I'm going back to Montana this summer! I've been offered a position with Ecology Project International, leading high school students on wildlife research trips in Yellowstone. Hopefully I'll have some killer new Montana stories for the blog soon, but in the meantime I've decided to post some unpublished stories from my time working as a tour guide in Glacier National Park in 2008 and 2009.
1. June
"Tell me please, where is the swift current?"
He was really worried about it. So was his wife; they pushed up close, blocking my path down the dock.
"Well you know, Swiftcurrent is kind of a misnomer," I said. "This is a lake."
Looking over their shoulder, I saw that the green rowboat was taking on more water. It was up to the gunwales by now.
"What? But the tour, where does it go --"
James was down by the water already, reaching for the rowboat. He motioned, get over here. I had been on my way to help him when I was ambushed by these bewildered Japanese tourists.
"Listen, I'll explain later," I said, and ran.
Together we heaved the boat up onto dock. James raised an eyebrow at me.
"You know, that stern plug was right out on the seat. And there's no spare."
We contemplated the weedy lakefloor, ten feet down, where the rubber plug had vanished.
"I guess that means I'm going after it," I said.
It really was my fault. Nick had left all the plugs out after draining the boats, but I was the one who'd pushed the thing in. Diving though-- what an ugly prospect. Early July on Swiftcurrent Lake meant glacial meltwater, fifty degrees or less.
The plug was still somewhere under the dock when I finished work at six thirty. I went home to the cabin to get a towel and recruit moral support. Remarkably, Anne and Ali were game, so we rowed back down the lake together, three captains on a mission.
Ali took off her funky sunglasses, sat down on the edge and stuck a toe in.
"Oh shit. This is going to hurt."
None of us wanted to get in until we could actually spot the plug, but the shadows were lengthening and the weeds down there were pretty thick. Finally Anne, in her practical way, simply jumped, and Ali and I followed suit. We touched bottom and rocketed right back up again, flopping onto the dock like seals.
My whole body had seized up; I was strangely short of breath. I lunged for my towel, swearing.
"There is no way I'm doing that again," Ali said.
"Well, we tried," Anne said. "James will see that at least we got our hair wet."
Still dripping, the three of us retired to the hotel lounge and split a bottle of huckleberry wine.
No one ever did find that plug. The rowboat sat out, unrented, for a while, and in the end we had to borrow a new plug from another dock.
ii.
James, Ali, Anne and I -- and also Nick, Dave, Mara, and Amanda -- were, respectively, the manager and captains of the Glacier Park Boat Company, Many Glacier dock. With the exception of Nick, who lived in a shack at his parents' campground, we all shared a cabin on a cove up Swiftcurrent from the Many Glacier Hotel. Every morning we took the forty-six foot tour boat, Chief Two Guns, down to run tours all day, catering to the hotel guests and the daytrippers, the hikers and the grandmas and the crazies. Every night we came back to the cabin on the shore. The cabin had only recently been outfitted with non-generator electric; the refrigerator ran on propane and we didn't have a phone line. So those who had instruments played them while other people fixed dinner or went out rowing in the green evening shadows. Moose and beaver swam past the living room windows, loons called in the distance, and the days were long, the light holding through eleven o'clock on a clear night.
I don't mean to make this out like we sat around all the time singing 'Kumbya,' but compared to my last job, a stint on the line in a lightbulb factory, Glacier Park was damn close to paradise. Even when things got ugly, like they do sometimes, you were still standing in a high clean country, and the mountains reflected in the lake etched against the sky were so beautiful they gave you a kind of ache…
For the first time, my friends back home envied me my job -- how do you get a sweet job like that, they wanted to know, as opposed to the usual oh my God, I'm sorry -- when I shared my summer plans. I told them the truth: the previous August, staring at the one hundred millionth lightbulb socket rolling down the belt, I had gotten a lucky feeling about Montana. It came out of nowhere and it wouldn't leave me alone. So I did what any smart person would do: I got on the Internet. Google led me to the Boat Company, and they hired me in February. Sleet hammered against the windows of my Chicago apartment the day I got the call - slush piled ankle-deep on the sidewalk - summer was purely theoretical. But I watched the trains roll through and held onto the day that I would turn to the West. It wasn't running away, not exactly, but winter and the factory had left a mark on me like a waterstain, and I was tired all under my skin. It was time to leave.
