to hold twenty or twenty-five hungry people. The kitchen was off to the left, through a door and a large serving window, and what I could see of it looked like a major outfit: enormous cast-iron stove, steam-table and commercial dishwasher, big fridge and freezer, metal counters. The place was quiet and seemed deserted; no meals were served on Sundays.

A round, tousled head peeked out from behind the kitchen doorjamb, and a refrigerator door clunked behind it.

“Hey, whacha dune? Nice morning, huh?” This around a mouthful of pancake.

“Just getting in. Was in Rock Springs yesterday. Terrible place. Name’s Steve. Going to work trail crew.”

“Hi, I’m Dick Robbins. Chicago (this pronounced just as in the old song: ‘Chicken in the car and the car won’t go. And that’s the way to spell Chicago.’). Want to go fishin’?”

The rest of Dick emerged from around the jamb. He was slightly above middle height, brown hair and eyes, round face, stocky but solid, and moved with fluidity rather than in bursts, kind of rolling smoothly along.

I learned, once I was able to interpret the strange speech (“moo’n pitcher,” “chorkorlit”), that Dick was indeed from Chicago, and was at the University of Colorado in Boulder, where he was majoring “in skiing and girls,” working as a short-order cook to get by. He thought Chicago was what was left over after they had made the beautiful Rockies, and, after he got expert enough in skiing and girls, his further ambition was to fly airplanes, big airplanes, for the United States Air Force (and, indeed, he did become a Strategic Air Command pilot, spending his career in such garden spots as Minot, North Dakota, flying the B52’s). Dick was nothing if not decisive. If it could be climbed, skied, fried, flown, or gently sweet-talked, Dick Robbins was your man for it. It also seemed they had Smile Disease down there in Colorado as well as in Wyoming, and Dick had a bad case of it.

“I got my private pilot’s license this year. Maybe we can go flying some time out of the Jackson airport. Should get some wonderful bumps from the thermals in front of the mountains. Fly up to Yellowstone. Fly over the Falls. Take some girls. But today we got to go fishin’.”

There was a phrase in my Western novels I really liked: “A man to ride the river with.” It took me only about five minutes to figure out that, if there was such, Dick Robbins was it. Nothing rattled him and his good humor. He took reverses and obstacles in the same easy stride as he took good fortune. If there was a tool, he knew how to use it. If there was a problem, he would give it some thought and then go ahead and fix it.

“Let me go upstairs and drop my gear, and I’ll be right with you.”

“Doncha warnt some pancakes first?”

“No thanks, Dick, I had enough pancakes this morning at the Silver Dollar to last me two days. Check with me in the morning, though. I could be ready.”

I went up the wooden stairs at the side of the kitchen, and adjusted my eyes to the dim light under the log eaves. Twenty or so metal bedframes, with mattresses, slipless pillows, and Army blankets, were lined along the two longer walls. Open white-painted wooden lockers, most with clothes on hangers and shelves, stood at intervals and on the inside short wall. Two large windows let light in through the fourth wall, and shaded bulbs were hung from the peaked ceiling. A large, white-painted washroom was at one end, with sinks and mirrors, Johns, and showers. There were about a dozen towels on the hooks. I found what appeared to be an empty cot, threw down my Gladstone, and sat for a minute, thinking how far I had come in four days, and how far I had come since the snow in Hoback Canyon just several hours ago. I thought about the Mountain Men, seeing this country for the first time, as I had seen the Tetons just this morning. I wondered if it had felt to them as it had felt to me, and if it had changed something nameless inside them as well.

A soft and liquid voice issued from a cot in a dark corner. “Hi, my name’s Larry. From Montana. The Flathead Rez. We’re goin’ fishin’, if you want to come.”

“Yeah, great, Larry, that’s what Dick said. I’m with you.”

“Great. Jim too. He’s got the car.”

Larry rose soundlessly and effortlessly from the bunk, all five and a quarter feet of him, dark straight hair and dark, dark eyes, and big knotted shoulders. I followed him back down the stairs. His soft footfalls were barely audible; my clumsy boots clunked behind him.

Dick was sitting straddling one of the benches, still chewing pancake, one in each fist. As we went over to him, the bunkhouse door blew open and in came the Wild West Wind.

“Hey. Let’s go. Ready? Get a move on, the fish won’t wait all day. C’mon, it’s past eleven o’clock already. Be dark soon. Head ‘em up. Hi, name’s Jim, Jim Burdock. Let’s go. Bang bang. We won’t know what’s there if we don’t go look.”

