Mid-Season Mentality

This is usually how it goes: 

I wake up to allow time for my hobbies that separate me from the role I must eventually play in the evening.  Breakfast is never worth waking up for.  Liquid eggs, cold potatoes, and chewy bacon await each morning.  It is better to sleep in and miss it altogether.  Around ten o’clock, my ritual begins. 

I start with a bowl of Cheerios and drink two cups of coffee while reading a book in the employee dining room (EDR).  The desert mountain is still cool and replete with morning breezes.  The heat is yet to come. 

With only a minor break between meals, it is time for lunch at 10:45.  The EDR cook frequently gives minimal effort and has a penchant for serving dry chicken, unsalted green beans, and schizophrenic meals in which the options seem borne from a blind-folded dart game.  Sloppy joes and tuna salad.  Roast beef sandwiches and penne pasta with marinara sauce.  There is hardly a soul who cares for his food, and we would gladly wish for him to be given the boot so that we may fend for ourselves.

 

Every now and then he bakes a delicious cookie laden with gooey chocolate and asks everyone what they think, and we cannot help but to tell him the truth.  This occasional treat briefly abates our frustration that this man continues to disappoint us day after day, yet his job somehow remains secure.  Any normal company that desires to make a profit and yearns to keep its employees happy would have fired him for his consistently sub-standard performance.  A teacher who fails to instruct his students would be asked to consider a career change.  An investment banker who frequently costs his company money would be let go.  But a cook who can’t cook still has a job. 

This is the nature of the company we work for:  an unprofessional regime, a sorry excuse for a concessionaire comprised of ladder-climbers with low standards, the burned-out, the bottom of the barrel, immigrants, and the moneymakers who have grown less virtuous and more apathetic.

If the usual EDR cook is off, there stands a chance the meal is appetizing, and I eat to the point of excess, because one must take full advantage of the rarity.  If the usual EDR cook is working, I eat what I can stomach, with my already lowered standards, or opt for a sandwich. 

I sit at a square table surrounded by three empty chairs.  There are many people whose company I enjoy, but there are more people I prefer to avoid.  As far as conversations go, there are three formats.  Gossip:  who got fired for drunkenness?  This person of high authority was seen rubbing the leg of someone of a lowly position.  Complaints directed toward the company accompanied by the necessary commiseration.  Or my preference:  the outdoors. 

Like any job, we swap weekend stories.  For those of us who leave the property during our two days off, we speak of slot canyons, dirt roads, Anasazi ruins, mountain lakes, national parks.  There are some who seek adventure, and there are those who want to seek adventure but for some reason don’t and replace their desires with a friendly form of envy and a list of dreams delayed. 

I started with a list of places I would like to see, and I drove to the vistas, but soon I realized this was doing nothing for me.  What is the point of seeing a place you will not touch or make no exertion to get acquainted with?  I might as well look at pictures online.  Not to mention I was behaving like the tourists I despised.  I made a vow to get dirtier, to challenge myself physically, to up the ante of danger and bravado, to go farther, to explore deeper, to climb, to swim, to paddle, to hike into the remote recesses of the American Southwest.   

          

I try to go as far as I can, driving hours down two-lane roads littered with deer carcasses to reach remote parks and monuments with the hope to find solitude, a sense of euphoria, and a disconnectedness from my weekday self.  These two days are the reason I took this job.  At this point in my life, I want to focus on exploration while my legs are strong, but this comes with a trade-off.

 

The job provides little to no glory, and my week seems like a downer compared to the highs of weekend trips.  I must don my uniform:  polish-able, nonslip shoes that look like army boots, black dress pants, a white shirt with buttons on the collars, and a gimmicky bolo tie.  My cheeks are sheared of their miniscule follicles.  My nametag hangs on the right side of my chest.  Everything must be in order according to those who make and enforce the rules. 

If my name tag were to hang from the left side of my chest or if my tiny facial hairs were to sprout and cast a shadow on my face, the manager would react with anger, as though this were a travesty easily avoided and appropriately dealt with using aggression.  Each time this happens, I want to remind him of his own mortality and the inconsequential nature of his complaints. 

This code of rigidity he is so busy maintaining gives rise to an artificial world that contrasts starkly with the one that exists outside the windows and beyond the parking lot.  How can he see the stratification between us but deny his own desires that we share:  the desire to rid ourselves of this orderliness and to shed our civility to bask in the wild where nothing matters except hunger, warmth, and thirst.

