♫♫ Home is Where the Heart is ♫♫ And what I learned this summer.

I’ve been home for a couple of weeks.  This summer at Glacier was more of a challenge for writing just because I actually had to work.  I had a couple of two-week pay periods where I swiped well over 100 hours into the old time clock.  And I also had to focus on getting more sleep as well.  My REM time really took a beating in 2021, and I would prefer not to go there again.  Ever. Unless I was a CIA agent torturing a hostile. Or my wife. Which apparently I do every day.

And never forget, home really is where the heart is. I was thinking of an old Elvis song, but pulled it up on YouTube and it kind of sucked (sorry to all you Baby Boomers out there – but the Millennials have replaced you).

I like this one better. Plus Hillary Scott does a lot more for me than Elvis ever did. Not a big fan of the band name change to Lady A. Sounds too much like a product that I don’t want to talk about (but fully appreciate the brazen functionality)

Now that I’ve had a little time to acclimate back to the ‘real world’, it is the perfect moment to reflect.  And think about what I learned. Yeah, to my faithful followers out there, you KNOW where this is going. So you better get that fresh beer or top off that glass of wine, because Dave is about to pontificate.

I learned if you have a really unaware, oblivious, D-bag, and socially retarded roommate, you will:

• Know what it’s like to sleep in a cave.  Seriously.  This guy put blackout curtains over EVERY window in the entire cabin.  I guess that’s what you need when you stay up until 2 am in the morning watching videos on your phone, giggling to yourself in an uncomfortable way, and then sleeping until noon (when your tour schedule permits).  Too bad he had never heard of a sleep mask.

• Know what it’s like to clean a prison bathroom.  At least that’s what it smelled and felt like.  I’m not sure how a grown-ass 31-year-old man could have missed learning how to flush a toilet.  Pretty sure that’s a key step in potty training.  I’m not talking about No. 2 here (although that happened a couple of times).  I’m talking good old No. 1 – our friend mellow yellow. 

• Know it’s kind of like turning the key of a car and putting it in gear.  You don’t even think about it.  But apparently peeing in the bowl and hitting the handle is not intuitive if you are from Iowa.  Add to that no concept of what the brush was for just behind this Throne of Terror. After flushing for him a couple of times a day (and throwing the brush in it at least once a week to scrub off the scum line), I started using the bath/shower room in the common kitchen.  At least there I only had mice to deal with, and they kept the place pretty clean.  I won’t even go into the shower mold. Just think shag carpet from the early 1980s across a tile floor. Icky and sticky.

• Know what it’s like to breathe recycled air for three months.  The window AC unit was on all day and all night during the ENTIRE summer and set to 62F.  Even when I turned it off and opened the windows, the cave would be magically sealed up again when I got back (with someone giggling unseen in a dark corner).  Did I mention this was the same cabin my roommate was quarantined for Covid in just before I arrived?  Between living in an Iron Lung Plague Factory and working in the Human Petri Dish I call a Red Jammer Tour Bus, I’m pretty sure there is nothing in the world that can compromise my Herculean Immune System now (H.I.S. for short, trademark)

• Know what it’s like to filter the farts of another person that you don’t like nor have respect for thru your lungs (which have been fully expanded from hiking all summer).   Its ethereal scent was only enhanced by his steady diet of trail mix, seaweed sheets, bone-in chicken broth, and lots and lots of canned Sysco vegetables that were hoarded from the employee dining hall just before they spoiled.  

• Know what it is like to have people ask me every day “Why do you spend so much time in the common kitchen or rec room building?”  Oh, for the better Wi-Fi of course.  Or the fact I forgot my Czech military surplus gas mask and carbon filters at home this summer.  So much for Dave being always prepared.

• Know and realize and fully appreciate that my parents DID raise me right.  How to be thoughtful and share a living space.  Be considerate of others and their property.  Not to throw on all of the lights when I got up at 5 am every morning and stomp around in heavy boots.  To take out the trash when it overflowed on the floor and started to smell (from the trash cans I never put anything into).  To stop trying to figure out why this guy takes an hour-long shower and plays loud music fifteen minutes AFTER I turned off my light and went to bed.

I learned if you hiked 250+ miles and have 50k feet of gain and loss in the summer, you will:

• Be considered a loser.  Yeah, a hiking and climbing loser.   Why?  Because everyone knows I kicked out DOUBLE that last year (and had four weeks less to do it in).  I guess that’s how all of those professional sports athletes feel.  Forced to live up to past career highs by every fan they meet every day of their life for as long as they live.  Maybe it is time to keep my mouth shut about my hiking exploits.  Like all the girls I dated and bedded in college (there were literally thousands, but I’m a gentleman and don’t brag).

• End up doing a lot of twenty-mile days.  AND actively seeking them out.  It became more of the getting the best bang for the off day this season, since for a while I really had no idea which days I’d be off or for how long. 

• Feel really good to be able to personally push yourself that far.  Especially at my age.  Of course, not saying I’m old or anything.  I also got to loop into some great valley/pass trail miles I’d never seen before. Which is always fun.  There are still blank terra incognita places on my GNP map to be explored!  Unless, of course, you are a French heavy metal band named Gojira and that was the title of your debut album.

• Be technically ‘done’ with Glacier National Park.  Well, at least that is what Nancy keeps implying. Normally when my mind wanders towards maybe going back for another season.  If you think about it, does kinda make sense.  There are (only) 734 miles of maintained trail in the Park.  So if you take my two-year running total of 709.7 miles and 167,844 feet of gain/loss, in a sense I’ve done it all. 710/170 has kind of a nice ring to it.   Might make a good ankle tattoo someday.  Or a cool bead bracelet. Or maybe I should just continue and bump that rolling total up to a nice even 1,000 miles?  After all, we should all have goals. Isn’t that what gets you out of bed every morning?

