Doug wakes me with a smile: “We’re on a warming trend.” The overnight low was 19 degrees, compared to the previous night at 16 degrees.
Today’s plan is to hike a bit at the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. I lived and worked at Canyon Village the summer of 1980 — a particularly tumultuous time in my life — so I have some trepidation about this return visit. When I wrote my memoir, RUINED, I fact-checked details online as much as I could. We’ll see now what I got right, and what I got wrong. Either way the sights are bound to stir up memories. That summer I made decisions that altered the course of my life.
Before we head out, Doug and I discuss whether our battery will have enough power to lift our jacks in the morning. The campground is closing for the season tomorrow and we need to clear out by 11:00 AM. It’s likely to be touch and go. But there’s not much we can do — except pray for sun so the solar panels can recharge the battery.
We tell each other — if worst comes to worst we can always hand crank the jacks. Then we put the potential problem out of our minds.
At 9:30 we drive to Canyon under a bright sun. (Yay!) We stop first at the North Rim, to take in the views. The canyon is larger and more beautiful than I remember. That’s a surprise. So often our memories are grander than reality, not vice versa.
I note where the trail leads to the canyon from Canyon Village. I remember coming down that hill many afternoons, to get away from the kitchen and the dorms and be alone. From there you can hike all along the rim.
I tell Doug I’d like to hike toward Inspiration Point. We set off through the pine woods, walking separately and silently. The pine branches are laden with snow, which occasionally plops down as the sun continues to shine. Every now and then the canyon comes into view.
After a mile or so I come around a bend and instantly recognize the place. At the edge of the canyon, a cedar tree offers its curving trunk as a place to settle. Below it, the V-shaped canyon opens like a chasm. I wrap my arms around the tree, grateful for the comfort it gave me then, grateful that it’s still alive.
We turn around and walk the mile back to Big Blue, then drive over to Canyon Village. The store looks different than I remember, but the Soda Fountain is exactly the same. On an impulse, we sit down to order lunch. It’s the last day the fountain is open so the menu is limited, to say the least, with most items crossed out. But you can still get chili and hotdogs.
While we eat I tell Doug some stories about the summer of 1980. When we finish we go around back to explore the employee buildings. They look exactly as I remember them: a dorm, a loading dock, a kitchen and dining room.
We head toward the main parking area. A man who looks to be about my age is emptying trash cans, wearing a mask. He says, “Aren’t you the people I saw in the back?”
I say Yes and he asks, “Can I help you with anything?”
I tell him I spent a summer here, forty years ago, and am just seeing what’s changed.
“Nothing’s changed, they wouldn’t spend a dime,” he says.
We talk about the park’s history of various concessioners. He and I both worked for Hamilton Stores decades ago. We discuss which store, exactly, he worked at — the one at Old Faithful, near the gas station, the one that’s shuttered all the time. We’re talking about various bits and pieces of history and laughing when a middle aged white man interrupts us.
The interrupting man is unmasked and chewing. He wags a piece of string cheese at the employee to get his attention. He wants to know about the timeline of closing the park. Of course, this information is posted on every door.
Disgusted, I turn away. The employee I’m talking to is a human being. We were having a conversation. Later I wish I’d told the string cheese man: “You’re interrupting.”
I wanted to ask the employee what he will do after the park closes for the season. Does he head to Death Valley? Somewhere else? I hope he’s okay.
Doug and I drive to the South Rim of the canyon to see the Upper and Lower Falls. I am done with my memory lane. I rarely saw the falls, since I didn’t have a car at my disposal in 1980. They are just a pretty sight, nothing more.
When we return to camp, we’re elated to see that the battery has enough power to raise the jacks and get the camper back on the truck.
We’ve only done this a few times and are not very good at it. The camper is supposed to sit precisely in the middle of the truck bed with an allowance of less than two inches on either side.
Doug’s job is to back up perfectly. My job is to know which spots on the truck are supposed to align with which spots on the camper. This is still hazy to me, so I keep running back and forth from one side to the other, peering down the side of the camper into the truck bed.
We spend more than an hour trying to get it right. We get close enough.
SUNDAY Oct 17 — Uh-Oh!
We wake up around 7:00 in a freezing camper. The inside temperature is 32 degrees. Our breath condenses as we speak. A strip of ice hangs on the sloping wall just above our heads, frozen condensation.
There’s plenty of propane but the lithium batteries have failed. The heater can’t run without the fans, and the fans run off the batteries. Those batteries went dead because each day they were replenished, but not quite enough. It’s been a slow erosion.
Yesterday evening when we raised the jacks to put the camper back onto the truck, then lowered them again, we must have used up all the battery reserve.