When I got off the train in Montana, Chicago melted into a slab of glass and concrete and retreated to the back of my head. For a while I left it there.
My first view of the park was Rising Wolf Mountain under the moon and beneath its bulk, Two Medicine Lake, a mirror of every star in the sky. I fell asleep in a house by the shore, and so began a strange lovely summer in the shadow of the Rockies by the green running water.
iii.
Having cast up in Glacier early Sunday, I started work first thing the next morning. It had been a heady twenty-four hours - East Glacier Amtrak station, Two Medicine boat dock where I spent the night, meeting my new boss James, the drive across open country to Many Glacier in the wall of western mountains, the cabin at the end of the road, and a slew of roommates whose names all seemed to start with 'A'…
Now it was Monday and I stepped aboard Chief Two Guns for the first time, wearing a blue shirt that proclaimed me a member of 'Montana's Mountain Navy.' Two Guns was beautiful, a blue and white wooden boat with a flat roof and a shallow draft and eighteen rows of wooden benches.
"Welcome aboard," said Dave, the assistant manager, a sweetfaced kid in a baseball cap. "First thing every morning, we take care of the boat, fuel, check the fluids, and so on."
While Anne and Mara mopped and washed the windows, Dave showed me how to lift the central row of benches, exposing the diesel engine coiled under the floor like a mass of monstrous steel blue intestines. The fluid levels and the bilge had to be recorded in a log book that was greasy and dogeared from previous seasons. I followed Dave up and down the deck like a puppy, watching as he explained various details.
At last he turned on the boat. Mara untied the stern line as the engine roared to life.
Dave took us away from the home dock and steered for the other side of the lake, where a trail ran out from another dock into deep woods. The water was emerald green and rocks lined the shore so precisely that they looked landscaped, but beyond the dock and the trail lay a tangle of conifer forest that climbed up and up before bursting into daylight as the scree-marked face of Mt. Allen.
Anne jumped out carrying two yellow fuel cans and disappeared into the trees.
"She'll go across to Lake Josephine and get Morning Eagle ready for tours," Dave said. "We'll go over there later."
Meanwhile he backed out and peeled away down Swiftcurrent, passing the cabin, navigating a narrow shallow stretch, passing a marsh and a beaver dam, passing all the mountains whose names and histories I would come to learn so thoroughly that I gave tours in my dreams, and finally rounding across in front of the big waterfront hotel to dock.
"This is the most difficult dock," Dave said, "but the wind only blows one way here, so at least you know where you're at."
He steered bow-first for the broadside of the dock, at the last minute veering slightly right so that our port side just lightly bumped against the last piling. Mara caught our bowline, and Dave put the throttle back in forward so the stern swung around and lay flush with the dock.
"Did you catch that?"
No, no I hadn't. It would be at least three days before I tackled the hotel dock, and much longer before I mastered it.
Passengers for the first tour were already milling around in front of the ticket office, a tiny hut in the hotel's shadow.
"Call them in," Dave said, so I stepped up and shouted "All abooooaaaard!" like an old-timey rail conductor. They shuffled along the gangway and descended the stairs into the bow. My first tourists! I was thrilled.
Last to come on was a Park Service ranger in a green uniform. The 9 AM tours, I learned, were always led by rangers; they gave the commentary and led a hike from the other side of Lake Josephine.
Dave got on the mike, went over safety procedures, and then handed it over to Ranger Kara, who began the tour as soon as we were cast us off. I sat in the front seat, trying to keep track of it all. Kara talked about the hotel, the landmarks around the lake, the bears and the bighorn sheep, history here, geology there, and so on.
(Boat Co tours were essentially identical to ranger tours, except that we had much more leeway to make silly jokes. For some reason the Park Service frowned on their rangers answering the question 'What happens if we see a grizzly bear?' with "Well, first of all you should make a tight circle around me…")
Dave docked at the head of the lake where we'd left Anne. He let everyone off and they headed down the trail, presumably to the next lake.
"Now the nice thing to do is radio the other boat when you send them over."
He spoke into the radio receiver.
"Two Guns to Morning Eagle, they're headed over the hill."
"Copy that," Anne crackled back.
