Two Medicine (15 page)

I cast Ronnie a side long
look as a quick awkwardness crept into the moment; then I looked
back to Greg as I nodded at the crowd over his shoulder.

“
Where are all these
people working?” I asked.

“
Them? All over the park,
but the main lodge up the street mostly; there’s a separate dorm
building for all of them here. The main lodge employs more kids
than any other place in the park. It’s like a little university
here – so many young people.”

He looked around the room.
“This is just a smattering of them actually, those who couldn’t
make the 1
^st
orientation a few
days ago.” He looked at his watch. “Grab a seat,” he said,
gesturing towards the front row, where there were a few unclaimed
folding chairs.

We sat
down
, and the orientation began with an
older woman ranger, who looked more like a retiree than an actually
park ranger, who began by talking about the park itself, its
history and its geography. She described the layout of the park,
talked about the famous “Going-to-the-Sun Road,” which was this
long stretch of asphalt carved out of sheer rock in the mountain
passes by the Great Northern Railway Company sometime in the
1900s.

At that time the Great
Northern Railway Company was setting up stations to house workers
who would be laying tracks in the nearby valley. The stations ended
up becoming lodges soon after the establishment of the park, which
was in 1910. The various stations/lodges grew in size, and
eventually became what we had today, several big hotel-like lodges
with hundreds of rooms, like the main lodge I had stayed in on the
first night, with the Swiss-Alpine theme.

She finished her talk by
describing the most popular destinations for visitors to the park –
places I’d never heard of: Lake McDonald Valley, Logan Pass, the
St. Mary Valley, The North Fork, Goat Haunt, Many Glacier, and Two
Medicine. Staffers in the audience started looking around,
whispering, bored already.

The lady sat down and then
Greg stood up had let loose a long blast with this whistle he had
been wearing on a string around his neck.

“
Wake up guys!” he said
loudly to the room with a smirk. “Whether you know it or not, the
history of the Railway Company is more important than you may
think, it made this place what it is – it wouldn’t exist without
that effort.

“
But for my talk, I’m
going for a more practical theme. It’s my job to make sure you
newbies learn this evening about one thing: how to stay alive in
the park, things like avoiding bear attacks, what to do if bitten
by a venomous snake, if you’re caught in a sudden snow
storm.

“
I’m going to teach you
how to avoid getting lost and left out in the elements, and how to
safely get in and out of rough and steeply elevated
terrains.”

Heads turned to him as he
started, and the attention level perked up at the mention of bears
and snakes – concrete, specific ideas we could wrap our heads
around – things that sounded dangerous, and closer to home, and,
therefore, more interesting.

“
So,” he continued, pacing
slowing in front of our front row, “this region that became Glacier
National Park was first inhabited, obviously, by Native Americans –
the Plains Indians. And at the time of the arrival of European
explorers, the dominating tribes here were the Blackfoot in the
east, and the Flathead in the west. He gestured over to a map of
Glacier Park on the wall to his right. The Blackfoot are still with
us today, not too far – in Browning, but the Flathead have all but
disappeared.”

“
Their heads were too
flat.” Someone murmured from the back, to a couple of chuckles.
Greg ignored them.

“
The Blackfoot were the
bison hunters of the Great Plains, fearless, wild, hunting the
bison on foot before the Europeans came, hunting with these.” Greg
held up a little bow and arrow set that appeared to have been made
recently.

“
And spears. But after
horses were introduced by the Europeans the Blackfoot took over the
area in great force. Their name, by the way, is said to have come
from the color of their moccasins, made of leather. Legend has it
they typically dyed or painted the soles of their moccasins black.
Another story, one I like better, is that the young men would have
to walk through a large prairie fire before he could take a wife,
which in turn colored the bottoms of their moccasins black. That’s
actually how I got my wife, coincidentally.”

A couple of people
snickered in the crowd behind me. I liked Greg’s honest, open,
almost childlike way of talking about
his
park, and his shameless smile as
he talked about where he worked. Greg struck me as the kind of guy
who showed all his cards when teaching a new game – to help
everyone figure out the game together.

“…
and it’s always
‘Blackfoot,’ even when it’s plural,’” he said. “It’s not
‘Blackfeet,’ by the way.”

He walked back over to the
map of Glacier Park, pulling it down further from the rolled-up
top. “The thing I like most about Glacier, guys, it that it has
almost all its original native plant and animal species that it had
when early Europeans explored I it – hundreds of years ago. When
you’re out there hiking, you are in fact seeing land as it was a
thousand years ago. Large mammals such as the grizzly, moose and
mountain goat, and wolverine and lynx inhabit the park – you will
see some of them before your summer is over.”

“
But I
want to specifically talk about the
grizzlies
tonight. Again, that is the
main point of this safety talk, especially for you newbies. Each
and every year people get mauled by bears in Glacier Park; on
average 1 person dies from an attack each year in the park – mainly
by female bears with cubs – but we’ll talk more about that in a
minute. Let me first talk about what this animal is.”

He pulled down yet another
large poster that unrolled from the wall, which depicted an image
of a grizzly bear in profile. It struck me Greg would have made a
good high-school science teacher, unabashedly enthusiastic about
the simple wonders of nature – year after year of half-interested
students never dulling his glee.

“
The
grizzly bear’s Latin name is
Ursus
Arctos Horribilis
.”

Greg went on
to describe how the word “grizzly” came from the
word “grisly,” which “spoke for itself,” as he said. “Adult females
weigh on average 500 pounds, and adult males average 800. A record
size for a grizzly has actually been recorded at 1,500 pounds, and
a large coastal male of this size may stand up to 10 feet tall on
its hind legs and be up to 5 feet at the shoulder – a real
monster.” Somebody whistled appreciatively from the
back.