Jim was about one hundred and forty-five pounds soaking wet, a couple of inches shy of six feet, not an un-oiled joint in his lean whipcord body. He always looked like he was moving fast, but he was really always moving slow, and smooth, and effortlessly. I never have met anybody who gave more the impression that he was in a terrific hurry, while he was really taking his time. He had nondescript brown hair, pale ice blue eyes, and, man, he was the inventor of Smile Disease. As I learned later, he could talk you out of your socks (or any other piece of apparel), and was a bit of a devil with the ladies. He had that “Aw, shucks, ma’m, my hand isn’t really there” cowboy way that snaps like a mousetrap on (especially Eastern) girls, but he was very quiet and polite about it. Jim had been raised in the Sandhill Country of western Nebraska, a ranch kid, and was a couple of years older than most of us. He had graduated from the University of Wyoming down in Laramie, and spent the past year teaching school over in Dubois (here pronounced Dew-boys), a settlement just over the mountains northeast from Jackson. What he wanted to do with his life was, “Well let’s just go look, and see what happens,” but, hard as he worked at it, the keen intelligence under his hat was hard to hide. He had the Western hat and the Western boots, and he drove a garbage pick-up truck for the park. Said it was a good job for the summer, because he got to meet a lot of girls in the campgrounds and parking lots.

We headed into the yard, piled into Jim’s old rattletrap Ford (made back when you could get any color you wanted, as long as it was black), and, trailing oily smoke behind the black and orange bucking horse Wyoming license plate, turned north on the main park road towards the Jackson Lake Lodge. I was a bit surprised, because nobody seemed to have any fishing gear.

After five or ten miles, when I thought I had better mention that we had forgotten something, Dick looked at Jim, Jim looked at Dick, and Jim said,” Well, Steve, here’s how we go fishing up here in the Tetons of a Sunday afternoon. First we go up to the Willow Flats below the Lodge, and Larry here will show us how to really catch trout. Then, after we cook and eat ‘em, and rest a while from our labors, it gets to be about four or five o’clock in the afternoon, and we go up to the bar in the Lodge, and sit there, and have a little drink, and go fishing for the girls who work up there. It’s early in the season yet, just beginning, but I think it’s going to be a good year. “

This was the second summer in the Park for all three of my companions, so I thought I better just follow along and work it like they said. Sounded good to me.

It took us about a half-hour to reach the Jackson Lake Junction. On the way, I got my first look at the crystal blue waters of Jackson Lake, the largest lake in the park. Across the water to the west soared the flat-topped Mount Moran, girdled by glaciers, and with a distinctive oxide-colored natural dike running down its upper east face. Mount Moran was currently best known as the peak into which an airliner had slammed during a winter storm a few years earlier; the bodies and parts of the plane were still up there. The mountain was named after the great early painter of the American West, Thomas Moran. Strangely enough, Moran never saw ‘his’ mountain from its most dramatic, Jackson Hole, eastern side, but he did get to paint it from the west.

Thomas Moran, a rather mousy and timid-appearing Philadelphia engraver, British-born, had been engaged as the back-up artist on the Hayden expedition of 1871. Led by the Director of the US Geological and Geographical Survey of the Territories, Ferdinand V. Hayden, the expedition set out to document the wonders of the region that included what was to become Yellowstone Park. Moran formed a close partnership and friendship with the expedition’s photographer, William H. Jackson, and Moran’s watercolors and later-executed oils of the geysers, steaming pools, colored rocks, lakes, and Yellowstone Falls and Canyon, substantiated by Jackson’s photographs of the same scenes, created a sensation back East, and at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876. This incontrovertible documentation of the scenic marvels of Yellowstone played a significant part in the creation of our first National Park and the subsequent treasures of our National Park System.

Moran did not accompany the Hayden expedition’s foray into Jackson Hole, south of Yellowstone in 1872. He turned further south, to paint the Grand Canyon, but Hayden named Mount Moran in his honor. Moran himself did not see the Tetons until 1879, when, with a military escort, he approached, and painted the range from the western (Idaho) side.

Between the Jackson Lake road junction and the edge of the lake were the Willow Flats, a low and somewhat marshy area where a number of small streams threaded into Jackson Lake. Jackson Lake is, actually, just an extremely wide place in the Snake River, which enters its north end, and flows out through a small dam to the south-east. It was here that I got my first taste (or, more accurately, vice versa) of the big local mosquitoes, or as some called them, the Jackson Hole Canaries. In truth, the tiny no-see-um black flies were much worse, but they weren’t about at the moment. Fortunately, there was bright sun and a pretty good breeze, and the Canaries were a relatively minor nuisance for most of this day. Their specialty, like the Royal Air Force over Berlin, was after the sun went down.

