A Village

This place is a village except we have more than one idiot.  All of us——waiters, managers, housekeepers, repairmen, gift shop and front desk employees——work, eat and live together.  Everything is centered upon the Lodge at Bryce Canyon, which is operated by Forever Resorts.  Inside lies the hotel front desk, the gift shop, the restaurant, the employee dining room, and an auditorium where the rangers host lectures about geology or the night skies.  The employees live in four dormitories which are located a walkable distance from the Lodge. I live in the Knotty Pine Lodge, and my commute to work consists of a thirty second walk.

 

My room is basic.  On my side of the room, I have a single bed, an armoire, a desk, a lamp, and a small TV in front of the window.  If I do a push-up, my head almost brushes against my armoire and my feet touch the door.  Cell service is spotty, but it exists.  The Internet is fast enough to send emails but slow enough to occasionally buffer Netflix.  I put maps of nearby national parks on the wall to motivate me to explore.  Despite its small size, the room has a coziness that I find welcoming.

I lucked out because my roommate is normal and considerate.  He is a waiter from Nevada who works mostly breakfast and lunch.  I exclusively work evenings, so we are rarely in the room at the same time.  My roommate has worked here for two years, and he has returned primarily to save as much money as he can.  The season here lasts eight months, and he takes four months off to travel.  Last year he went to Japan and spent a month outside of Tokyo and lived in a cheap hotel.  His objective is to disappear while on vacation, but while he is here at Bryce he is a work-horse who picks up shifts on his days off.    

The laundry room is across the hall from me.  Both the washers and driers are free.  The communal bathroom is next door.  There are four showers, one urinal, and two stalls.  Two toilets are broken, but that hasn’t deterred people from using them.  Some of the men in the dorm are disgusting, but I have never held high expectations for the cleanliness of men who choose to live in remote places.  For the most part, the accommodations are fine, but it is always surprising to find that multi-million dollar companies are not always so quick to give the workers basic tools to live and work in comfort.  Even something as simple as ordering a new iron can go through so many bureaucratic hoops and take weeks to solve.

I realize my situation could be worse.  Employees in other dorms such as Whispering Pines have to share a single bathroom with three or more roommates.  Those dormitories are farther away from the Lodge and accessed by a dirt trail through a patch of woods.  The rooms there are larger, but neighboring rooms share a single bathroom, and I have heard this leads to several problems.  I have heard of roommates creating shower schedules, and some of my coworkers are so frustrated they have considered moving out.  One guy I know prefers to live in a tent when the weather is warm.  I have never had to wait for anything in the communal bathroom, which is shared by at least fifteen men in a single dormitory.  I usually shower in the late morning when no one else is in there, and most people are at work.

Our meals are served in the employee dining room, which everyone abbreviates as the EDR. There is a staff of cooks who primarily prepare meals for the employees, and we don’t even have to wash dishes.  Three dollars a day is taken out of our paychecks to pay for the food.  When I lived in Pittsburgh, I would spend on average $200 a month on groceries, and I would invest an average of four to eight hours per month traveling to and from the store. 

While working a seasonal job, I never have to worry about buying groceries unless I want a particular snack, and I reduce my food expenses by half. The food is surprisingly delicious.  There is the usual Taco Tuesday fare, but we have also eaten steaks, shrimp, pizza, pasta, and we are promised a monthly lobster dinner. In addition to food costs, waiters have to pay ten dollars a day for living expenses, which cover utilities.  My living expenses total $390 a month, a sum I can make in two to three days. 

The work is easy.  I am scheduled five or six days a week, and I clock in at 4:15 PM each day.  I wear a white button-up shirt, black pans, a black apron, and a string bolo tie, a popular Western substitute for the neck or bow-tie.  For opening duties, I may have to slice a few lemons, pour oil into cruets, or polish some forks, but nothing that takes longer than fifteen minutes.  I stand around and wait for people to come in, and they usually come in all at once. 

I balance a workload of five to seven tables.  I take the orders and punch them into the Micros POS system.  When my entrees are up, the expediter buzzes my pager, and I run the food.  At the end of the night, my sidework takes about ten minutes, and I am usually finished by 11:00 PM with an extra $150 to $200 in my bank account.  I hardly break a sweat and usually don’t feel as though I have done much work at all except try to get people to like me so they’ll leave me twenty percent, and so far I have been successful in portraying myself as a friendly and helpful person worthy of an appropriate tip. 

Most guests who come into the dining room are already in a positive mood because they are in a beautiful place, or they may be cold and hungry but they know this is just about the only place miles around where they can eat a decent meal and warm up.  I try to be precise with my timing, genuine with my interaction, but most importantly I try to mentally detach myself from the stressful pitfalls of job and the drama that arises from living and working alongside the same people for month after month.

