Home for a Season

I saw the tin foil on the windows of the trailer as I climbed the rusty, metal steps to the door. It was unlocked. Inside, it was dark and dusty. The smell of propane hung in the air. There was an ominous quality to the stained corduroy couch, a sense that something poisonous lay dormant in its cushions. A hulking, nonfunctional CRT television rested in the corner. In one bedroom, there was a pile of used mattresses. In the other, an empty box spring, wood panelling, a garbage bag of clothing. The soles of my sandals stuck and peeled away from the linoleum as I walked to the kitchen. When I opened a cabinet, a flurry of meaty brown spiders withdrew from the light, sandwiching themselves between stacked plates.

I thought of my boyfriend, 900 miles away in Colorado. I thought of friends from college, friends from high school, people who had settled in cities and towns. People who were not out here alone in West Texas. There was no one to blame but myself for how lonely I felt. I had chosen this. I had wanted it. I had moved here on purpose.

I went outside and stood in the dirt. The sky darkened—one of the darkest skies in North America. The stars came out. I went inside. The lights worked, a small mercy.

That night, a pack of javelinas crawled beneath the bedroom I’d chosen and scraped at the thin layer of floor that separated us, their screams and skunk-like scent just inches away. I shined a flashlight into the living room and caught hundreds of pairs of bright blue-green eyes looking back at me. Wolf spiders, I would later learn, have retroreflective tissue in their eyes that makes them glow. When I ran the shower, a lizard crawled up from the drain and looked at me.

This was my employee housing in Big Bend National Park, my home for the winter while I worked at a restaurant inside an isolated hotel in the Chisos Mountains. I’d begun working at hotels in the national parks five years earlier after a breakup led me to the Google search term jobs with housing.

I went out to my car, withdrew my suitcase from the trunk, brought it inside, and began to unpack. There was a sense that whoever had lived here last had holed up for a long time before moving out suddenly. Perhaps this was a sign to leave, but I didn’t take it. Most national park jobs are seasonal, and as such, housing is meant to be temporary. How beautiful the world looks when you’re just passing through; each place contains the fantasy of the life you might lead there. I have always been drawn to the challenge of living with wolf spiders, finding the right rug for the dorm room with six roommates in the mountains, learning the names of the animals that live in the new place.

*             

In Death Valley, my first park, where I delivered room service at an elegant old hotel, I lived in a squat building called The Gulch. It was brown like the desert around it. And the name was fitting; it sat at the base of limestone foothills where water would collect during monsoonal storms and destroy the dirt road again and again. I lined books up by the window where a single scorpion clung to the screen on the other side, its body prickly and amber in the hot sunlight.

That first night in that first park, I sat cross-legged on the pink bedspread I’d slept on as a teenager. What was I thinking, I asked myself as I watched the crushing blue sky bleed red and bruise black, moving to Death Valley all alone? There was a knock on the door, but I didn’t answer. I laid on my back, absorbing the gravity of my mistake. Had I really taken a job in the middle of the desert because the housing was provided and came out of my paycheck? As a child, I’d jumped into a neighbour’s pool before realizing I didn’t know how to swim. This felt the same; I’d made an impulsive decision and would now live with the consequences.

I’d started kicking that day, in the water. I’d adapted.           

I reached for the throw pillow behind me. A trivial thing I’d purchased in New Hampshire. The first month of college, a bus ride to the mall with new friends. Happy and indulgent with twenty dollars in the pocket of my jeans. Somehow, the fabric of the pillow still held the scent of that mall. Department store perfume, hot pretzels in the food court, the comfort of being contained within that space. There was a storage bin with other pillows. I took them out. I put them on the bed. I stayed up all night setting up the room, transforming it into a place where I could live. The fibres of the carpet held the fine dust of the desert. A tea-coloured stain on the ceiling hinted at a rainstorm the building had not been designed to withstand.

In Yellowstone, where I worked as a hostess at a restaurant overlooking an alpine lake, the dorms were named after birds that lived in the park. Pelican, Trumpeter. My room was in Osprey. There was a hole in the wall. The sulphuric smell of geysers leaked in from outside. I hung paintings and unrolled a soft, colourful rug onto the cold, institutional floor. I put a vase of fake flowers on the generic dresser that had been provided by Human Resources. Everything in the room was frictionless, heavy, meant to be easily cleaned and not easily removed. At the end of the summer, when I moved out, I had to complete a cleaning checklist, which someone from management had to personally check my work against. “Give it another try,” the housing director said, circling the items on the list that needed improvement, the parts of the room that still hinted at my presence there. Outside my window, a bison huffed in the courtyard. The herd was moving south, away from the lake and towards a geyser basin where the dirt was warm from underground volcanos, where openings in the earth breathed vapour from fumaroles.

In Glacier, where I waited tables at a restaurant that served trout, elk, and fondue, I carried my bags through the mist of the parking lot into the glow of the dorm. It was named simply—Lower Dorm—but its placement at the shore of Swiftcurrent Lake spoke to something much grander. There was no cell phone service or internet. The wooden porch with doors on either side for men and women looked out at the Many Glacier Valley, its lodgepole pines and beargrass, its mountain goats and glacial lakes, cliffs of black diorite, red argillite, gray granite—sedimentary rock containing millions of years of history, each mountain a silent witness to all who had passed through. Later I’d see a black-and-white photo of that porch crowded with grinning employees from decades ago. In someone’s scribbled handwriting: the wild house. It was raining when I arrived, the valley cool and wet and bright with the scent of cedar. I entered the dorm and found new employees gathered in the common room.

“Damn,” someone said, looking at me standing there with everything I owned. “You sure all of that is going to fit in your room?”

I was sure. Even though the room was tiny, containing one bunk bed and one twin bed, I was sure. Three of us in a space for two. Other rooms were even more crowded. Multiple sets of bunk beds, so close they were almost touching.

I opened up my suitcase. I stood and visualized where things would go. I had become good at this particular geometry challenge.

“Trust me,” I assured my new roommates. I laid a woven blanket on the room’s only chair, hung photos and string lights on the wall. There was a place for everything. Soon enough, the room didn’t feel like it was too small. In this wild corner of Montana, where grizzlies and wolves and wolverines roamed, its tinyness felt protective, intentional, essential.