“
They get that big on the
coast because they have all the fish they can eat, most years.
Females around here have 1 to 4 cubs in a birth, usually 2, and,
like I said, they are the main problem in the Park as far as
attacks are concerned. I’ve seen a full grown male push a small car
on its side, so it’s not to be messed with people… but the attacks
are usually females.

“
These bears,” he
continued, “like almost all animals in nature, will run away from
the approach of people, and they try to avoid contact if at all
possible. Basically we stay away from them, and they stay away from
us.

“
But
sometimes you’ll get a bear that is different – that
seeks out
people, or more
specifically, people’s food, people’s stuff, and those kind will
not shy away from contact.”

I imagined a large bear
pushing down our flimsy screened back door and nosing around in our
kitchen – full of food and delicious smells – walking up the
staircase to Larry’s room and devouring him in his sleep. I
wondered what I would do if I encountered a bear on a trail deep in
the woods.
What can you do?

As if in response to my
thoughts, Greg continued, “So, if you go hiking out into the
forests and the higher elevations, you need to carry one of these.”
He flipped a leather pouch open on his belt and pulled out a spray
can with a large trigger and black nozzle on the end, which he
pointed at us.

“
Pepper spray,” he said,
“is a hiker’s best friend. All rangers carry them because shooting
a charging bear doesn’t’ stop it; and a bear’s sense of smell is
extremely sensitive. A blast of this stuff will usually send them
running – usually.”

He walked over to open
door we had come in through and shot a stream of the stuff out into
the night. I hoped there wasn’t some poor strangler coming in
towards the door when he launched the red, misty powder out into
the darkness.

“
Also, we advise that you
wear these,” he walked back in front of us and pulled out a leather
necklace with two round metal bells hanging on it. “Bear
bells.”

Some of the people laughed
in the chairs, and Greg grinned good-naturedly. “I know they look
stupid, and they sound like Santa is coming down the trail.” He
shook them a couple of times to make his point. “But you can’t
really walk up on a female bear with cubs if you are hiking with
one of these around your neck – they’ll be long gone.

“
They may be silly, but
they will save your life.” He tossed them over to a table by the
door. “If you don’t wear them, just try to clap a little now and
then, or talk out loud to give the grizzlies some heads up. Just be
noisy.”

He continued on for a
while about mountain lions (you’d be lucky if you see one, but from
a distance), snakes (which were rare too) white mountain goats
(liked to lick antifreeze off the roads), and possible hazards like
getting lost and being caught in a land slide, but he was soon
finishing up.

He grew somber as he
finished though, and he stopped pacing and faced us with a serious
gaze. “You guys are in the most beautiful place the lower 48 has to
offer – much less known, less traveled, than the other parks. The
Rocky Mountains up here look different than anywhere else in the
county.

“
So you are lucky – this
place is special. Take it in, spend time in deep woods and see what
there is to see. Henry David Thoreau said, ‘Heaven is under our
feet as well as over our heads.’ And that is nowhere truer than
here in Glacier.”

He bowed dramatically, and
we all clapped with amused appreciation, and there were even a
couple of tongue-in-cheek shouts of “bravo!” and “encore!” He
waived for us to quiet down and then thanked us and told us we were
all free to go.

As people were shuffling
out the door, he came over to Ronnie, Katie and I as we waited to
get to the exit. “Listen guys, my wife and I work the station at
Two Med, our little daughter’s there too. We’re a family at Two
Med, and we like to take care of our own. So anything you need you
let us know, ok? You guys have the best spot in Glacier, beautiful
area!”

I smiled and thanked him,
and said I planned on it. Ronnie, for his part, just nodded to him
curtly as we left.

On our way
down towards the car, Ronnie said to me, “You know
Thoreau also said, ‘The mass of men lead lives of quiet
desperation.’ That guy sounds like he’s doing just that, crammed up
there in the ranger shack with his little wife and kid.” He spit at
the ground as we walked.

“
Why are you so critical
of the guy?” I asked. “He seems decent enough… And I’m sure being a
ranger up here is a better fucking job than most people
have.”

Ronnie just grunted
something and kept walking. Then he suddenly turned to me and said,
“I never trust a cop, and neither should you.”

“
Cop?” I asked. “Greg?” I
laughed. “He’s like a big boy scout.”

“
He’s a cop,” Ronnie said,
shaking his head, “and just like the bears up here – they stay away
from me, and I stay away from them.”

I didn’t know how to
respond to that, but I didn’t really want to get into it right
then. We had some time to kill before leaving, so we went down to
the main lodge and went inside to look around out of curiosity. The
main room at the lodge that I had stayed in my first night was a
huge, cavernous, three-story lobby with enormous whole tree trucks
acting as pillars keeping the roof up high above.

Ronnie wandered off to
find someone he said he knew that worked there, and Katie and I
idled at the display cases along the wall in the main lobby, which
presented taxidermies of stuffed, furry, white mountain goats in
one case, a brown bald eagle in another, and other unfortunate
specimens posing for the visitors. I wondered as I looked at the
goat if it had in fact licked antifreeze before its unfortunate
demise.

I watched Katie as she
watched the exhibits, and I tried, yet again, to get a sense of her
mood, which was always difficult to say the least, it was like
trying to read a map in the dark – she kept so much locked away
from her face and eyes. She hadn’t said a word the entire
night.

“
Why so quiet?” I finally
just asked her.

She glanced at me and then
back to the mountain goat in the case. “I’m agoraphobic – don’t
like crowds. I’d rather be in one of these cases than out with
them,” she said, nodding over to the crowd at the check in
desk.