In order to achieve this level of peace in the outdoors, there is a role I must play and political battles to fight.  When the season started, I was enthusiastic and inquisitive with guests.  I would ask them of their vacation plans and their origins, but now I have become hardened and bitter.  I am direct and sometimes emotionless:  a button-pusher going through the motions to expedite an undesirable process.  I deal with only the basics.  Tell me what you want, and I will get it for you.  Like a loveless whore.  And worse, I have become greedy.

The money in the beginning of the year was ridiculous.  There were lines at the door, and tourists spending loads of money.  In a single dinner shift, I could clear three hundred dollars.  If I worked a double, I could make over five hundred.  We all made thousands of dollars with our manners and our fingers and our straining shoulders and our aching legs and our stinking, sweaty feet.  And the best part was:  it was all so easy.

 

If you wanted more money, all you had to do was move faster and connive your way for more shifts and more tables.  Prey on the lazy, or those who have had their fill.  But I always wanted more.  I picked up any lunch shift that anyone wanted to give away.  If someone wanted to leave early, I would take their section and stay late. 

Twenty dollar bills became Monopoly money.  I would go out to eat with friends and pick up the tab, and, although I hate to admit it, it made me feel empowered.  I started paying off my loans aggressively.  I would go on thousand-mile road trips and spend hundreds of dollars in cash and still have plenty left in my stash.  But I was generous too.  Each shift I tipped out my sever assistant much more than the usual amount.  I had enough to eat, enough to make a profit, enough to share and then some.  And all for what:  bringing somebody a plate of food?

 

But then the crowds disappeared, and money wasn’t always so easy to come by.  You had to fight for your money, and I became a hardened individual devoid of my usual sentimentality.  I protested to oust the sixty-five year old server who consistently gets the best section.  I yelled at the hosts for not evenly distributing the guests.  I called a server assistant incompetent for working too slowly.  I accosted the bartender for serving glasses of wine with pieces of cork floating on top.

These were my friends, and I was treating them poorly.  I realized something in me had changed, but my aggressiveness was paying off.  I was still making the same kind of money while others weren’t because of my pestering, conniving, and protesting, but in the process I had made several enemies.

In the dining room, servers with seniority are given the best sections near the windows, despite the fact their skill level may not warrant such a bonus.  I was left in the middle, where nobody wants to sit.  This system based on favoritism has been in place too long, and I could not allow myself to remain quiet and become a victim of the injustice.  I am not accustomed to this villainous role, so at first I was uncomfortable by the uneasiness in which people treated me, as though my presence was not wanted because I am threatening to destroy the order that has been created.

Now my motivation is waning and apathy threatens to overtake me.  I am no longer angry when I see a ten percent tip from a French family who orders a bottle of wine and two steaks.  I don’t wish to be heartless to my coworkers, although often my frustration mounts inside of me to the point where I want to smash a chair over someone’s head.  Instead, I do what I am told and say nothing and walk away in defeat. 

I was only trying to survive, but at the same time I know I have been incredibly selfish.  I have listened to my primal desires and in the process I have betrayed a close friend and angered many of my coworkers.  So now I mostly immerse myself into my book and daydream my weekend plans.  I imagine strange vistas before me:  red and orange rocks protruding from the earth in alien shapes, canyons devoid of humans but filled with wild horses, a silver river carving its way through the stone.  The desert water recedes from this world and into the narrows, a labyrinth of shadows and million-year-old forces that never stop crafting the land.

Stuck

The dirt road curved around the ranches and wound its way up the mountain.  The wheels of my car flung tiny rocks and wafted dust into the air.  The bends in the road were sharp, and the climb was steep enough to make the engine struggle to stay cool enough to function.

As the road leveled off into a sparse forest, a trio of elk bounded across my path and continued grazing.  The skies were a thick and ominous gray, and the air at this elevation was rapidly cooling, despite the midday heat blazing thousands of feet below.  I was blindly following GoogleMaps’ directions in search for the Kolob Canyon of Zion National Park.  I typed in Kolob Canyon, rather than the Kolob Canyon Visitor Center, and the GPS took me very literally, as computers usually do.  It was sending me into the heart of my destination, and by now I had lost cell reception.  I knew this wasn’t right, yet I pressed onward, partly out of the sheer surprise of ending up in such a place and partly due to a lack of places to turn around.

Soon the dirt road turned to mud, and the tires lost their purchase and began to skid and flounder.  Steering grew unsteady.  The brakes became coated with a thick and pasty mud.  I slowed the car to a crawl and weaved into the turns as the car hydroplaned across a set of potholes filled with rainwater.  By this time I knew I was lost, so I found a flat spot to turn around with much difficulty.