He hung up the receiver. "Now are you ready to practice?"
Hands shaking a little, I took the wheel.
Well, steering those boats was dead-easy. You turned the wheel and where the bow went, the boat went. As long as you didn't run out of lake, you were golden.
Docking was another story again. It required a lot of maneuvering and throttling, forward idle, reverse, neutral, forward again, and just to make things kicky, the wind at the head of the lake habitually blew in circles. The problem was that I had no idea what fifty feet of boat did when you turned the wheel or gave it throttle, when the wind blew or the waves picked up. After I got a feel for these things it all made more sense, and I gradually lost the conviction that the boat was going to defy my captainship and the laws of physics by leaping forward to grind against the shore. But docking made for a steep learning curve.
When Anne volleyed the 9 AM tour back at us, Dave called a halt.
"We'll take this group back to the hotel and go work on Morning Eagle after lunch."
True to this promise, afternoon found us walking over the hill to Morning Eagle. From Swiftcurrent, you would never guess at the existence of Lake Josephine, surrounded by mountains on three sides and stretching two miles up the valley toward the high columns of the Garden Wall. Josephine was even more beautiful than Swiftcurrent, but I lost track of the scenery as I struggled to master Morning Eagle, a faster and touchier boat with an outboard propeller that made the steering work opposite to Two Guns'.
At last I managed to bring her home without too much panic, and then I did it again. Dave threw the bowline, securing us to dock.
"Good. That was good. Once you have two in a row, it's time to take a break."
We tied the stern line and killed the engine, and then he put his hands on the roof and vaulted up.
"The afternoon on Josey is the best part. You can take a nap between tours…We'll practice more before the 4:30 comes over."
As he stretched himself out in the sun, I lay down on the dock and looked into the water. Six feet deep, and clearer than the water out of my faucet in Chicago. A galaxy of colored pebbles lined the bottom - blood red, emerald, black, pink, and brindle-striped in gray and green. I dipped my hand in and pulled it right back out, already numb. Farther out, beyond the dropoff, the lake swallowed the sunlight and turned deep aquamarine, an effect born of the glacial flour suspended in the water column. Up at the head of the valley, high on the wall, lay the three glaciers themselves.
It was like some wild miracle that I had landed in this place, that a place like this existed, and that was something I never got used to; on the last day as much as the first it got to me, the sheer and furious and pristine beauty, the aliveness of that landscape among the mountains still covered with snow.
The second afternoon of my apprenticeship found me back on Morning Eagle, this time with James and Amanda, also a new captain. I was a little nervous to learn with James; Dave was the sweetest kid in the world, but James struck me as altogether sharper and less easy-going.
For her part, Amanda was a Midwesterner turned mountain hippy: she had dreadlocks and big earrings, and hardly ever washed her pants.
James had us take turns docking. Amanda had had a few weeks' practice on me, and nailed her landings every time, while I more or less flailed around. James didn't say much, but he had a way of standing there staring at you while not saying it that was slightly disconcerting.
When the 4:30 tour came over the hill, he jumped off the boat and gave Amanda a look that made the light glint off his glasses, turning his eyes into twin silver plates.
"Why don't you solo this one? Lily can ride along and throw your lines."
It would be her first solo. As I would learn for myself, James made a habit of not telling new captains when their turn was coming up.
Amanda was a little taken aback, but excited too, and once we got everyone boarded and out on the water, she launched confidently into the Josephine tour, a kind of sequel to the one on Swiftcurrent, touching on bears, glaciers, geology, and the history of the park and the Boat Company. I perched on the stairs with the breeze in my face, taking mental notes.
The dock at the head of the lake came into view. I stood up, ready to throw the bowline. We were still roaring along at tour speed.
One beat, two beats, we were thirty feet away now, and you didn't need Coast Guard certification to realize we should be slowing down. I sneaked a glance at Amanda. She looked terrified. Oh hell, the stage fright had gotten to her. And it had been going so nicely.
Next moment, we plowed into the dock, all twelve tons of boat and tourists. Boards flew everywhere.
"FUCK!" Amanda shrieked, and killed the engine.
In the sudden silence, we dusted ourselves off and looked around. The dock had sprung a gaping hole and bits of it were floating off in the direction of Cataract Creek. The passengers began to mutter, an embarrassed mutter undercut by panic.
