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.