Most people who accept jobs in far-flung places are down-to-earth and peaceful.  They come here to be outside, to explore a few trails in the wilderness, and to read a few books in a hammock.  They are comfortable in strange environments many would find challenging due to the remoteness and unreliability of technological comforts.  Seasonal jobs are transient and extremely lucrative, but they also require less individual responsibility when it comes to caretaking.  We are out in the middle of nowhere, so some people think they can act like fools.  For these reasons, this type of work can also attract weirdos, the socially dysfunctional, the irresponsible youth, drunks, and the workaholics who become mentally unhinged.

I have witnessed and heard stories of coworkers coming into work intoxicated at nine in the morning or one in the afternoon.  Breakfast cooks burnt eggs that were supposed to be over easy because they were hammered. One cook this year chugged half a bottle of vodka before work and stunk of liquor every shift.  She was fired after three days.

There is another group who seek to take advantage of their youth and those who continue partying to convince themselves they aren’t getting older.  On their days off, they drive four hours through the night to Vegas and blow their money on booze.  There was a young Portlandian girl prone to uncontrollable emotional freak-outs who went berserk during such a trip.  I have seen her crying in the EDR and smashing the table with her fists and screaming ironic phrases like, “That’s not a reasonable way to behave!”  Apparently she bumped into a waitress, and the waitress called her a bitch.  I imagined her seeking revenge by stabbing the waitress with a chef’s blade and thought the possibility was all too likely.  Fortunately, the girl quit and bought a plane ticket back to Oregon.

Then there are the high-strung and the overworked.  Last year the Food and Beverage director had a stroke because he was working seventy hours a work without giving himself a day off. He is a short, farsighted man with a friendly demeanor.  He is very businesslike at first but once he is comfortable he boasts about his previous successes running restaurant chains like Applebee’s.  When he is all too comfortable, he salivates over the prospect of winning millions of dollars in the World Series of Poker. 

The front of the house manager is a southern belle with endless charm, but she is burned out from working in restaurants for decades and this job offers little respite.  Managers have to devote so much office time dealing with scheduling and paperwork regarding tour groups, and they have to spend so many hours on the dining room floor. I mostly see her occupying herself with physical tasks like emptying hampers of dirty linens, and I don’t blame her.  After working so many consecutive twelve-hour days, I, too, would occupy myself with something that couldn’t ask for my help.

Fortunately, not everyone is overly responsible or too irresponsible.  I have quite a few normal coworkers who are here because the money is easy and plentiful, and they enjoy exploring national parks.  There are a few girls who bus tables even though they have college degrees.  They’re taking time off to discover where they want to go.  Unlike most seasonal jobs I’ve had in the past, however, there are many locals who drive to work from nearby towns, and they are older than most seasonal employees.

 

Two sisters——I’ll call them Elle and Kay——live in a nearby town called Henrieville that has a population of roughly 220 people according to a 2013 census.  They have been working at Bryce Canyon for over twenty years.  Their thinning grey hair and wrinkled temples signify to me they are approaching in their sixties.  They are the de facto leaders.  They create the floor plan and answer any questions new hires might have.  The manager doesn’t fight with them because they make her job easier. 

There is a host who is old enough to be my great-grandma, and there’s a group of waiters older than my parents.  Then there are transplants:  a man from the Virgin Islands and a man from the border of Germany and Lithuania have decided to live in the boonies of southern Utah.  Since there are so few jobs in this area, locals are willing to commute because this offers the best money around.  Most of them have been working here since I’ve been in high school.  I’ve always thought of waiting tables as a young person’s game and a transitional and temporary position, but this has proved me wrong.  I am the youngest server and find myself in the minority.

Finally, there are the J1’s, a nickname given because of the visa they must obtain to work in the US.  Each company seems to hire from different countries, and so far the company has hired at least five young women from the Philippines who work as server assistants, hosts, and housekeepers.  It is early yet and most of the foreigners don’t arrive until May.  They don’t complain as much of the American workers even though they work harder at less-profitable jobs.

    

When I clock out after my shift and say goodbye to my coworkers, I walk outside into the frigid night and find blackness all around me.  Light from the stars poke through the clouds, and the wind howls and sweeps the snow from the branches of the pine trees.  We are living at eight thousand feet elevation, and the mountain air is thin and dry.  A short trek up the stairs to my dorm leaves the unadjusted short of breath.

The dormitory.

Less than a mile away beyond the warmth of my room lies the orange pinnacles of Bryce Canyon, a beautiful oddity in the landscape created by erosion and flash floods.  Because of those ancient forces and those carved rocks, a commercial enterprise has been established here.  The canyon attracts visitors who want to see a land different than their own, and they need a place to eat and sleep.  The canyon is the reason the prices are high, and we can make money.  We are all here due to a geologic outcome most of us don’t fully comprehend.  From this a village with its own varied landscape is created.

