Yellowstone Memories (48 page)

“Hello,” Jersey said to the group, giving a hesitant half wave, half bow.

“Jersey Peterson?” asked the man in the fishing hat at the front of the line, holding up a crisply folded sheet of paper.

“
Hai
. Yes.” Jersey felt silly throwing out her few Japanese words in a thick American-English accent. All nasal and open vowels. “I’m Jersey, and I’ll be helping you while you’re here at Yellowstone.” She bit her lip and stood on tiptoe to see the end of the line, hoping she wouldn’t offend them with her next question. “How many of you are … well, fluent in English?”

She needn’t have asked. The man in the front grunted something in Japanese, and five people hesitantly raised their hands. He repeated his sentence through a series of whispers, one person to another, and two of the three lowered their hand.

Great. Three people who speak English fluently, maybe, and what am I supposed to do?

“Hold on a second.” Jersey gave a bright smile and dialed Taka from the office phone, listening to it ring and endlessly ring. Not even voice mail.

Jersey let out a breath of exasperation and banged down the phone then forced herself to turn and face the group. “Well,” she said, raising her arms helplessly. “Welcome to Yellowstone.”

The man repeated her comment, and smiles broke down the line of people one by one. And like an oddly polite “wave” at a football game, they all bent in unison. A polite bow, heads tucked. Tipping the tops of their sun visors and baseball caps toward her in respect.

Jersey blinked in astonishment and gave a weak bow in return.

“Jersey,” said the man at the front of the line again with a grin, gripping her hand between his two strong, sun-spotted ones and giving it a firm, hard shake. “Thank you. I’m Masao Fujimori. We heard you needed help, and so we’re here. As soon as we got the word. Show us what we can do.”

“You brought tents?” Jersey braced herself for their response. Some volunteer groups had come with nothing more than umbrellas, expecting the Hyatt Regency once they stepped off the bus.

All down the line a murmur of whispers and nodding. They raised backpacks rattling with tent stakes, and the line parted so Jersey could see a pile of colorful Gore-Tex bundles piled against the far wall. Coleman lanterns and sleeping bags and shiny new camping stoves. Snazzier stuff than most campers brought in, and all lashed together in perfect little geometric stacks.

Well. Huh. Taka must have sent a detailed list
. Jersey shifted her weight to the other foot. “Water and food? Because we don’t really have any way to provide meals.” Another common volunteer mistake.

Man-in-the-Front gestured toward the window. “It’s all boxed up in the bear-safe locker. Enough for five days. Maybe six.”

“For everybody?”

“Hai.” He tipped his head in another bow. “All ready to go. I’m on cook crew for lunch. Wanna join us?”

Huh. Well
. “We’ll see how the day goes.” Jersey ran her hand through her hair, trying to think of any other stupid questions she ought to ask before she hauled them all onto the boat and across Lake Yellowstone.

“No food in the tents, right? No toothpaste. Not even a bottle of water. We’re going into bear country. Are you ready for that?”

“Hai.” He drummed his fingers on the desk as if in boredom and checked his watch. “Anything else?”

Jersey stared at him then straightened her hat and pointed to the door. “Well, come on then,” she said with a burst of boldness. “Let’s go to the lake.”

T
he distant dock shimmered in Yellowstone Lake under a thick stand of green pines, and Jersey watched as they pulled close to the land. A thin stretch of sand extended along the endless shore until it curved out of sight, and back in the dense woods she could spot a corner of the dilapidated old ranger’s cabin. Nothing else, as far as she turned in all directions.

Zack maneuvered the boat close enough so that Jersey could jump to the dock and help passengers down one at a time and then help haul the food locker and bear-safe storage Dumpsters to the dock. They passed the bags and gear assembly style, and then Jersey jerked a thumb toward the cabin. “This is us, folks. Let’s go. We’ll set up your tents over here and start making lunch.”

“We’ve got rotating duty schedules.” Masao crossed his arms over his chest. “Cook duty and clean-up duty for every meal while we’re here. Everyone else can do prep work for our first job.”

“Tomorrow, right? You’ll probably want to rest a bit before we get started.”

“Rest?” Masao laughed and put his hands on his shoulders. “We’ve been sitting on a plane for hours and then a tour bus. The last thing we want to do is rest.”

Wow. The last college group Jersey had worked with hadn’t gotten their tents and gear set up until nearly nightfall. “Okay then. Let’s clear the grounds of twigs and branches to prepare for tomorrow’s work.”

Masao nodded and barked a translation.

Jersey led the way off the dock and onto a patch of green grass, and then she gave a mock bow. “Welcome to the Lake Yellowstone Hilton.”

An ancient wooden shutter that had been hanging by a rusted hinge suddenly crashed and fell into a tangle of old weeds, as if on cue.

To her surprise, the whole group chuckled and dug into their backpacks, snapping photos with their thousand-dollar Fuji and Sony cameras.

The first thing Jersey heard when she turned over in her sleeping bag at dawn was the sharp sound of shouts. Rhythmic shouts, punctuated by short grunts.

Bears? She rolled out of her sleeping bag, still in her thick flannel pajamas and long woven underwear, and dug frantically for her canister of bear spray. She jerked the zipper of her tent down and poked her head out.

And as soon as she did, her mouth dropped. There in the clearing by the cabin stood all thirteen volunteers in orderly rows—already dressed in hiking clothes and boots. Stretching their arms and leaning side to side first then over at the waist in cadenced beats.

Of course. Morning calisthenics. The kind millions of Japanese practiced at Toyota shops and via the daily national news channel NHK.