"What was that - " I started, but Amanda cut me off.
"There's something wrong with the throttle! It wouldn't go into reverse! Oh my God, I tried to ease it down and it just kept going - "
She snatched the radio.
"Morning Eagle to James? Morning Eagle to James!"
James' voice crackled back over the intercom. Meanwhile, I had another problem to work on. The dock pilings were still sound, so I had gotten our lines tied up, but the hikers who had been waiting to catch the boat now rushed down to investigate.
"Hey, what's wrong?"
"Can we get on the boat anyway?"
"Lemme through, I bet I can fix it."
The dock groaned dangerously.
"EVERYBODY OFF!" I bellowed. "GET BACK ON THE BEACH!"
I jumped over the hole and physically blocked the gangway. Slowly, reluctantly, they sidled back to dry ground.
I went back to consult with Amanda. She was a little pale, but starting to calm down.
"He says to get back on the water and they'll meet us in the chase boat."
"Okay," I said, and very slowly, very carefully, we pulled away from dock. I looked back once at the people left on shore. They made a forlorn group huddled there. A few shook their fists in apparent rage as Morning Eagle retreated.
Far down the lake I spotted James and Dave in the battered old outboard skiff that served precisely for emergencies like this. The cavalry was coming, but what were they going to do when they arrived? From the murmur of the passengers, everyone else was wondering the same thing.
They veered close under our port side, moving fast. Dave stood up, teetering, and then, in a single move, leapt up to the gunwales and swarmed in through a window, while James gunned the chase boat and roared off down the lake. Dave strolled up to the bow - Amanda handed over the wheel without a word. The audience gazed at their hijacker, thunderstruck.
"Hi everyone," he said. "I'm Dave."
And they applauded wildly.
He took Morning Eagle and beached her in the shallows off the dock, and we all helped everyone to shore. Amanda and I herded them over the hill, where Anne waited with Two Guns.
James would ferry the hikers home in the chase boat and then, with Dave and the boat owners, spend half the night fixing the outboard on Morning Eagle.
We made it back to the hotel without incident. The passengers were still chattering about Dave and his badass pirate moves as they disembarked. I never saw such happy customers, not before or since. They knew they'd gotten their money's worth.
1. June
"Tell me please, where is the swift current?"
He was really worried about it. So was his wife; they pushed up close, blocking my path down the dock.
"Well you know, Swiftcurrent is kind of a misnomer," I said. "This is a lake."
Looking over their shoulder, I saw that the green rowboat was taking on more water. It was up to the gunwales by now.
"What? But the tour, where does it go --"
James was down by the water already, reaching for the rowboat. He motioned, get over here. I had been on my way to help him when I was ambushed by these bewildered Japanese tourists.
"Listen, I'll explain later," I said, and ran.
Together we heaved the boat up onto dock. James raised an eyebrow at me.
"You know, that stern plug was right out on the seat. And there's no spare."
We contemplated the weedy lakefloor, ten feet down, where the rubber plug had vanished.
"I guess that means I'm going after it," I said.
It really was my fault. Nick had left all the plugs out after draining the boats, but I was the one who'd pushed the thing in. Diving though-- what an ugly prospect. Early July on Swiftcurrent Lake meant glacial meltwater, fifty degrees or less.
The plug was still somewhere under the dock when I finished work at six thirty. I went home to the cabin to get a towel and recruit moral support. Remarkably, Anne and Ali were game, so we rowed back down the lake together, three captains on a mission.
Ali took off her funky sunglasses, sat down on the edge and stuck a toe in.
"Oh shit. This is going to hurt."
None of us wanted to get in until we could actually spot the plug, but the shadows were lengthening and the weeds down there were pretty thick. Finally Anne, in her practical way, simply jumped, and Ali and I followed suit. We touched bottom and rocketed right back up again, flopping onto the dock like seals.
My whole body had seized up; I was strangely short of breath. I lunged for my towel, swearing.
"There is no way I'm doing that again," Ali said.
"Well, we tried," Anne said. "James will see that at least we got our hair wet."
Still dripping, the three of us retired to the hotel lounge and split a bottle of huckleberry wine.