  

On the way back toward civilization I tried to build up speed because the car was quickly losing traction and relying purely on dwindling momentum.  Soon I lost control completely as the tires slowed their revolutions and skied over the slippery surface.  I flinched as the car bumped into the muddy embankment.  I pressed on the gas, but there was no movement——only the frustrated whine of the rubber spinning uselessly.  We were stuck.

Megan, Kendyl and I got of the car and inspected our situation.  The others were mildly giddy about the conundrum, but I felt their enthusiasm was borne from their detachment.  This was not their car stuck in the mud, but mine.  I was only slightly frustrated with my irresponsibility for landing in such a position, but I, too, was eager for the challenge of finding a way to get unstuck.  The car is cheap and over twenty years old, so I was not too concerned. Besides, it has always been my intention to run it into the ground.  On this day I was successful, and I thought it was extremely possible this burial in the mud could be its funeral.  The towing alone would probably cost more than the car itself, and I would rather push it off a cliff than pay the fee. 

At first, Megan and Kendyl tried pushing as I pressed on the gas, but a brief experiment proved useless.  The coolant bubbled and smoke hissed from the engine.  I got out of the car again and walked in my slippers until they became caked with mud.  I did not want to ruin both my car and my footwear, so I took off my slippers and squelched my feet in the cold mud.  I walked to the trunk and peered under the car.  The right rear wheel was completely covered in mud.  Pushing would be futile until we dug this thing out.

“Should we start thinking of a backup plan?” Megan asked.

Kendyl suggested calling a friend who was at least two hours away, but she soon realized we had no service.  We were several miles up this road, at least a day’s walk back to the highway.  To the right of the muddy road was a grassy hill that offered an overlook of the valley below.  Megan started up the road to see how far we were from stable dirt and cell reception, and I started toward the overlook to get our bearings.  The grass was soaked, and the water enveloped my feet and numbed them.  I stepped over rusted cans and broken bits of fence and reached an abandoned hermit’s nest.  The view of distant farms offered no solution.

I walked back to confront the quagmire.  I released my frustration by launching rocks into the grass and screaming expletives.  Kendyl was very level-headed, as though this were a game with no real-life consequences.  Megan reported that once we crested this mound we would be back on flat ground and soon would hit the dirt road, if we ever got the car unstuck.  We would all have to work together and think reasonably, or we could have an even more serious dilemma on our hands.  I was determined to drive out of here, so I resolved to embrace this situation. 

I dipped my fingers into the mud and painted lines under my eyes like a quarterback.  I put the emergency brake on and crawled under the car and dug out mounds of freezing mud until my fingers became so numb I had trouble bending them.  I tagged Kendyl in, and she took a turn scooping out the mud.  I needed to make progress and warm my fingers through exertion, so I walked ahead of the car and discarded larger stones that would impede our progress.  Kendyl emerged from underneath the car covered in mud and shivering.  I handed her a blanket and dove under the car to continue digging until I unearthed the wheel.

Kendyl hopped in the driver’s seat while I took my position at the rear.  She rolled the window down, and I yelled that I was ready.  She put the car in drive and stepped on the gas while I heaved.  I planted my feet against the embankment and pushed while my feet slipped in the mud and I wondered if I was making any difference until the car began to teeter out of the divot and rock forward.  One last heave and the car shot out of the ditch and out of my grasp.  I ran to catch up to it and shouted jubilantly.

My spirits were immediately lifted.  I had always used blind optimism and stubbornness to accept any alternative to get out of hairy situations before, but there were moments in which I thought success was impossible.  We still weren’t out of trouble quite yet, as the car began to zig from side to side and became stuck again.  But this setback was minor compared to what we had just overcome.

Megan joined me in the back of the car and pushed as Kendyl stepped on the gas.  As I was straining against the car, I realized what a great teambuilding exercise this was.  What I initially believed was a terrible inconvenience proved to be exhilarating and memorable.  Megan and I pushed against the car which had now gained purchase once more and started moving without our aid.  We both jogged to keep up with the car until it gained too much speed for us.  Megan stepped away and I jumped on the bumper and held onto the fin and rode against the wind as the tires crunched against the gritty earth.  I jumped off the bumper which was now decorated with my muddy footprints and raised my arms and screeched with victory.

Covered in mud, now, we drive down the mountain as the brakes struggle to slow our descent.  Each bend makes me nervous as I consider using the E-brake, but finally the dirt turns to pavement and off we go.  A shorter hike is planned in Zion, and afterwards we must reward ourselves with pizza; finally, a stop at the carwash where I futilely attempt to erase the evidence of my blunder.