• Become very very afraid of bears.  And see them everywhere.  I don’t get this bear thing and why people want to see them up close.  I could go the rest of my life without seeing a bear in the wild.  And would actually prefer it that way if given the choice.  This summer in Glacier came on the heels of a very wet, cool, long spring.  The berries came in late and all of my bruin friends were way too low and way too close to all the places I wanted to hike.  Fear of bears actually kept me from a lot of the off-trail hikes I wanted to do late in the season.  Even Smokey creeps me out now.

I learned that if you are a Jammer and drive a Red Tour Bus all summer, you will:

• Drive almost 6,000 tour miles, the majority of it on the Going to the Sun Road.  In a vintage 1930’s White Model 706 Touring Bus.  Not easy on the lower back, and even more, brutal on the people you have sitting four to a bench seat behind you. Literally butt-cheek to butt-cheek.  These seats were NOT made for ‘modern’ people.

• Transport almost 800 riders/tourists/guests.  I didn’t count employees, but they were few and far between (at least for me).  Yeah, that’s the thing about dealing with a thousand different personalities in the span of a few months.  You never know how the day will go or where it will take you.  But there will always be a story that you can’t make up, and those experiences can either restore or (more often) destroy your personal faith in humanity.

• Give almost 60 different tours.  Varying from 1.5 hours in total to full 8-hour outings, to the 10-hour back-to-back monster shifts (after cleaning/fueling/dead-head time were always 14-hour days).  That’s a great big OUCH.  I don’t care who you are.  It takes a lot of willpower and a lot of emotional effort to talk that much that long while driving on a narrow and scary road.  Many of my guests assumed the high skill required for this job came with high pay.  If they had known our skill level was only valued by Xanterra at $12 an hour, most would have never climbed aboard. But don’t worry. I’m a professional.

In the end, you get what you pay for. AND what you TIP for.

• Burn well over $3,000 in fuel (take that times 33, and add in the six shuttles like the one I drove last year).  And more than a couple of quarts of oil (depending on which Red Bus you drove).  So while some of the Red Buses are sporting new engines/drive trains along with many other nifty niceties from the $150,000-230,000 per vehicle overhauls (pending who you talk to and when), many are still running the 2002 Ford dual fuel V-8’s (which have not run propane in over a decade).  Those bad boys have 200k+ miles on them.  You can really feel on that steep hill south of St Mary heading up to the Hudson Divide.  The compression is so low you can’t get over 40 mph will a full load of driver + 16 (which is suicide on any paved road in MT).

• Swipe the time clock with over 500 hours, with around 10-20% of that being overtime (pending how you abused ‘the clock.’ See roommate rant).  That thing became my nemesis.  Especially on days rolling over 12 hours.  Since that required special DOT paperwork, most drivers would commonly clock out just before the 12 hr. mark and finish cleaning their bus on their own time. Just wasn’t worth it. Just ask Fred Flintstone.

• Come home with a couple of freezer baggies of untraceable (and untaxable) cash.  All denominations.  From my coveted C-Note (thank you, Barbra, for NOT including a room key with that generous tip. Or did she?).  To a bunch of Canadian one-dollar coins that you should never put in the pockets of your cargo shorts (nothing like a pocket full of Loonies).

• Maybe even leave a very personal mark on a Jammer bus.  Just a little something to give the people around camp good gossip.  And maybe even the day it happens go out for Mexican food in St Mary after work.  Possibly even if you don’t want to.  But of course, you do, just to keep them all from talking shit about you behind your back.  Again, maybe.

But most importantly, I learned that when you realized the mind and body are truly one entity, you will:

• Pull your head out of your ass.  At least I did.  Sure, last summer was just a job to get me in the Park.  As such, I focused on just hiking and climbing.  But I really was looking for a lot more.  Although it was still a great personal achievement, it was all physical.  I worked at night, and as such, I lived (more often dreamed while driving) my way through a social and emotional desert.  Too much alone time.  Feeding the body and not the mind is a fool’s paradise.  There has to be balance.  But sometimes, there sure is a lot to be said for just being a fool. 🙂

• Discover your fantasy job (in some ways).  You know, the one you are supposed to dream about so it will free your mind to settle for something much less (at least that is how I’ve normally seen it play out).  This summer was probably the hardest job I’ve ever had in my entire life.  It took more from me intellectually, emotionally, and socially than I thought I would ever have to give.  It’s easy to force the body to follow the mind. Until the body is just an empty shell of skin, bones, sinew, and muscle.  It takes a lot more to balance the two worlds, acknowledge what each half has to give and create a catalog of personal social interactions that you will page thru for the rest of your life.

• Find out you really ARE a people person.  You start talking to strangers for hours on end with a new batch every day (or twice a day).  You find that meaningful conversations with coworkers and acquaintances take on a whole new appreciation.  There was a LOT of drama at the Beargrass Compound this summer.  I mean a LOT.  So many personalities that I could easily write a post on each and hardly have to exaggerate. 

• Sure, some people I met I didn’t like (see roommate rant above).  Some I just tolerated.  Some I would have liked to explore in more detail.  And with a few, there were some real connections.  Connections I know will be recurring in my life, as I continue to follow my personal path.  But at the end of the day (and with a little of that good old Catholic reflection), I can honestly say I learned something from everyone I met this summer.  And with that comes some respect which is a little hard to admit.  As long as you don’t take life too seriously, laughing with (sometimes at) others are the way to go.