No one ever did find that plug. The rowboat sat out, unrented, for a while, and in the end we had to borrow a new plug from another dock.
ii.
James, Ali, Anne and I -- and also Nick, Dave, Mara, and Amanda -- were, respectively, the manager and captains of the Glacier Park Boat Company, Many Glacier dock. With the exception of Nick, who lived in a shack at his parents' campground, we all shared a cabin on a cove up Swiftcurrent from the Many Glacier Hotel. Every morning we took the forty-six foot tour boat, Chief Two Guns, down to run tours all day, catering to the hotel guests and the daytrippers, the hikers and the grandmas and the crazies. Every night we came back to the cabin on the shore. The cabin had only recently been outfitted with non-generator electric; the refrigerator ran on propane and we didn't have a phone line. So those who had instruments played them while other people fixed dinner or went out rowing in the green evening shadows. Moose and beaver swam past the living room windows, loons called in the distance, and the days were long, the light holding through eleven o'clock on a clear night.
I don't mean to make this out like we sat around all the time singing 'Kumbya,' but compared to my last job, a stint on the line in a lightbulb factory, Glacier Park was damn close to paradise. Even when things got ugly, like they do sometimes, you were still standing in a high clean country, and the mountains reflected in the lake etched against the sky were so beautiful they gave you a kind of ache…
For the first time, my friends back home envied me my job -- how do you get a sweet job like that, they wanted to know, as opposed to the usual oh my God, I'm sorry -- when I shared my summer plans. I told them the truth: the previous August, staring at the one hundred millionth lightbulb socket rolling down the belt, I had gotten a lucky feeling about Montana. It came out of nowhere and it wouldn't leave me alone. So I did what any smart person would do: I got on the Internet. Google led me to the Boat Company, and they hired me in February. Sleet hammered against the windows of my Chicago apartment the day I got the call - slush piled ankle-deep on the sidewalk - summer was purely theoretical. But I watched the trains roll through and held onto the day that I would turn to the West. It wasn't running away, not exactly, but winter and the factory had left a mark on me like a waterstain, and I was tired all under my skin. It was time to leave.
When I got off the train in Montana, Chicago melted into a slab of glass and concrete and retreated to the back of my head. For a while I left it there.
My first view of the park was Rising Wolf Mountain under the moon and beneath its bulk, Two Medicine Lake, a mirror of every star in the sky. I fell asleep in a house by the shore, and so began a strange lovely summer in the shadow of the Rockies by the green running water.
iii.
Having cast up in Glacier early Sunday, I started work first thing the next morning. It had been a heady twenty-four hours - East Glacier Amtrak station, Two Medicine boat dock where I spent the night, meeting my new boss James, the drive across open country to Many Glacier in the wall of western mountains, the cabin at the end of the road, and a slew of roommates whose names all seemed to start with 'A'…
Now it was Monday and I stepped aboard Chief Two Guns for the first time, wearing a blue shirt that proclaimed me a member of 'Montana's Mountain Navy.' Two Guns was beautiful, a blue and white wooden boat with a flat roof and a shallow draft and eighteen rows of wooden benches.
"Welcome aboard," said Dave, the assistant manager, a sweetfaced kid in a baseball cap. "First thing every morning, we take care of the boat, fuel, check the fluids, and so on."
While Anne and Mara mopped and washed the windows, Dave showed me how to lift the central row of benches, exposing the diesel engine coiled under the floor like a mass of monstrous steel blue intestines. The fluid levels and the bilge had to be recorded in a log book that was greasy and dogeared from previous seasons. I followed Dave up and down the deck like a puppy, watching as he explained various details.
At last he turned on the boat. Mara untied the stern line as the engine roared to life.
Dave took us away from the home dock and steered for the other side of the lake, where a trail ran out from another dock into deep woods. The water was emerald green and rocks lined the shore so precisely that they looked landscaped, but beyond the dock and the trail lay a tangle of conifer forest that climbed up and up before bursting into daylight as the scree-marked face of Mt. Allen.
Anne jumped out carrying two yellow fuel cans and disappeared into the trees.
"She'll go across to Lake Josephine and get Morning Eagle ready for tours," Dave said. "We'll go over there later."