We wandered down along one of the larger streams, lay down in the sun, had a smoke (Luckies and Camels for the locals, Marlboros for the wanna-be cowboys), watched the clouds roll by overhead, and then, when we were good and ready, got down to the serious business of fishing. Dick and Jim had, between them, in their pockets, a half-dozen fish hooks and about twelve feet of line—in six pieces of unequal lengths. The three of us dapped (British fancy fishing language for “dipped”) short lines in the water, baited with worms I dug up from the soft soggy ground with my pocket knife. But this was only a diversion from the main event, and we never did catch any trout that way that day.

What really was going on was this: Larry would sneak up to the stream bank, on his belly, absolutely silently. In slow motion he would push his arm over the bank, into the water, and underneath the grassy overhang. Then he would sort of wiggle his fingers in a motion I never was able to master, and that he called “tickling the trout.” Jim later told me that what he was actually doing was stroking their bellies, and mesmerizing them. In about 15 minutes he had flipped a half-dozen small brookies onto the bank, and that was all there was to it. I have heard of people catching fish with willow wand rods, reed-woven nets, bows and arrows, and fish spears, but I have never seen anything like that Flathead friend of mine that afternoon. The only thing I could compare it to was in my Western stories, where the young braves would slip in among the pony herd, and steal them silently away, while the enemy camp slept on, unawares.

We gutted and cleaned the trout with our small knives, spitted them on willow sticks, cooked them over a small, smokeless fire right on the stream bank, sucked our greasy fingers clean, and soon were lying, contented, on our backs again, smoking and talking, resting after all that hard work.

I already knew that Jim’s job for the summer was driving the garbage truck. Larry, it seemed, was just passing through for a few days, on his way to work on assignment with a fire-fighting crew based up in Yellowstone Park to the north of the Tetons. Dick, it turned out, was a major player on the real trail crew. These were the experienced hands who did not come back to Park Headquarters and the bunkhouse each night, but lived for days and weeks at a time high in the mountains, at tent camps or winter refuge cabins, or under the sky, working the back trails in the high country. Their year-round park staff supervisor, Buddy, who was in training to get his deer that next fall by running it down with a hunting knife (and he did it, too; his explanation was that it wasn’t so hard, all you had to do was to keep moving after it until the deer became exhausted and lay down), would drop in on them every once in awhile, but they were largely on their own, and had to really know what they were doing. The other trail crews, such as the one I would be joining, were regarded by that elite as sort of rear-echelon soldiers.

As we lay there, a little groggy from the sun and the trout, Jim began what I soon was to recognize as one of his school-master-type discourses.

‘The reason they call that bay up around the east side of the lake Colter Bay, is in honor of John Colter, probably the first white man, certainly the first American, to come through the Hole. That was in 1807. Colter was the youngest member of the Lewis and Clark Corps of Discovery, 19 years of age (same age as you said you are now, Steve) when he signed on in Missouri. He was kind of a hell-raiser, but also a superb hunter, and became, along with Pierre Drouillard, the main meat-getter and special assignment scout for the expedition.

“When they finally started down the Missouri River for home, in 1806, John decided he didn’t want to leave this shinin’ country. Guess he saw the mountains like we all did. So he came back upriver on the Missouri, and did a little exploring all by his lonesome. By 1807 a big Saint Louis trader, Manuel Lisa, was sending him out to spread the word to the Crows and other tribes that the Great White Father’s fur-trading supermarket was coming. Colter just moved around all this country by himself, with his long rifle and a thirty pound pack. Lived with the Indians in the winter, especially the Crows.

“Colter had a number of run-ins with the Blackfeet; in fact, some blame him for the intractable hostility of the Blackfeet to the Americans, though I guess they were just trying to keep hold of their way of life. The most famous story about John Colter and the Blackfeet is when, one time, the Indians captured Colter and a companion, butchered the other man alive in front of Colter, flung the bloody pieces in his face, and told John to run for his life. He outraced those Blackfeet for five miles or more, turning to kill the one brave that stayed close behind him, with the brave’s own spear. Then he hid in the icy-cold Jefferson River all day, poking his nose up beneath some drifting logs and reeds, until the Indians gave up looking for him and went home.

