Glacier Stories

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 Hopefully I'll have some killer new Montana stories for the blog soon, but in the meantime I've decided to post some unpublished stories from my time working as a tour guide in Glacier National Park in 2008 and 2009.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.

Goodnight, Irene

Saturday, the 27th of August, was sunny and humid. Camp was finally over; the last guests had packed up their families and left early, heading back to Connecticut and the Cape to pull in their sailboats, shutter up their beach houses. Irene was coming. We had been watching the radar for days, but it was hard to say what, if anything, would happen when it finally came over us. As a child of the Midwest, I'd seen plenty of tornado weather, but never experienced anything like the slow, oncoming inevitability of a hurricane.
After lunch, we split into groups to start shutting things down. My team was assigned to pull up boats from the lakefront. While a team of dock specialists in wetsuits broke down the docks, we loaded the sailboats onto a trailer and drove them up the hill, to lie safely out of the wind and waves. It was hard work, but we were laughing and happy; there was a sense of camaraderie and definite purpose, unusual for Arcadia.
All through that hot afternoon, I watched the clouds rising up, big thunderheads riding out ahead of the rain. Dinner conversation that night centered on the storm. No authority figure had given any indication of emergency preparations, of where we might go if the conditions were bad. The more cynical staff members speculated that the authority just didn't care. It was all too easy to imagine them leaving us to fend for ourselves in our cabin down by the lake. After all, we'd already put away all the valuable equipment. But I preferred to believe that it wouldn't come to that.
The rain started in the night. When I woke up in the morning I looked out to see curtains of it passing over the far side of the lake, and what I thought was water streaming off the cabin roof turned out to be only the rain.
The power went out at 9 AM, killing all attempts at a productive workday. Little by little, people began filtering into the main lodge where a fire was going. We sat in the dark and played cards by the light of headlamps. The rain was still lashing down, and the trees began to bend in the wind.
The first big branch fell around lunchtime. I was sitting on the porch of the lodge when it came crashing down on the infirmary roof. Others soon joined it. Some people started a game of guessing which branch or tree would fall next, cheering for their candidate when a big gust came through. Gripped by the wind, the trees bent and groaned. It seemed that they could never hold. Finally one fell, taking out the window and a corner of roof on a cabin next to the main lodge. Then another, down in the field by another cabin, and another and another. Limbs and cones littered the ground. An enormous tree fell by the shower house, leaving a hole waist deep in the path. People screamed and rushed out to take pictures of themselves standing in it.
When the wind retreated a little, I took a stroll with some other people to look at the waterfront. Pleasant Lake, usually so murky and placid, was lashing the beach. Two ducks rode the breakers. No matter how hard they paddled, the swell threw them to the shore and back, over and over. When I looked up at the sky, the clouds were scudding by so fast they made you seasick.
Back on the porch, Jess and Will, the most senior counselors, were drinking gin-and-tonics. Very classy. Really, the ideal cocktail for sitting out a natural disaster. Will was anxious because a big triple-trunked tree, leaning directly over the porch, had begun to twist and warp in the wind. He and Jess phoned the camp directors, who were in their own cottages half a away, and received permission to move us to the big house by the road, if it came to that.
The storm howled on, and the world was violent and wild all around us. Then little by little it began to calm, and by suppertime was quite still.
When it got dark we lugged our things up to the loft of the big house for the night, safe from blow-downs and any following winds. It was like a private refugee camp up there, everyone set up on thin bunkbed mattresses, gathering to talk and play games in the light of a storm lantern.
I fell asleep early and missed the winds that came in the night. When I got up, the day was bright and the whole camp was carpeted in pine branches.