Meanwhile he backed out and peeled away down Swiftcurrent, passing the cabin, navigating a narrow shallow stretch, passing a marsh and a beaver dam, passing all the mountains whose names and histories I would come to learn so thoroughly that I gave tours in my dreams, and finally rounding across in front of the big waterfront hotel to dock.
"This is the most difficult dock," Dave said, "but the wind only blows one way here, so at least you know where you're at."
He steered bow-first for the broadside of the dock, at the last minute veering slightly right so that our port side just lightly bumped against the last piling. Mara caught our bowline, and Dave put the throttle back in forward so the stern swung around and lay flush with the dock.
"Did you catch that?"
No, no I hadn't. It would be at least three days before I tackled the hotel dock, and much longer before I mastered it.
Passengers for the first tour were already milling around in front of the ticket office, a tiny hut in the hotel's shadow.
"Call them in," Dave said, so I stepped up and shouted "All abooooaaaard!" like an old-timey rail conductor. They shuffled along the gangway and descended the stairs into the bow. My first tourists! I was thrilled.
Last to come on was a Park Service ranger in a green uniform. The 9 AM tours, I learned, were always led by rangers; they gave the commentary and led a hike from the other side of Lake Josephine.
Dave got on the mike, went over safety procedures, and then handed it over to Ranger Kara, who began the tour as soon as we were cast us off. I sat in the front seat, trying to keep track of it all. Kara talked about the hotel, the landmarks around the lake, the bears and the bighorn sheep, history here, geology there, and so on.
(Boat Co tours were essentially identical to ranger tours, except that we had much more leeway to make silly jokes. For some reason the Park Service frowned on their rangers answering the question 'What happens if we see a grizzly bear?' with "Well, first of all you should make a tight circle around me…")
Dave docked at the head of the lake where we'd left Anne. He let everyone off and they headed down the trail, presumably to the next lake.
"Now the nice thing to do is radio the other boat when you send them over."
He spoke into the radio receiver.
"Two Guns to Morning Eagle, they're headed over the hill."
"Copy that," Anne crackled back.
He hung up the receiver. "Now are you ready to practice?"
Hands shaking a little, I took the wheel.
Well, steering those boats was dead-easy. You turned the wheel and where the bow went, the boat went. As long as you didn't run out of lake, you were golden.
Docking was another story again. It required a lot of maneuvering and throttling, forward idle, reverse, neutral, forward again, and just to make things kicky, the wind at the head of the lake habitually blew in circles. The problem was that I had no idea what fifty feet of boat did when you turned the wheel or gave it throttle, when the wind blew or the waves picked up. After I got a feel for these things it all made more sense, and I gradually lost the conviction that the boat was going to defy my captainship and the laws of physics by leaping forward to grind against the shore. But docking made for a steep learning curve.
When Anne volleyed the 9 AM tour back at us, Dave called a halt.
"We'll take this group back to the hotel and go work on Morning Eagle after lunch."
True to this promise, afternoon found us walking over the hill to Morning Eagle. From Swiftcurrent, you would never guess at the existence of Lake Josephine, surrounded by mountains on three sides and stretching two miles up the valley toward the high columns of the Garden Wall. Josephine was even more beautiful than Swiftcurrent, but I lost track of the scenery as I struggled to master Morning Eagle, a faster and touchier boat with an outboard propeller that made the steering work opposite to Two Guns'.
At last I managed to bring her home without too much panic, and then I did it again. Dave threw the bowline, securing us to dock.
"Good. That was good. Once you have two in a row, it's time to take a break."
We tied the stern line and killed the engine, and then he put his hands on the roof and vaulted up.
"The afternoon on Josey is the best part. You can take a nap between tours…We'll practice more before the 4:30 comes over."
As he stretched himself out in the sun, I lay down on the dock and looked into the water. Six feet deep, and clearer than the water out of my faucet in Chicago. A galaxy of colored pebbles lined the bottom - blood red, emerald, black, pink, and brindle-striped in gray and green. I dipped my hand in and pulled it right back out, already numb. Farther out, beyond the dropoff, the lake swallowed the sunlight and turned deep aquamarine, an effect born of the glacial flour suspended in the water column. Up at the head of the valley, high on the wall, lay the three glaciers themselves.