Seasonal Work

“The last manager there went mental,” the current manager says.

I am sitting in a dining room with people I barely know.  Before me on the table is a menu I have never seen.  Each table has a number, and the empty chairs will soon be filled.  The season begins in a few days.

“That’s what this industry can do to you,” the manager says.  

She has prominent cheekbones and a southern accent of a country singer.  Her straight, blond hair brushes against her shoulders.  This isn’t the first audience she has spoken in front of.

“My husband and I ran a restaurant, and when our last daughter graduated from high school, I said, let’s sell the place. I want out. This is killing me.”

She vowed never to work in a restaurant again, and here she is leading one.  I have said those words before, but I am sitting here, too, about to start another restaurant job in some far-flung place where people need to eat. I am working at the Lodge at Bryce Canyon and living in a dormitory less than a hundred yards away from both the restaurant and the orange hoodoos of this desert mountain in southern Utah.

Most people I know don’t consider waiting tables to be a real job, but instead a form of purgatory.  From their view, I am a waiter waiting for my youth to end.

The job is easy.  I ask people what they want to eat, and I bring it to them.  In the process, I hit a few buttons on a computer, and I act nice to strangers so they give me their money.  Although each task is no more difficult than opening a bottle of wine, the process can get complicated. 

The rhythm of the shift is unpredictable, and the workload, crammed into a tight time-window, requires one to be level-headed and efficient at multi-tasking.  There is a physicality to it:  lifting trays, weaving through tables, kicking doors open.  And then there is the performance:  using a friendly tone with assholes and pretending to be sorry for something that isn’t your fault.  To deal with this, I compartmentalize my emotions and manage my expectations.

Among the public there is an endless deluge of the stupid, the needy, the ten percent tippers, and the guests who say they’re ready to order yet struggle to finalize the decision while you wait in agony. When I ask people why they work in housekeeping, most of them say they don’t like people.  When discussing the human race it is best to be more specific.  It’s not that I hate people.  There’s only a few that I like.

At resorts and national parks, waiters often make the most money of all the employees.  I cannot think of any other entry-level position that pays more than upper management.  I make more money than my boss, and I know that doesn’t make sense, but it’s a fact that should be taken advantage of.  There is no ladder worth climbing in the food and beverage industry.  Waiting tables can be a cause of shame for someone with a college degree, but making $200 in five hours, night after night, will quiet your mind.

 

With a little bit of flattery and exertion of the legs, you could save thousands of dollars each year, live in a beautiful wilderness, travel the world, and still have money to take month-long vacations. You may want to do more with your life, but for now this influx of cash and abundance of free time is enough to off-set the pressure of chasing that professional image that is expected of you. In this country we measure success in square footage, not in miles traveled unless they're attached to an airlines credit card.

The traditional trajectory leads toward a career that allows one to afford a house in which to shelter a family.  I want that someday, but when I make that choice I want to be ready to say goodbye to the possibilities my life could have been.  If I sign a lease and work my way up in a company, I am more than likely bound to one spot for a while.  I could take short weekend trips and plan a two-week vacation, but that could get expensive.  Seasonal work allows you to go wherever you want and to live in a place that most people can only afford to visit for a few days.  This is a job for the young, the empty-nesters, the divorced, and the middle-aged wanderers who don’t want to establish roots. 

For some, this is an escape from real-world responsibilities like doing your dishes or paying your electricity bill.  Certain companies deduct fees for accommodation and meals directly from your paycheck.  My coworkers cook my every meal, and the dishwashers clean up afterwards.  Each month I pay less than four hundred dollars for room and board——a price for rent that is hard to come by in most places worth living.

For others, this is a new experience akin to freshmen year in college where neighbors knock on each other’s doors to make plans.  The work is lucrative but, it can become mind-numbingly monotonous.  I refill my motivation by venturing far away from the job to a place so natural and remote that it knows no commodities.

For many, this becomes a way of life.  Drifters and travelers bounce from park to park for whatever reason impels them whether it is restlessness or wanderlust. 

I don’t have an enormous salary, a title that demands respect, or even a car with a functioning air-conditioner, but I know many places whose value remains only intrinsic.  The job is secondary to exploration.  So I am sitting here with a new menu in front of me and a trail of broken promises behind me. 

Even though I have told myself I want out of this industry, I will be taking orders, stacking entrée plates on a tray, and setting that food down in front of somebody who makes more money than me but with far less vacation time. I am waiting tables to hike into the canyons of the American Southwest, to gaze upon Anasazi ruins, to see the Milky Way with my naked eye, and to ensure that I can say to myself I tried to see as much as I could before it was too late.     