Expedition to Mt Washington

I was looking forward to the Washington trip, but I definitely needed some breathing room beforehand. So on my night off, after watching Harry Potter 7/2 in Scarborough (Harry Potter and the Curb Stomp Beatdown!), I drove out to a state park I know in Cape Elizabeth and slipped in to sleep on the beach in the moonlight, which was so incandescently bright that I cast a shadow on the sand. A strong wind came in over the water and the clouds were speckled with stars. When I got up in the morning, my clothes smelled like salt. I had an early breakfast on a wharf-front diner in Portland, and then drove back to pack for Washington.
Three counselors were assigned to this trip: me; a male counselor, P.; and B., my boss, the head of the trips department. On Tuesday morning, we mustered the seven teenage girls, ages 13 -16, an interesting assortment of characters, and hit the road.
It was a beautiful sunny day as we started up the trail. The Mt Washington trip is reserved for the toughest, most experienced hikers at camp, and they were happy to be in the woods again; we set a brisk pace uphill through the forest. At the edge of the alpine zone, everyone was momentarily sobered by this sign:

and I thought again about what it means to lead other people's children into the wilderness. Under the guidance of B., with her military background, the trips counselors in our department took this responsibility very, very seriously. Other camps, as we soon learned, did not. On the 2nd day of our trip we hiked 7 miles across the peaks to the summit of Washington. It was a hot day and we moved at a deliberate pace, pausing often for water breaks. The trails were crowded with other hikers. Finally we were only a mile from the top; the summit was in view. But we stopped: there was a little boy sitting on a rock beside the trail. It was the same boy we had seen earlier, stumbling and pleading for some water and 'just 5 seconds' to rest. His counselor had refused him then, and now apparently she had abandoned him on the trail to catch up later. He had no water left in his bottle. B. snapped into action. She gave the boy some water from her own emergency supply and made plans to have him hike the rest of the way with us. At that point, however, the counselor came back. She was sweaty, angry, and English.
"Don't give him more water, it's his fault he already drank all his and most of mine. Get up Leo, you have to keep going."
B. asked her what trail she was taking; the woman had no idea. She was trying to hike up the scree slope next to the cog railway. We invited her to join us on the trail, but the counselor shook her head.
"Can't. I have to go this way, I've got more kids up there somewhere." She gestured vaguely at the summit and then took off, Leo shuffling in her wake. We never saw them again. Thank God the weather was good, that we didn't experience one of Washington's notorious fogs, the kind that goes down like a curtain over a beautiful day, reducing visibility to 10 feet or less.
The summit of Washington was a surreal tourist parade. After hours of hiking through the rugged mountainscape, we climbed onto this paved plateau, with a cafeteria, a museum, and a gift shop. The summit itself was the traditional pile of rocks topped by a weathered wooden sign – but it was surrounded by the concrete observation deck, and it put me in mind of the monkey island in a zoo. People who had paid to drive up wandered around in sundresses and flipflops. I have never visited a mountain so stripped of its essential mountainness. It was an interesting experience.
There was one thing they couldn't pave down, however: the wind. Washington holds the record for one of the highest recorded surface wind speeds: 231 mph. According to Wikipedia, it blows above hurricane force approximately 110 days out of the year. In February, when I was living east of Washington in Bethel, Me, the windchill one day was approximately -72 F. The gentle zephyr blowing the day we hiked up there was nothing. Just enough to knock you off balance if you stood on the summit too long. Done with the summit, we hiked down to the slopes of Mt Monroe to stay at Lakes of the Clouds, perched on the precipice below Washington. There was a girl's camp group of 40 at Lakes, and a church group of 20, for a total of 70 or so screaming high
school students packed into the hut, utterly shellshocking the few legitimate adult visitors and thru-hikers trying to share the space. Our group was overwhelmed too, so we hiked up to the summit of Monroe after supper to watch the sunset, seeking peace. Up there it was cool and silent. The sun sank into banks of clouds, the mountains rolled away for miles, losing themselves in the blue haze of dusk. Directly below us the eponymous lakes nestled in the rocks reflecting the sky.

