James Perry - Squatters in Paradise: A Yellowstone Memoir

Squatters in Paradise

SQUATTERS IN

PARADISE

A Yellowstone Memoir

by

James Perry

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Squatters in Paradise

Copyright 2012 James Perry

Cover and interior illustrations by John Roberts

First printing 2009

All rights reserved.

ISBN: 1475088337

ISBN-13: 978-1475088335

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Squatters in Paradise

We come and go, but the land is always here. And the people who love it and understand it are the people who own it

- for a little while.

Willa Cather, O Pioneers!

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Squatters in Paradise

For Jim Seaberg

Who hates Yellowstone and wants me to go to Bangkok.

ALTHOUGH I had long envisioned writing a book about the experien ce of working in Yellowstone, i t was not until I was offered a weekly column in the Yellowstone Independent Voice that the project began to take shape. For this I must thank Liz Kearney, the publisher of the paper in which my columns appeared. I can only hope that my literary contributions did not play a role in the early demise of her newspaper. Chapters which originally appeared in print in the Y.I.V. include the following: Down the Rabbi t Hole, We Are the Xanterrans!, Resident Coordinator, C.U.T . , My Bear Story, Service Industry, Squatters in Paradise, and Roommates .

I would also like to thank John Roberts, who provided the illustrations for this b ook. As a former Yellowstone employee, he was able to imbue his artwork with just the right balance of a ff ection, irreverence, and hostility.

I have here written a truthful account of life in Yellowstone National Park from the perspective of a long-term seasonal employee. I have not used any real names in this book (with the exception of a few actual first na mes). The events are all real, althoug h the timeline has occasionally been truncated in order to spare the reader certain needless particulars. If the narrative seems to implicate me in any matters outside the law, the reader should attribute such fa ux pas to their own misreading of the text.

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Squatters in Paradise

Contents

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Squatters in Paradise

Introduction

WHAT do you know about Yellowstone National Park? What images are conjured in your mind at the mention of this pleasuring ground? Geysers? Wildlife? Waterfalls? How about stone-drunk employees playing rodeo clowns to the bu ff alo, or taser-wielding Type A rangers, apocalyptic cults, tourons, haunted ho uses, hot-potting and love among the pines?

I know about Yellowstone. I know because I've spent the better part of the last twenty-five years living and working here: not as a ranger or researcher, not as a conservationist, not as a lobbyist for the geothe rmal, logging, or mineral-extractive industries, nor as a corporate shill ... but as a savage . In Park nomenclature a "savage" is an employee, a grunt, a wage slave who works for the Park concessionaire, who drives the buses, makes the beds, serves the food and pours the drinks for those who practice the global ritual of passing their time o ff from work in a mad frenzy of soi-disant leisure.

This book is the story of these long-su ff ering troops and what it is that draws us into this particular purlieu of the American West (and keeps some of us coming back year after year). It is an irreverent tale and also a love story, because we're not complete fools; we love this place and the community which forms within its borders each summer. As I mention within the pages of this book, Yellowstone employees are the Park's dirty little secret, and it's time we raised our scandalous little heads. Why? Well, to the purpose of this book, because it makes a good story.

Since ours is a transient community it has been for the most part a community without a voice. I believe, however, that the unusual length of my Park sojourn has furnished me with the requisite bitterness to speak with a certain authority on this adumbral existence. So gather around the campfire, kids , and let me tell you a story

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Squatters in Paradise

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Squatters in Paradise

Part One

Down the Rabbit Hol e

THE first of my days in Yellowstone began in Gardiner, Montana, where all Park employees check in for work. While standing in line with my two forms of I.D. and a cop y of my summer contract in hand I saw that someone had neatly stenciled the words of Arapooish, a Crow chief, on the wall above me:

Yellowstone is a good country. The Great Spirit has put it exactly in the right place; while you are in it you fare well; whenever you go out of it, whichever way you go, you fare worse.

Those words would come to haunt me as the years went by, as I returned season after season. Over twenty years passed, all of them memorable, and every time I left the Park, whichever way I went, I generally fared worse.