Panguitch, UT

I am eating breakfast in a diner in Panguitch, Utah.  The booth cushion sinks unevenly under my weight.  Four placemats each depicting a map of southern Utah are arrayed on the table along with an arsenal of sauces and sweeteners.  A hefty waitress with a graying ponytail is making jokes about how empty the place is.  Booths along the window offer views of the road and the gas station across the street.  A few seats in front of me and to my left is a bar with backless stools.  It is not a bar for drifters to lurk or for friends to share a drink.  It is a bar suited for locals who order the usual and read the newspaper and drink coffee that is poured without a word from the waitstaff.  This is a place for hardened routines.

While the waitress converses with the only other guest in the restaurant, I wonder how she makes enough money to pay her rent.  Living here must not be expensive, and I don’t feel I need to ask around to verify this.  If rent was steep, then nobody would live here.

“When do you leave?” the waitress asks the other diner.

“Saturday,” he says.

“You’ll have the nice waitress then,” she says and then announces her work schedule before revealing her coworker’s past.

This other waitress who is not present used to live in Phoenix but moved here years ago with her husband.  They raised a daughter who went to school around here.  She divorced her husband but stayed in the area to be with her daughter.

“Panguitch was a culture shock for her at first,” the waitress says.  “It’s a culture shock for anybody.”

The other diner laughs out of politeness and a lack of response.

“This place is so backwards you ought to set your clocks back a hundred years,” she says.

The other diner makes a joke about daylight’s savings, pays his bill and heads toward the exit.

“Have fun at Bryce,” the waitress says.

The bell rings as the door opens and the cold wind sweeps into the foyer.  The diner leaves, and a trio of older men enter.  They sit in a booth to the left of me.  I can see a white-haired man wearing a camouflage vest.  Another man is wearing a cowboy hat, and he says he’s buying.  I cannot see the third man without craning my neck, so I do not look over my shoulder because I already feel out of place. The waitress calls them kids when she takes their order.  She recedes into the kitchen, and I hear her yell out an abbreviated order to the cook. 

The man in the cowboy hat pulls out his smart phone and says, “I killed him up there on that rock.”

“Well, I’ll be darned,” says the white-haired man.

He plays a video on his phone, and I can hear accented voices and the wind blowing and somebody mentioning a good kill. They were hunting deer.  The man in the cowboy hat plays the video again and then puts his phone away.

“Boy, your photography skills sure are gettin’ better,” the white-haired man says.  

“I always got the thing on me.”

In this backwards town where you could set your clocks back a hundred years, here sit three men sharing a kill filmed on a smart phone.  Although this town only has one stop-light, it is still tethered to the vast network of bustling places whose people often move so quickly they don’t consider the existence of towns like Panguitch. Every town starts out this small until enough people like it so that others want it, too.  Some were born here and know no other life.  They like the quiet in the winter when the snows fall into the orange canyons and cover the mountaintops. Others end up here accidentally and find obligations to stay despite their desire to leave.

I sip my mediocre coffee and watch the diner fill up with locals and travelers. A couple ventures in, and the man says he doesn’t need to see the menu.  After he asks the waitress for an order of pancakes, he greets another man sitting on a barstool, and they talk about fishing holes they used as kids. 

A European couple sits in the booth in front of me.  The woman seems tentative to touch anything as though it will poison her.  The man orders two grilled cheese sandwiches with an accent I cannot place. It is clear that the woman would rather be somewhere else, but there is nowhere else to go for miles at this time of day.  She sits here reluctantly.

A fat man waddles past me as the waitress drops off the cheese sandwiches for the Europeans.

“If my wife doesn’t pay for the bill,” he says to the waitress, “make her wash the dishes.”

The waitress laughs and says she’ll be sure to do that.  The European couple eats quickly, and the man places a fifty dollar bill on top of his check.  A Hispanic family wearing burnt-orange Texas gear take up two big tables in the back, and now the waitress is busy.  The European says he is ready to pay.

“I’ll be with you in just a moment,” the waitress says from behind the bar.  She is brewing another pot of coffee while eating and talking casually to a man I assume is her boss.

“I say what I think,” she says with a mouth full of food.

She moves through the dining room while chewing her food and picks up the payment for the Europeans and my credit card as well. She returns with my card and tells me to sign the merchant copy and tells me to have a good day while clearing my plates off the table.  I finish my cup of coffee and the Hemingway novel I had been reading.  I don my coat and head out the door and into the parking lot.

Before I start my car, I screw in my GoPro onto my dashboard mount and film a video while driving through Panguitch.  The town consists of two intersecting roads that feature at least five gas stations, a few motels, a coffeehouse, a burger joint, and an auto repair shop.  I turn left at the single stoplight and pick up speed as I leave the town behind. 

Along the highway flows a creek that glistens silver when the sun strikes the white water trickling through the rocks. The land is dotted with ponderosa pines, and patches of snow are scattered in the grass.  A rusted tractor embedded in the soil is turning into a fossil. I watch as the forested slope gives way to the orange spires of Bryce Canyon.