Return to Camp: American Summer

"So they filled you in about this camper?" the nurse said. "The sleepwalking? The bedwetting? You know what to do if she gets up in the night?"
"I know," I said. "I'll be in the next bed, so I'll be able to go after her and steer her in the right direction."
"I'm worried," the older nurse interjected. "What if you don't wake up? I think you should take a string and tie one end to your wrist and the other to her arm. Just a little string, you know."
It was 9:30 PM, and I was on night duty at the camp infirmary. The three of us sat on folding chairs in the main office. A single 60-watt bulb hung over a table festooned with paperwork and jars of medicine and bandages. Down the hall I caught a glimpse of a barracks-like room lined with white-sheeted beds. It felt like a scene out of WWII. But instead of soldiers in white, my special assignment tonight was a troubled 10-year old girl. I was to sleep in the bed beside her to prevent her sleepwalking and wetting the bed. She was a sweet little kid, and I felt bad for her. But I was damned if I was going to tether myself to her, like some peasant with his only goat.
"Um, I'm a pretty light sleeper," I said. "I don't think that will be necessary."
The younger nurse gave me an ironic, sympathetic look. "Whatever you think will work. Do you want to get settled now?"
She led me into the barracks room and showed me my cot. My camper was already there, and so were two other girls, one with a fever, the other a vicious lung-rattling cough. I arranged my bed so that it blocked the sleepwalker's; she would have to climb over my bed to escape. She was awake and happy to see me, we chatted about Justin Bieber for a while, and then she went peacefully to sleep
I lay on my cot in the dark, with a little breeze at the curtains and the moonlight seeping in, and wondered, not for the first time, how how how do I end up in these jobs? Why hadn't my survival instinct kicked in that first week, when we all stood up together after supper and rearranged the dining room tables so that the wood grain in every table pointed north?
Well, it was a long night, but the sheets stayed dry. She had a beautiful sleep, much better than me or the cougher. In the morning I got up and poured coffee down my gullet and fidgeted through the traditional outdoor Sunday meeting, a non-denominational cross between Walt Whitman and a Vineyard church service. One of the nonagenarian directors told a rambling story about friendship, and also Albrecht Dürer, and then treated us to a sermon on happiness: "What is Happiness? It is a spring flower. A campfire with friends. A beautiful feeling that brings a smile to God's face." Yup, good old God, up there beaming away. And when Jesus laughs, he laughs kittens.
Finally, after the meeting my day off started, and I fled. Fleeing from camp here is simpler than it was in Russia, because I have a car. With exactly one 24 hour period off a week, though, it's hard to get very far. Fortunately, Portland and the ocean are only 45 minutes away. The boyfriend, unfortunately, is 3 hours away; I've had some lovely 5 AM drives back across the mountains, heavily caffeinated and pedal to the medal before the clock strikes duty time and I turn back into Cinderella.
Things are stressful only when I'm scheduled to work in camp, though. Most days of the week, I have a very cool job: I lead selected girls on hikes and camping trips in the wilderness. Right after breakfast, almost every day, we load up the 12-passenger van with gear and children and hit the road, radio cranked the moment we're out of the driveway. They 're not allowed to have phones, computers, or music at camp, so the radio is a treat. We have road trips, adventures, ice cream, climb mountains, pitch tents, jump off 15 foot cliffs into deep blue swimming holes, and life is good. I have now hiked and camped and driven all over the White Mountains. Next week I'm leading a trip up Mt. Washington. We'll hike for three days and stay in huts along the Appalachian Trail where lovely AMC croo members will cook lovely food for us. If you're imaging my group squatting in some kind of dismal coop, let me disabuse you. This is Lakes of the Clouds, where we'll stay the 2nd night on Washington.
Needless to say, I like this aspect of my job very much. Once again I being paid to hike. The absurdity is free.