It was like some wild miracle that I had landed in this place, that a place like this existed, and that was something I never got used to; on the last day as much as the first it got to me, the sheer and furious and pristine beauty, the aliveness of that landscape among the mountains still covered with snow.
The second afternoon of my apprenticeship found me back on Morning Eagle, this time with James and Amanda, also a new captain. I was a little nervous to learn with James; Dave was the sweetest kid in the world, but James struck me as altogether sharper and less easy-going.
For her part, Amanda was a Midwesterner turned mountain hippy: she had dreadlocks and big earrings, and hardly ever washed her pants.
James had us take turns docking. Amanda had had a few weeks' practice on me, and nailed her landings every time, while I more or less flailed around. James didn't say much, but he had a way of standing there staring at you while not saying it that was slightly disconcerting.
When the 4:30 tour came over the hill, he jumped off the boat and gave Amanda a look that made the light glint off his glasses, turning his eyes into twin silver plates.
"Why don't you solo this one? Lily can ride along and throw your lines."
It would be her first solo. As I would learn for myself, James made a habit of not telling new captains when their turn was coming up.
Amanda was a little taken aback, but excited too, and once we got everyone boarded and out on the water, she launched confidently into the Josephine tour, a kind of sequel to the one on Swiftcurrent, touching on bears, glaciers, geology, and the history of the park and the Boat Company. I perched on the stairs with the breeze in my face, taking mental notes.
The dock at the head of the lake came into view. I stood up, ready to throw the bowline. We were still roaring along at tour speed.
One beat, two beats, we were thirty feet away now, and you didn't need Coast Guard certification to realize we should be slowing down. I sneaked a glance at Amanda. She looked terrified. Oh hell, the stage fright had gotten to her. And it had been going so nicely.
Next moment, we plowed into the dock, all twelve tons of boat and tourists. Boards flew everywhere.
"FUCK!" Amanda shrieked, and killed the engine.
In the sudden silence, we dusted ourselves off and looked around. The dock had sprung a gaping hole and bits of it were floating off in the direction of Cataract Creek. The passengers began to mutter, an embarrassed mutter undercut by panic.
"What was that - " I started, but Amanda cut me off.
"There's something wrong with the throttle! It wouldn't go into reverse! Oh my God, I tried to ease it down and it just kept going - "
She snatched the radio.
"Morning Eagle to James? Morning Eagle to James!"
James' voice crackled back over the intercom. Meanwhile, I had another problem to work on. The dock pilings were still sound, so I had gotten our lines tied up, but the hikers who had been waiting to catch the boat now rushed down to investigate.
"Hey, what's wrong?"
"Can we get on the boat anyway?"
"Lemme through, I bet I can fix it."
The dock groaned dangerously.
"EVERYBODY OFF!" I bellowed. "GET BACK ON THE BEACH!"
I jumped over the hole and physically blocked the gangway. Slowly, reluctantly, they sidled back to dry ground.
I went back to consult with Amanda. She was a little pale, but starting to calm down.
"He says to get back on the water and they'll meet us in the chase boat."
"Okay," I said, and very slowly, very carefully, we pulled away from dock. I looked back once at the people left on shore. They made a forlorn group huddled there. A few shook their fists in apparent rage as Morning Eagle retreated.
Far down the lake I spotted James and Dave in the battered old outboard skiff that served precisely for emergencies like this. The cavalry was coming, but what were they going to do when they arrived? From the murmur of the passengers, everyone else was wondering the same thing.
They veered close under our port side, moving fast. Dave stood up, teetering, and then, in a single move, leapt up to the gunwales and swarmed in through a window, while James gunned the chase boat and roared off down the lake. Dave strolled up to the bow - Amanda handed over the wheel without a word. The audience gazed at their hijacker, thunderstruck.
"Hi everyone," he said. "I'm Dave."
And they applauded wildly.
He took Morning Eagle and beached her in the shallows off the dock, and we all helped everyone to shore. Amanda and I herded them over the hill, where Anne waited with Two Guns.
James would ferry the hikers home in the chase boat and then, with Dave and the boat owners, spend half the night fixing the outboard on Morning Eagle.
We made it back to the hotel without incident. The passengers were still chattering about Dave and his badass pirate moves as they disembarked. I never saw such happy customers, not before or since. They knew they'd gotten their money's worth.
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