Jersey felt like an idiot as she zipped her tent closed and felt around for clothes in her backpack. After all, the sun wasn’t even up yet. Her back ached, and the muscles in her arms throbbed from hours of heavy work. Yes, work. No trash pickup or litter crews—not that rangers didn’t bend over backward in grateful appreciation for those.

But these Japanese people.

Jersey fought the urge to flop back down in her sleeping bag from sheer exhaustion. Not only had they prepared a scrumptious lunch of Japanese noodles and vegetables, complete with hot green tea, but they’d picked the entire grounds clean of pinecones and branches in … oh, less than two hours.

For the remainder of the day Jersey had jumped ahead of them from task to task: tearing out a heavy log horse fence, leveling a patch of uneven ground in backbreaking wheelbarrows, and stripping all the rotting wood trim from the old cabin.

Jersey had dozed off around the campfire.

“I’m a ski instructor,” one of the sixty-something women had said in a chipper voice as she poured Jersey another cup of steaming green tea. “Too bad it isn’t ski season in Wyoming.”

And now they stood with their arms up, shouting the calls for group calisthenics before the sun had even risen through the pines.

Before Jersey could pull on her jeans, she heard the rattle of dishes and food lockers, and the scent of propane wafted across the pine-scented air. They were already making breakfast—and Ranger Jersey wasn’t even out of bed yet.

Jersey groaned and covered her head with her pillow, determined to throttle Taka next time she saw him.

She needn’t have worried. Just before noon on the third day he sauntered over in hiking gear, piled to the brim with bags of research stuff. A tin cup dangled from his backpack, and he’d wrapped a bandanna around his sweaty forehead.

Jersey was up to her knees in dirt and sawdust, helping two of the volunteers saw an enormous pine trunk into a flat surface for a table, when she spotted him coming up the wooden trail.

“Well, well, well.” She wiped her dirty hands smugly against her pants and strode over. “More research?”

“No, I’m here to help. Didn’t you get my e-mail?”

“What e-mail?”

“You sent me the numbers you copied from Jeremiah Wilde’s logbook, and I wrote you back.”

“Wait a second.” Jersey stared at Taka then at the lake. “How did you get here? Did you walk?” She shielded her eyes but saw no boat.

“Sure. Following the elk routes.” He took off his glasses and wiped them. “So how’s it going?”

“Going?” Jersey repeated, not sure how to answer his question. “Taka, they’re machines. I’ve run out of building supplies twice. I’m not even sure we have enough work for them.” She leaned back against a tree, letting the breeze cool her sweaty neck. “I’ll tell you one thing. It’s sure changed my perception of what senior groups can do.”

“Why, you didn’t think they were capable?” Taka squatted down and picked at something on a piece of pine bark with his fingernail.

“Of course not. It’s just … wow. They’re amazing.” She tucked her hair back up in its bun. Which, by the way, she’d actually braided neatly first—rather than stuffing it in its usual messy knot with strands flying everywhere.

Taka must have seen it because his eyes traveled briefly to the nape of her neck with a quick flicker of approval before darting back to the tree bark. He lifted the shaggy chunk ever so carefully and then dug for a magnifying glass. “Look.
Dendroctonus ponderosae
larvae.”

“Gross. No.” Jersey wrinkled her nose and stepped away. “Well, thanks anyway for inviting this group. We really needed this work done, you know.”

“I know.” Taka poked his eye close to the magnifying glass. “Although I guess Japanese volunteers weren’t your first pick, huh?”

“Excuse me?”

“I hear through the grapevine that you weren’t crazy about dealing with a Japanese tour group. Why, do we send you bad tourists?” He looked up briefly.

“No, Taka. It’s not that.” She sighed and squatted down on her heels next to him.

“Then what is it?” He scraped at the bark again with a blade of grass.

“You want to know?”

“Yes.” He put the magnifying glass down and faced her.

“Fine.” She crossed her arms. “My grandfather was a POW during World War II, and he almost didn’t make it.” Her eyes filled with tears as she looked away. “You should have seen him when he returned. A skeleton. Sunken eyes and torture wounds.” She snapped a pine needle between her fingers. “My family says he was never the same after that.”

Taka studied her a moment with gentle eyes. “I’m sorry,” he finally said, folding up his magnifying glass and dropping it back in his bag. A cool breeze from the lake rustled his hair, making it fall in his eyes. “I’m truly very sorry, Jersey.”

He plucked at some blades of grass. “I remember when I first understood about the war. Years ago.” He let out his breath and sat in quiet silence a long while as if remembering. “My grandfather used to build model planes with me back in Fukushima. Very good ones. I loved to help him.”

“Hence your knowledge of taxidermied squirrel repair.” A light came on. “Like airplane models.”

“Exactly. I asked my grandfather about the war. About the planes we were building. Japanese war planes.” Taka swallowed. A mosquito floated through the air, ghostlike, and he barely moved to swat it away. “ ‘Japan didn’t really do that, did they?’ ” I asked him. “ ‘We didn’t really try to take over the nations of the world one by one, did we? It’s a lie. I don’t believe we would do something so evil as that.’ ”

Taka shifted on the grass, his face still downturned. “Every time we built planes I asked him. Until one day he smashed our plane in anger, leaving broken splinters all over the low table where we knelt.”

He stayed silent a long time, playing with the grass that tickled his jeans. “He apologized and offered to help me build a new plane, but I’d lost interest. I refused as politely as I could—always giving some excuse or other. For I’d lost my heart.”

Jersey bit her lips. “So you see where I’m coming from?”