Fast Times at Gardiner High

I never wanted to go to my high school reunion. I am sure my class has had more than one by now, but with all the times I have moved, I seem to have given the reunion organizers the slip. I recently stumbled into a web page for my high school class, and discovered that I was listed as "Missing." I found this discovery oddly pleasing. I have disliked the idea of a reunion because I did not want to spend hours apologizing for my adolescent self, and explaining that it was just a phase: "Nope, I'm not trying to be like Jim Morrison or Jimi Hendrix any more. No more insanely self-destructive behavior for me. And I wear sensible shoes now!" I have certainly never felt I was missing anything--but my fear of seeing people from high school led me to avoid all reunions. I spent the past few months getting over this fear, and when we were in Yellowstone National Park in July, I went to a reunion of people who worked for the company I spent years with, Yellowstone Park Service Stations. We had a delightful time--which actually doesn't surprise me now. It did surprise me to learn, however, that this affair had as much to do with the future as the past.

We had spent the week in our cabin near Cooke City or out touring the park, as I said in my last entry. The bug situation never got any better. We were as besieged by horseflies at the end of the week as at the beginning; neither, of course, did the deerflies and mosquitos all up and die for our benefit, and by the end of the week, I had found a number of new species trying to bite me that I did not recognize and would never have expected to see outside a nightmare. One day, I found a circular rash on the back of my calf the size of an Eisenhower dollar. It had not been there an hour earlier, and I immediately thought "Lyme disease." Jen, who actually knows something about Lyme disease, and has actually seen it, said no. An insect bite, yes, but she couldn't guess from what. The only annoying insect missing were what I used to call "face flies." Other people call them buffalo gnats, although that term usually refers to a different and worse pest. Common in the geyser basins, face flies hover around your face and seem to be trying to land on your eyeball.

We ended up spending the week looking for refuges from this sort of fun, and finding them regularly enough. It did wear us out, though, and when the time for the reunion came, I wasn't sure that I was up for it. I was worried about what I would find. The reunion had been set up by longtime YPSS employee Bill Lang, whose time with the company crossed over with my own, but who had started way back in the mid-1980s. As I originally understood it, the reunion was intended for people who worked in the park around 1984, but during the long year in which the event took shape, it swelled until we had people from the 1950s on their way, and from every decade after that. They were coming from all over the continent. Some of the people I expected to see were comrades from the early '90s, when I had first started here; I had had no contact with them for a decade and a half. What had the passage of time done to them? Would the men all look like Gandalf the Grey? Would the women all look like elderly hobbits? And what of the former girlfriends my wife would be meeting?

In the end, the former girlfriends were limited in number and vitriol--were entirely friendly, in fact--and what struck me most was the extent to which people don't change. A hairline or two had slipped, and a little weight had been gained here and there, but everyone looked much the same as they had when I last saw them, wearing oil-stained uniforms down in the park. In a number of cases, I know, they look this way because they didn't give up on a vigorous outdoor life when they gave up on YPSS.

The night before the actual reunion, we began with a party at Cool Works headquarters: Bill Berg's compound on highway 89, beside the Yellowstone River. "Do you want to feel the power?" he asked, before giving me a tour of Cool Works central. I got to see, among other things, the webcam, pointed out his back window. So many webcams are disappointing (think how often you've been shown the inside of people's dorm rooms, with socks on the floor, etc). This one is not.

People were still traveling that night, and the crowd was twice as large at the reunion proper the next day. We held it in the little municipal park in Gardiner, at the north entrance to Yellowstone, and next to the high school. Here was where the trains, a hundred years ago, had parked; horse-drawn stages had looped through here, picked up loads of visitors, and hauled them up the hill to the hotel at Mammoth and points south. Next to the park loomed the Roosevelt Arch, the stone archway that is the traditional gateway to Yellowstone. Before the party, some of our number had visited the company warehouse and dug in its back corners for YPSS memorabilia that would be familiar to this group, and as people arrived, they found the park filled with station signage and other gear. One sign gave the prices for the 1961 season: 37¢ a gallon for regular, 41¢ for ethyl. I particularly enjoyed the tire tank, a steel trough like that from which a horse drinks; YPSS people use these tanks to dunk a flat tire and discover where the hole is that made it flat. This one was filled with ice and beer.

I had wondered how many people would make it, given the travel involved to get here. There turned out to be more than at plenty of high school reunions I've heard about: over a hundred, and maybe close to two hundred, counting people who came and went. I saw the people I had not seen since the early '90s. Our kids charmed my old friends. Everyone was delighted to see each other. The life of the park, even for just a season or two, creates bonds so tight that decades cannot entirely erase them. The bond to the landscape itself is even stronger.

YPSS itself has changed a great deal since we first knew it, has grown much smaller (except for the repair side of the business; there seem to be as many trained mechanics as ever). A few people expressed disappointment over this change; they had visions of their own children working for the company--as the third generation in a number of cases--and now weren't sure there would be space. I wasn't so troubled by that problem. In the old days, YPSS had been a refuge for me, an emergency refuge, one that I needed desperately. When I came here, I was an intensely unhappy person, and relying on the park to set me straight--which actually worked. I would have been happier to begin with if I had gotten out more before I came here. My hope, for the kids, is that they won't need that kind of rescue.

So we go to the mountains as much as we can, to the Sierra, and to Yellowstone. I'm always delighted to restore my contacts here, to get on a new footing with the place. I was also delighted when people, numbers of people, asked me about the book I published, Lines on the Land. It's partly about YPSS--but, as I told them, I have something else up my sleeve, a book about working in the park written for a really broad audience. There's always a good chance that this book won't be published, as with any book. If it is, I made about a hundred advance orders just standing around the park in Gardiner, reminiscing. Stay tuned.