“After he came through the Hole in 1807, he went up north through Yellowstone Park, just like the tourists do today, and saw the steaming pots and geysers and hot springs. When he told about the marvels he had seen, nobody quite believed him, but for years Yellowstone was known to the Mountain Men as ‘Colter’s Hell’ Many took the stories to be tall tales, such as the one “Old Gabe,” Jim Bridger, a leader years later among the Mountain Men, liked to tell: “You could catch your trout in one pool, and boil it for dinner in the pool next door!” said Bridger, who was, of course, not exaggerating.

“What happened to John Colter, Jim,” I asked.

“Well, by 1810, this first, most indestructible, youngest, and maybe greatest of the Mountain Men had had enough. He went back to Missouri to farm (can you imagine that?), married, and died two years later of liver disease.”

Dick’s voice rose from the grass: “John Colter sure was something, but I don’t think you can call him the greatest. The greatest was undoubtedly Jedediah Smith, the Mountain Man’s Mountain Man. The beaver were a sidelight to him; what Jed Smith really was driven by was exploration—he discovered South Pass, down below the Wind Rivers, where the wagon trail was later to take settlers over the mountains; he was the first white man we know of to cross the Sierras; he blazed trails all up and down the Rockies, in the dry country beyond, over by the Great Salt Lake, and in California. Jed Smith did more than anyone to understand the geography of the Shining Mountains. What all those early guys were looking for were two things: beaver to trap, and an easy river route to the Pacific, to connect up with the Missouri. They never found that route. This area around the Hole is a kind of a hub from which the water spokes fan out, going east and west from the Continental Divide, but, as Lewis and Clark and many others found out, there is no direct, easy passage. But the idea died hard; for years they searched for the Bonneventura River, which was supposed to flow from the west side of the Rockies through the Sierras to the sea, but they didn’t find it, because it didn’t exist. They sure found beaver, though, and they trapped the mountain streams, hard, for twenty years or so, until the beaver were all but gone. Then the Mountain Men were all but gone, too. Their entire era lasted from the very early days of about 1810 to only about 1840, when the beaver streams began to be trapped out, and when changes in men’s fashions back East and in Europe created a disastrous decline in prices for pelts.

“Jedediah was quiet and religious, but a great leader of men. He had come West with Ashley’s brigade as a green youth of twenty-three, and immediately showed his leadership qualities among men older and more experienced than he was. When he formed the Rocky Mountain Fur Company with David Jackson (and by the way, that’s who Jackson Hole and the Lake are named for—even though Colter had come through first, years before) and Bill Sublette, they brought about the most efficient and successful fur trapping operation in the Rockies. They were the first to bring goods by wagon into the mountains and to the Mountain Men’s rendezvous. Ironically, they probably accelerated the sharp decline in beaver and fur prices that led to the end of what they most loved in these Shining Mountains. There’s a Mount Jedediah Smith over on the west side of the Tetons, I’ve been over there last summer, just to have a look around. It’s right next to Mount Meek—over by Alaska Basin—named after Joe Meek, who was one of the wildest of that hair-raising bunch. What a bunch they were, and what a time, a Shinin’ Time, that must have been up here. I wish, well, never mind… “

“And how did Jed Smith end up, Dick,” I asked.

“Well, unlike Colter, he died with his boots on, killed in a fight with Comanches, way down on the Santa Fe Trail, in 1831, at the advanced age of 32. His entire career of exploration and beaver trapping in the Rockies had lasted but a short eight years. He had tried, once, to leave the mountains and settle down, like John Colter did before him, but of course he couldn’t do it, so he came back. If there was a “greatest” of the Mountain Men, Jed Smith was it.”

“And what about David Jackson?”

“Interesting. Almost nothing is known about Jackson, where he came from, where he went after Jedediah was killed. He first turns up, with Jed, at Ashley’s big fight with the Arikaras along the Missouri in the early 1820s. He was with the group traveling the Santa Fe trail when Jed was killed, a decade later. But, before and after, nobody knows. Like that song says, he came with the dust, and he went with the wind. He was judged by his peers to be one of the best brigade leaders of the beaver hunts, knowing just where to go, and how to stay alive to get there, and keep your hair in the process. “

After a bit, the sky clouded over some more, the mosquitoes got bad and the no-see-ums showed up, and Jim announced that it was time “to go up to the Lodge and do some more serious fishing.” Larry, who was as shy as a cat at a dog convention, decided to head back on his own to the bunkhouse. It was no trick at all to move easily around the park road system; all summer long the tourists, and the Park Service vehicles, would pick up any young person who stuck his, or her, thumb out, day or night. No one on either side of that Fifties’ deal worried about there being any threat to their personal safety. About the only bad thing I ever heard happening was when one of our crew was in a car that bounced off a bear that was crossing the road at night over by Signal Mountain. The bear ran off, but the car had to be towed. Nobody was hurt.