English Day

It was an awful struggle to leave Lindsay's peaceful, wi-fi equipped flat and drag myself through the downpour to Kievsky Station, there to catch the Sunday night electric train for the 2 hour journey back to Dubravushka.
Back at camp, I started planning seriously for English Day – which meant making some copies of the lyrics to 'We Will Rock You' and taking my laptop with the music to class, and then encouraging my students to pound on their desks until the Russian teachers stuck their heads in to see what was up.
On Monday afternoon, in between classes, I was treated to the gut-punch irony of curling up for a 15 minute nap - just the briefest, blessedest respite from hours upon hours of yelling children – only to have 25 of them suddenly descend upon the piano outside my door, banging amusically and howling. Then two of them pulled open my door (which I stupidly hadn't locked) and discovered me lying on my couch under the chalkboard.
"Look, it's Leely!"
"SHUT THE DOOR!" I screamed in Russian, and they withdrew.
But the other 23 had heard me, and they all started shrieking.
"LEELY LEELY LEELY!"
Oh God. I got up and locked the door and went back and pulled the pillow over my head.
I heard a teacher come back to round them up, and felt a stir of hope – maybe they were going away now? Maybe they were going to do arts and crafts or some other really soothing thing?
But no. On the count of 'Raz, dva, tre!' the teacher started playing, and the children launched into some kind of shrill Pioneer chorus, accompanied by a 7-year old soloist keyed to dog-whistle range.
The song went on and on. When they were finished, there was a pause and then –
'Again!' the teacher cried.
I had that song in my head for the next three days.
Later, some students, prompted by their instructor, actually asked my permission before playing in the afternoon, but since they barged into my room without knocking in order to ask, I wasn't impressed.


Finally, it was Wednesday. The usual frantic morning was enlivened by the arrival of a 3rd teacher, Andrew from Moscow. We were surprised; they had warned us to expect a Polish girl from Warsaw. So was Andrew; they hadn't bothered to tell him he was coming until the day before.
At 3.30 Olga summoned me and Ariel into her office and gave us handfuls of Chupa-Chup lollipops, to be used as prizes for the English Day games. We took them and went back out to wait on a bench, but nobody came. The counselors were nowhere to be seen, no kids wandered the grounds – nothing anywhere, except the presence of me and Ariel on our park bench, suggested that an English Carnival was imminent.
Then, like a sweaty shambling teddy bear of doom, Alexander Borisovich appeared.
"Ah yes! At last! Here you are! Lily, I have your tongue -twisters, and Ari – the translations!"
He shoved fistfuls of paper at each of us.
My station was to sit and listen to students attempt to read English tongue-twisters. If I judged their pronunciation satisfactory, they got a Chupa-Chup.
"But remember!" cried AB, tapping his nose and twinkling his eye, "This game should be about fun, yes, the joy of the day, not sweets and things!"
I think he was alluding to the fact that Olga had been stingy and not given us nearly enough lollipops, so I just shrugged and went off to find my station on the porch of Bungalow Six.
At first all remained silent and peaceful. Off in the distance hordes of children had begun galloping about, but I didn't really connect them with myself until suddenly 20 teenagers stampeded onto the porch and leaned over the chair I was sitting in.
"Mozhno ya? May I?"
"No, may I first?"
"May I?"
"May I?"
I waved my arms to clear them off a little and picked a kid at random.
"You – try a tongue twister!"
I didn't recognize him from any of our classes, and the reason became evident: he didn't speak or read English.
"That was a great try," I said, and handed another twister to a second kid, who did a little better, and then to a third, the best of all. At this point, I made a strategic mistake: I reached into my teacher's satchel and took out a pineapple-mango Chupa-Chup.
"Congratulations!" I told the third student. "This is for you."
The girl's eyes lit up. She seized the lollipop, and at once the whole crowd surged in around my chair again.
"Ooooh, Chupa-Chups!"
"I want!"
"Me me me!"
They blotted out the sun; their elbows were in my eye sockets. I fought free and climbed up on a table.
"One at a time!"
When they had all had a go – two tries each – most of them wandered off, still lollipopless, except a few diehard 15 year old boys who clasped their hands and whined,
"Pleeeez….Chuuuuupa-Chups!"
"No!" I said. "Go away! No Chupa-Chups!"
Then another wave of children, and another, and another. When my 25 tiniest crowded onto the porch, I held my breath, lest even the rustle of a wrapper betray the sacred presence and spark a riot – because I didn't have 25 Chupa-Chups to hand out
Then they were gone and that, thank God, was that.

