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Summer of Fifty-Seven. Stephen C. Joseph
Читать онлайн.Название Summer of Fifty-Seven
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780865344730
Автор произведения Stephen C. Joseph
Жанр Приключения: прочее
Издательство Ingram
Moving out onto the opposite side of the sunlit main street, I lifted my thumb once again. I had barely time to feel those pancakes begin to settle before a brand-new Volkswagon bus stopped.
Its driver looked like he would be more at home in Olde Lyme, Connecticut than in Jackson, Wyoming. He was clad in khaki ‘chinos’, an open-necked short-sleeved shirt, and had one of those little plastic thingy’s in his breast pocket with several pens, and the obligatory 1950s slide-rule. But, like everyone else in western Wyoming, he seemed to be chronically-infected with Smile Disease. “Where can I take you, my young friend?”
“Name’s Steve, and I’m headed north, up to Montana and then to the AlCan for Alaska. Appreciate any lift you can give me.”
“Well, I can only get you five miles or so up the road, but at least that’s a start out of town, and there’s sure to be someone who will be heading north.”
We hung a left at the little park in the center of town, the one with arches of elk antlers framing the entry paths, and moved north in the lee of a long bluff to the west.
“That’s Gros Ventre, Fat Belly, Butte. A lot of things have French names around here, tagged by the French Canadians who came down into this country after beaver. They were among the first of the Mountain Men. I’m turning off west just after we pass the Butte, over to Warm Springs Ranch.”
I suppose the words “Mountain Men” set the fever alight in my brain, and then, as we came up to the end of the Gros Ventre Butte, I saw them in the morning sun, standing to the northwest and front-lighted from the east. I saw them, something lifted up inside me, and I never have been the same, even to this day, forty years and more later.
There they stood, compact in an uneven broken line, glistening crests of rock and snow and ice. They were just a short range, separated from the rest of the chain of the Rockies by flat spaces to north and south, and cut by deep west-running canyons between the peaks. Though you could not, from where we were, see the chain of blue lakes along their eastern front, the green dip of conifers told you the lakes were there.
“What are those mountains, mister?”
“Those, my boy, are the Grand Tetons, and out in front of you is Jackson Hole. The Snake River runs through it. The Mountain Men crossed through the Hole in the 1820s and 30s, looking for beaver, moving back and forth to their yearly rendezvous sites: west of the range in Pierre’s Hole, southwest on the Bear River, over southeast on the Sweetwater, and down south of the Hoback on the Green River. They gathered each spring, coming in from wherever they had spent the winter, to trade, to raise hell, and to plan the year’s beaver hunts. Jackson Hole was a sort of center-point, a cross-roads on their trails of exploration during the high time of the Mountain Men. They called it a ‘shining time’, and those are the Shining Mountains. I’ve always wondered where that phrase came from, though it’s plain to see what it signifies. Last year I read that when the French explorer, Pierre La Verendrye, was looking for furs way over north and west of Lake Superior, back in the 1740s, almost a hundred years before the Mountain Men got out here, the Indians told him that far to the west there were mountains ‘that shined by night as well as by day.’ They had it right, for sure. Just be here in the moonlight, and you’ll see.”
Thoughts of Alaska vaporized. This was my place.
“Stop the car. I mean, slow down, please. Do you think there might be any work around here, mister? I can do most anything, especially if it’s outside.”
“Well, I don’t know, but there is the National Park headquarters up the road there at Moose, and I think they usually take on seasonal help for the summer. Tell you what, I’ll run you up to the park, past Moose Junction, it’s just a few miles further on than I was going anyway, and you can try your luck.”
We drove through the valley of Jackson Hole, elk and trumpeter swans to the right of us in the National Wildlife Refuge. The visual passage was clear to the north, and always the peaks lay to the west. We dipped down to cross the Snake at Moose Junction, passing the Chuckwagon, a tourist restaurant under tent canvas, with huge grates and cauldrons already firing up. At the Chuckwagon, I came to learn, if it was made of beef, you could order it. If it wasn’t made of beef, they were temporarily out of it. Alongside the river lay the log-framed Chapel of the Transfiguration, through whose huge altar window the simple wooden cross was silhouetted against the soaring peaks. On the other side of the road was a small general store, also of peeled logs, with a telephone hung outside, next to a Sinclair Oil gasoline pump.
Once past the river bridge, the road wound up onto a forested benchland fronting the mountains. A sign proclaimed: “Welcome to Grand Teton National Park.”
I hopped out, offering my thanks to the driver for going considerably out of his way for my convenience, and walked into the entrance road.
Park headquarters was a cluster of log buildings with green roofs, surrounded by lodgepole pine forest. There was a jumble of jeeps and pick-ups in the central yard, and nobody much was around; it was Sunday morning.
I knocked on the door of the building marked “Central Administration.” Being hailed in, I faced a youngish man with a leathered face, a receding hairline, and a nicely-developing beer gut, sitting slouched behind a desk. On the desk was a sign, “Assistant Superintendent.” But from under the desk stuck out a pair of well-used, and well-oiled, work boots, and the hand he waved me in with was clean but heavily callused.
“Sir, I was headed for Alaska, but I saw those mountains. Any chance you have work for me? I’m strong and not too bright, and I can do most anything.”
“Well (that word seemed to be the way to begin any sentence in these parts; sort of a front-end punctuation mark, like the inverted question mark in written Spanish), we filled our Trail Crews last week, but I had some Eastern kid quit on me this morning, so I do have one place open, and tomorrow is Monday, and Billy Jiggs from Driggs has got to take a crew up on the Hidden Falls Trail. Would you mind working in the woods? You’d have to spend some time in the mountains.”
“Well (by now I had become similarly speech-affected), I guess I could do that, if you really need somebody.” I am certain he saw right through my affected nonchalance; eagerness must have been all over my face. He tried to suppress a grin.
“Then you’re in luck, and we have a deal, young pardner, as long as you are not on the run or some kind of dope fiend, and can sign your name. Just throw your gear over in the bunkhouse, and we can fiddle with Uncle Sam’s paperwork tomorrow, early morning. If you’re hungry, there’s probably some cold pancakes left in the kitchen”
And, as I was backing out the door, he added, “Oh, yeah, by the way, what’s your name, so I can tell Billy.”
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