So Jim, Dick and I got back in the Ford. Jim was driving, Dick was in the shotgun seat, and I was in back snugged up between the silent ghosts of John and Jedediah. We meandered up to the Lodge, perched on a bluff overlooking the lake.

I don’t remember much about the architecture or interior lobbies of the Jackson Lake Lodge, because I only entered it a few times, and those were to go to the bar. Mostly, as I will relate, the time we spent “at the Lodge” was actually at the recreation hall or single-story dorms for the young college kids who were working there for the summer. They were busboys, waiters and waitresses, maids, outdoor help, etc. What Dick and Jim told me was really nice for the Park Service guys like us, was that the ratio of summer workers at the Lodge was about three females to every male. Ah, hah. I comprehended that arithmetic. As I came to understand it, there was kind of a pecking order, a status chain, among the young people. At the top were the Park Service crews (and evidently it didn’t matter whether you were roughing it in the mountains or driving a garbage truck, if you had the right stuff). In the middle were the kids working at the lodges and concessions in the park. And at the bottom were those unfortunates who were summer help as ‘pseudo-Rangers’, the ‘Flat Hats’ who got to dress up and stand at the campground entry kiosks and sell passes and hand out maps. These unworthies had come all the way from New Jersey, so to speak, to Wyoming, when they could have stayed home and been movie theatre ushers for the summer. As is always the case with young people, the rankings were pitiless. Life is unfair, but I figured it was nicer to be an Alpha than an Epsilon.

The bar was cool, high-ceilinged and large-beamed, and full of dark corners. Jim led us to a table in the darkest corner of all, but one from which, I soon realized, we had the best view of, not the other patrons, but of the staff moving back and forth from the bar and the kitchens. As we moved among the tourists, to our table in our jeans and denim jackets and boots, I wished I could emulate the unconscious swagger of my two buddies, but, being only four days out of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and new to the mountains, I was not confident I could pull it off. I also wished I had a pair of real boots and a big hat, like Jim.

“Hi, what can I get for you.” Her silly little name tag said, ‘Sarah, Pocatello, Idaho.’ She had hair the color of October cornstalks, and eyes that matched Jackson Lake. All the rest of her, under the striped apron and above the black flat Capezio shoes, looked equally nice to me. I tried to smile back, and said,”Martini, no olive, just a twist.” I have no damn idea why I said that, as I had never before in my life ordered a Martini, but it seemed to go down okay, and she smiled back.

“Bourbon, straight up, with water on the side,” said Jim, and Dick said, “I’ll have an iced tea.”

Well, we had a drink or three, and a couple of hamburgers, and Sarah spent plenty of time around our table. We were about out of both pocket money and time when Dick, who had said the least, but looked around the most, asked Sarah, “Who is that tall girl working those tables over on the other side?” Sarah looked through the dim light, and replied, “That’s Kitty.”

Dick Robbins said not another word, pushed back his chair, walked across the room, and whispered something quietly in Kitty’s ear. She turned absolutely white, then red, then pink. I thought she was going to hit him, but she just took two deep breaths, looked into his eyes, and smiled. Dick smiled back, turned around, came back to the table, and told us, “C’mon, it’s time to go. I have to start back up Cascade Canyon to camp before it gets dark, and I won’t be back down until Wednesday. We can come up here again Wednesday night. I’ve arranged it with Kitty.”

Sarah, who had watched the byplay, said, looking straight at me, “Sure, why don’t you all come back up to the rec hall Wednesday, sometime after six-thirty.” She deftly executed a pretty little turn thing, and walked away, slower than slow and twice as sweet.

We got back in the car, noting that John and Jedediah had gone off somewhere, and started south, taking the Inner Loop road that goes by Jenny Lake and the Jenny Lake Lodge, from which Dick would have the easiest access to the Cascade Canyon Trail.

The light was fading now; those glimpses of the lakes that we could get showed surfaces of blackening purple. The meadows around Jenny Lake had hidden their blankets of wildflowers. A few deer stood feeding in a dusky meadow; the buck raised his head as we slowed the car in passing, then bent again to graze, unafraid.

The peaks, beyond the lakes and forest, were also darkening rapidly, losing detail of their outlines. But at their summits, especially where one could make out their southern flanks across the canyons, a glistening, shining pink light of alpenglow flared up for a few minutes, and then vanished.

We dropped Dick off, watching him stride into the twilight, his flashlight still in his hip pocket, and continued on south toward Park Headquarters.