I went off to dinner – plain cold spaghetti and chopped cucumbers – and at 8 we reconvened in the hall for the skits program. Ari was already there, looking harassed as he ran his middle-schoolers through another reading of Shakespeare. I was watching Sevyeron, the skinny jugheared savant that they had translating everything into Russian, when AB swooped in and steered me into a seat at a table near the stage, which had been draped with a red-and-white English flag.
"I know, I know, you are American, you and Andrew!" he said. 'But today – ha ha! – we are all English in our hearts!"
I sat down without comment. Ariel and Andrew joined me, and shortly thereafter all the students filed in. The tiny ones spotted me and waved with hysterical enthusiasm, as if it had been 2 years instead of 2 hours since we had last met. When everyone was quiet, Olga bounded onto the stage, looking more fanatical than ever. She was still wearing the sweater vest.
"Good evening students, citizens of our beloved Dubravushka!" she screamed, to tumultuous applause. "Are You. Ready. For ENGLISH!"
Apparently they were. She retreated and the first performers, a group of girls in pink and yellow shifts, came up to do some kind of folk dance to the shrill tootling of a recorder.
At the end of this dance, they danced over to our table with a huge lump of black bread and bowl of salt.
"It is traditional,' explained Sevyeron the savant, "to welcome Russian guests with bread and salt…"
With the eyes of the whole school pinned on us, we each ripped off a chunk of bread with our bare hands and dunked it in the salt, then tried not to choke on the resultant saline frosting.
After this little ceremony, the primary schoolers came forward with a crown of oak leaves.
"This is for you, Leely!" said Sasha, their spokeswoman. "Because you are our queen!"
I bent and let them put the leafy crown on my head, then all the kids applauded and 10 or 12 of them rushed forward to hug me before their hatchet-faced Russian counselors hustled them back into their seats.
The show continued. A group of boys pantomimed a traditional Russian market day, complete with a flute playing, fights, juggling, and an openly rigged shell game. Sevyeron sang a little folk ditty that had been translated and considerably bowdlerized for the occasion. At the end of this skit we teachers were presented with a plate of blini and a bowl of sour cream. I nibbled at a blin, but soon had to desist, feeling the longing eyes of children at my back. They'd only had cold spaghetti too…
Finally it was time for what Olga had billed as our 'English Surprise."
We went onstage and summoned all our students to join us. The first strains of Queen, 'We Will Rock You,' began to thud in the background. My students, God help them, were all watching to take their dance cues from me, so I clapped and stamped my feet, and dragged them into it, until we were all clapping and stamping together – except my oak crown kept slipping my eyes. No matter.
At the end I herded them offstage with many cheers of congratulation and attempted high-fives. I say attempted because hardly any of them recognized the gesture: they got confused and we ended up gravely shaking hands instead.
Then it was time for Ariel's Shakespeare production, all but incomprehensible because half had forgotten their lines and the rest couldn't pronounce the words.
"Oh Yuliet, Yuliet…"
"Forget the fazzer and forsek thu nem…"
But Sevyeron's translation at least got big laughs, as did the bawdy little joke of holding up a discreet sheet for the newlywed Romeo and Juliet to duck behind, following the wedding scene. Olga was the only one who wasn't amused. The next day she would scold Ariel for allowing off-color elements into the production (off color? Shakespeare? Never!)…but that was all later. For the moment, all was triumphant. The curtain fell to rousing applause, and English Day was over. For another two weeks at least.