If our generator would start, we could recharge the batteries.
If the sun would come out, we could recharge the batteries (though slowly).
If we could drive the truck, we could recharge the batteries. But in order to drive the truck we need to bring the slide in and bring the jacks up.
At 11:00 AM this campground will close for the season. I can picture the park rangers coming round to see why we’re still here. No doubt they have an off-season life to get to.
We will have to hand crank the slide and the jacks. First we’ll have to get out of this warm bed.
Doug goes to the nearby washroom to get water to make coffee. We have water. We just can’t get it out of the tanks without using the water pump which, you guessed it, runs off the batteries.
But we can heat the water on the propane-powered stove and make coffee. I watch the steam rise as Doug pours hot water through the cone filter.
I am beginning to understand this rig on a whole new level, on a bodily level. I am becoming one with this rig.
In Which I Wax Philosophical About Love
A little voice in my head dings that it’s Sunday morning. And I don’t have to preach. I can stay right here in bed. Despite the craziness of the situation, I feel completely content and at peace.
We lazily drink the coffee in our cozy bed, watching our breath make clouds as we speak. We talk about our dreams of the night before and what they mean.
Doug talks, again, about the circumstances of his retirement from teaching, which was sped up by the pandemic, and the residue of that, how hard it is to let go of a career and all the dreams wrapped up in teaching, the identity of it. I am grateful he can express this.
I talk about the memories that came to me yesterday while hiking the trail. How it pained me to recall the tumultuous mental space I’d been in 40 years ago. How the choices we make when we’re young ripple through our lives.
Since we’ve been married 37 years, very few of the stories we tell each other are new. But every now and then we unearth something previously untold. Or maybe it’s better to say, in the telling of the story once again, we unearth new layers.
I tell Doug about a sheepherder I met that summer of 1980. I had told Doug this story long ago because it was an interesting encounter. The sheepherder was a gentle man and a good kisser. He was looking for a woman to come live with him and his young daughter. “I don’t want to lay a heavy trip on you, but her mother is strung out on PCP.”
His daughter needed to have a woman around, and his concern for raising her, touched me. He told me, “It’s not a hard life. Just me and my daughter, and the sheep, and the ever-lovin’ wind.”
I could, and I still can, picture the quiet life he offered.
I wish I knew how things turned out for him. I hope that sheepherder found a good woman, and that his daughter got what she needed. Some part of me wishes I could have been part of that story. I imagine myself writing books in a little house on a windswept prairie. They would be totally different books than the ones I did write.
My breath makes clouds as I tell Doug about pivotal choices I made, 40 years ago, without realizing they were pivotal. Maybe that’s common — how are we to know which choices really matter? We make so many decisions in a lifetime.
And it doesn’t end. We are always remaking ourselves with our choices, no matter our age.
When Hamilton Stores hired me that summer of 1980, they gave me a choice between two positions — Head Cook at Tower Falls, or Assistant Cook at Canyon Village. I considered the question for less than two minutes, I remember that. It was a long distance call, back when those cost money. So I weighed my choice quickly and, knowing that Tower was one of the more remote sections of the park, I chose Canyon.
At least that’s what I told myself. In truth I think I was afraid of having too much responsibility. “Head” Cook scared me. As I have so many times in my life, I underestimated my own abilities.
But also, didn’t it turn out to be the “right” choice? At Canyon I made a friend named Faith who encouraged me to move to Minneapolis, and there I met Doug.
What alternate reality would have emerged if I’d gone to Tower instead?
Would I still have met Doug? Some would say that the universe would conspire to bring us together. That we are soul mates. But I don’t think that. I think Doug is the love of my life, not my soul mate. What I mean is — we had/have some choice in the matter.
Still, I wonder. If I’d gone to work at Tower Falls that summer, would I have ended up in this freezing camper beside this warm husband on this beautiful, cold day?
By 9:00, when the coffee is long gone and we’ve been awake for two hours, the temperature inside the camper registers 40 degrees.
Yesterday I made sandwiches for today’s lunch. These become our breakfast. Fortified, we pack up the camper and Doug warms up the truck. Then we take turns standing on a stool and using both hands and our body weight to turn the crank that inches up the jacks.
After we get two of the four jacks raised, Doug pushes the button once again. Miraculously, this time it works. We are on our way.
I think the memories of this trip is going to be your next book Ruth!
Love your description of your morning conversation - pondering, reviewing dreams, remembering, and how new layers can emerge as you share stories you have shared before. Maybe they emerge especially with people we have spent much time with, people we love, people we trust.