Camp Part II: Olga the Culture Nazi

"There's this woman," said Ariel on Thursday night of the first week. "I've never seen her before, but apparently she wants us to put on an English Day carnival all of next Wednesday, with you know, booths and skits and things. We have a meeting with her tomorrow night at 6."
"Six?" I said. "I can't. I just can't, I'm catching the train to Moscow!"
Ariel blinked. "Well, I suppose I could always go alone and then text you about it later," he said, in that mild way of certain British men, where you can never tell if they're being nice or just incredibly passive-aggressive.
But I ended up attending the meeting anyway, just to see what kind of hoops they were going to make us jump through this time. We showed up at the administration building and were ushered into a back office. There was Alexander Borisovich, an unidentified older woman off in the corner, and Olga. Olga was a youngish woman with a short, bad haircut, and a stripey sweater vest. She beamed when she saw us.
"Please, please, sit down!" she said in Russian, gesturing at the lumpy old couch, so Ariel and I sank awkwardly into the couch while she and Alexander Borisovich loomed over us. The latter apparently hadn't showered all week – he was still in the shirt he'd been wearing on Sunday, and the greasy sweat rolled out of his hair. Discreetly, I leaned out of range.
Olga took out of sheaf and papers and clutched them to her chest. "Privyet Ari, privyet - ?"
"Leely," said the other woman, stirring herself. That was her one contribution: she wouldn't say another word for the rest of the meeting.
"So," Olga said, still in Russian – she didn't speak any English – "So, Ari and Lily, we will have English Day, a celebration of English language and culture! You of course will lead this celebration, there will be booths and station games and in the evening each children's house must perform something, perhaps a song, a skit -?"
She looked at Ariel, who took out the list of haphazard ideas we had come up with on the way to the meeting.
"Yes, of course," he said – conveniently, he spoke fluent Russian. "We thought the youngest ones could do a nursery rhyme – Humpty Dumpty? Do you know Humpty Dumpty?"
Olga looked dubious.
Alexander Borisovich nodded enthusiastically. "Very good, very famous children's poem," he reassured her.
"Well, then, lovely," Olga said. "Lily can do this with her 3rd House, the smallest ones. And the 6th House, and the 7th?" They were the 8 to 10 year olds.
"Maybe a song?" Ariel said. "We thought, something popular, something that they can dance to."
"How about Lady Gaga?" I said. "They love Lady Gaga."
"Yeah, or Beyonce," said Ariel.
Olga frowned. "No, no, this is no good. We need something…more classical, yes?"
"OK," said Ariel. "What about Queen?"
"Much better," she said, scribbling it down on a piece of paper. "And finally, the oldest students. What to do with them?"
"Perhaps theater?" Ariel said. "An act from a play, adapted? I have some modernized Shakespeare that my girlfriend sent me…"
She clasped her hands in delight. "Shakespeare! How wonderful! How perfect! Or…what about Pushkin? Should we train the children to memorize a translation of Pushkin? Or perhaps Chekhov? Can you make a translation of Chekhov for our English Day? You can write it this weekend…"
"I think," Ariel said, diplomatically "we should stick to English authors."
"Right, right, you're very right," she said. "Yes! It will truly be an English Day!"
"OK," Alexander Borisovich interceded. "That's the skits taken care of. Now about the carnival booths…"
"Oh no," Olga said. "We're not finished yet! The children will of course need costumes. We'll need Romeo, Juliet, capes, swords….You can do this, yes, Lily and Ariel?"
I looked at Ariel and Ariel looked at me.
"Costumes?" said Alexander Borisovich. "Costumes, psshh, in my opinion they will not be necessary."
"We'll see what we can do," Ariel said. "Now the booths…"
"I thought, a game," said AB in English. "I don't know how to call it. There are four, heehee, excuse my word, pricks, and you must throw a circle thing, and it touches the pricks, and when you miss you must pay forfeit by speaking something in English, perhaps rhyme or tongue-twister."
"A ring toss," I supplied.
"Yes," said AB. "That. And many games, perhaps geography trivia, questions about England and America, culture, things of that sort."
"In English, of course," said Olga in Russian. "So much better that way!"
"Surely not!" said AB. "English culture – then everyone can play, not just those who speak the best English."
"All right, all right," Olga said. "If you must. Now about rehearsals…"
"No, wait," said AB. "I am trying to remember…Two years we had a game, a very good game. I was a pirate, and I had two women in bondage. With every question the children answered we unwrapped them a little more, first the arms, then…"
"Yes, yes," Olga said, "We'll decide more about games later. But the rehearsals…"
After much haggling, we established that rehearsals would be held for class the following week, and then followed a period of arguing about mundane details, which I tuned out, using my poor Russian as an excuse. At last we were dismissed.
"All this," said Ariel. "By Wednesday? I mean – honestly! Well, at least we have the weekend to prepare."
"Terrible," I said. "That woman is out of her time. She should have organized Pioneer parades for Stalin…But now, if you'll excuse me…"
Pausing only to grab my bag, I caught the 8 PM train and fled to my friends in Moscow, and I didn't think about English Day again until Monday morning.

Life at Camp: Part I

As noted, I had some misgivings about Dubravushka and now I can report that…they were entirely justified. Yet, the difficulties have a certain refreshing unpredictability about them. For instance, I was expecting to be put up in some miserable apartment miles out of town – that's normal. I was not expecting to be escorted up to the top floor of the schoolhouse and handed the keys to an empty classroom. There was a blue couch, several creepy English posters, and a photograph of Queen Elizabeth next to the chalkboard.
My guide, the school secretary, ushered me in.
"Look, it's very good, there is TV – " she tried the TV, but since it was an ultra modern TV with no remote control and no manual buttons, nothing happened. "And radio – " but the radio didn't work.
"Well, best part –" she said, undeflated – "is, other girl teacher never come, so all for you! Very big room!" She stretched out her arms for emphasis.
"Yes," I said, dropping my things on the floor next to a bookshelf. 'Yes, you can definitely say that about it."
"And now, I think, we should go to dining hall. Please, follow me."
We went back downstairs and down the path to a rambling white building close by.
It was quite a pretty campus. 'Dubravushka' has roots in the Russian words for 'oak' and there were oaks everywhere, beautiful spready ones overhanging the paths. Scattered around were white concrete bungalows that served as housing for the children. I was surprised at the size of the camp – it was only 1 or 2 acres total, more like a compound. Adding to this feeling, there was a spiked iron fence all around the perimeter.
I stared at this fence and fought a feeling of irrational claustrophobia. Now that I was in, would they ever let me out? This being Russia, maybe I could bribe a guard?
We went into the dining hall, and here was another surprise – we were going to be fed. Maybe this sounds like a bonus, but I think most adults with their own kitchens would agree with me: it's better to cook what you like, when you like, than be subject to the culinary whims of a stern-faced Slav who pushes across to you, at designated times, a pre-measured portion of whatever she damn well feels like serving, usually something she scraped out of a kettle, or off her shoe, or something.
In this case, it was watery potato soup, with some sprigs of dill floating on top for garnish. For a side, a slab of cold stale bread – no butter, no condiments. And sweet tea.
That's how the meals went at Dubravushka. Soup for lunch, plain mashed potatoes with a small unseasoned piece of meat thrown on top, or plain cold spaghetti topped with a slice of bologna for lunch, and then soup for dinner. Stale bread at every meal. Sometimes a plate of raw cucumbers of tomatoes for veg. It was tolerable. The worst meal was buckwheat kasha, a kind of chemical starch, with something chunky poured over it that in smell and texture resembled nothing so much as hot Alpo. They served this twice a week, on average. Breakfast was OK – cream of wheat, cereal, coffee (Mondays and Fridays only), watery tea the rest of the time. One time they got fancy and created a kind of bitter, leathery cheesecake product with Ѕ c of condensed milk poured over it – this was repulsive and nobody touched it.
I'd like to say that all this was fantastically healthy as well as character-building, but unfortunately, since it was nothing but salt, potatoes, and pasta, I don't think you can take a moral lesson from it. The Russians are just lousy cooks, that's all.

The first week of teaching was exhausting and chaotic. I was teaching eight classes a day, starting at 9 AM and ending at 6:45…80 6 to 10 year olds, a screaming waterfall of children. They all adored me– getting them to come to class wasn't a problem, it was usually harder to chase out the ones who didn't belong – but there were just so goddamn many of them. Ariel taught at the other school, so I could go all day without ever speaking a coherent sentence to an another adult – unless I ran into Alexander Borisovich, our English-speaking administrator liaison. If he spied me crossing campus, he would rush up, rubbing his hands, looking delighted.
"Leely! I'm so glad I run into you! I have such good news! From today – right now – you will teach the 5th class at the other school. So – fourth class primary school, fifth class the high school!"
"But the high school is a quarter mile away," I said, "and I only have a 5 minute break between classes. I'll be late all the time – is that OK?"
"Of course! It is perfectly normal! Great, yes? Brilliant, as our British friends say!"
He was always so excited, and it was never, ever good news – or at least not what any sane person would consider good.
I tried to avoid Alexander Borisovich.