USFS 2019 — Part 2, Chapter 2
I got back to the government area and had just made it into my room when I heard two sets of feet beelining for my door, their turnover so fast it sounded like a single organism scuttling across the floor with an uneven gait.
Bridger and Ian, two of my fellow seasonals, were outside my door before I could finish commenting that they were like dogs.
“We were taking bets about where you were,” Ian said.
“You must understand this has been a long and suspenseful process for us,” Bridger said.
“I’m confused. Do you expect me to report my hourly activity like I’m on parole?” Although I did err on the side of radical candor when people put me on the spot for details about my whereabouts or anything else, it had been a long time since I’d been in a place isolated enough that it was in my interest to proactively communicate my comings and goings. If ever I didn’t return, these were the first people who’d be approached for information. And even if I felt I had no inherent value, the reality is I was a young white woman. Society had a thing for sparing no expense to recover people who looked like me at the true expense of other missing persons who didn’t. In short, I was in for a lot of changes in behavior that summer, most for the better.
“I mean, no. But you can tell us if one of us won a bet,” Ian said, striding past me and sitting on my bed. He propped himself up on his elbows. Bridger was close behind, but he just stopped and sat up straight next to Ian. “Bridger thinks you went to a cannabis dispensary, and I think you went to a psychic.”
The fact was they both could have been right based on what I knew at the time. While I assumed Tully was credible since she was involved in Ayla’s casework, there was a lot I didn’t know about her. I had no reason to believe there was a legitimate precedent for having an initial consultation with an astrologer that had essentially gone like the first conversation with my old therapist. “Sorry if this bums you out, but you might both be right,” I said. “I met up with a therapist on Marrowstone, who’s also an astrologer. We kind of talked about both things and neither. There’s a ouija board in her office and her neighbors definitely grow cannabis. That’s all I got. Why the hell were you betting on something like that?”
“Because it’s you we like,” Bridger said. He’d readily adopted any excuse to invoke Mister Rogers. Incidentally, Ian, the returning seasonal who should’ve been the most steeped in the bizarre tradition of the three of us, was out on the bit. I would later learn this was not because he was a monster, but because his pop culture knowledge was woefully limited. The telltale evidence of this came, not in his lack of interest in Mister Rogers, but in his total lack of familiarity with Beetlejuice—a depraved condition Bridger and I were immediately made to realize after I mentioned that Tully and I had tried to summon the eponymous character.
Bridger quickly responded by repeating Beetlejuice’s name after me and we waited with bated breath for Ian to say it a third time for naught. I eventually did the honors of saying the name a third time, and turned around for the kitchen to fill my empty water bottle. I heard a muffled “It’s showtime!” from Bridger back in my room before he and Ian rose and followed me downstairs, again as a unit.
“Wait,” Bridger said. We all stopped before I’d even made it to the stairs. “Ian, you legit don’t know Beetlejuice? Well, guess what we’re screening downstairs tonight?” I’d caught on in my first few days on-location that, in addition to the indulgent Mister Rogers references, we were to embrace glorified designations for improvised creature comforts. Thus, the term screener had been assigned to the practice of projecting movies onto a bedsheet in the musty basement of the government area’s group house, affectionately dubbed the Rain Shadow. With that, Bridger jetted past me down the stairs, and out the door before I’d made it down, even with the head start. We could hear his feral call of “Beetlejuice screener at 7! BYOB!” resounding through the gravel lot at the center of all the employee housing structures. A two-level duplex, two trailers, and the Rain Shadow all accommodated seasonals. Ours was the largest of those four. One single-family house further off accommodated the permanent law enforcement ranger and two golden retrievers named Friday and Elaine.
Ian followed me into the kitchen. I could tell he was just pretending to occupy himself by looking in the fridge while I filled my water bottle. “We didn’t mean to put you on the spot,” he said.
“I can’t say I know you didn’t, because I don’t. I’ve known you for exactly one week. But checking in is probably something I need to get in the habit of, so it’s not a big deal. I’ll say that in lieu of saying that I’m catastrophically uncomfortable right now.”
“Why are you catastrophically uncomfortable right now?”
“That’s just how I am. This isn’t verified by the lady on Marrowstone or anything. But based on something I found on the internet when I looked up my birth chart, it’s typical of Sagittarians with their Ascendant in Gemini to present nervous energy. So, I blame the fucking stars.”
“People don’t see that though.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m saying that I don’t think people can tell you’re uncomfortable. If you didn’t come out and say that, I’d have no idea. You’re really sharp and you might not think so, but it comes off as confidence and it’s intimidating. Bridger and I were talking about it before you got home.”
I was in the middle of taking several gulps of water. Before he’d gotten to the second part, I’d already been thinking how nice it must be to be a cishet-presenting white man and think it’s that easy to be confident at feigning confidence without having to lay down your cards. But when he kept going, I felt myself pulling a Pete and consciously ceasing any further activity. “You were just talking about what?”
“I’ve done this job for a few years now and women—especially out in the field—can be hit-or-miss. And you’re really competent.”
I made the mistake of attempting to take a final swig of water while Ian responded and instantly regretted it. Elliott would have surely given me shit for deep-throating the water cock.
The only upside to having to recover from snarfing my water in this case is that it bought me time to decide if what I’d just heard was worth engaging. What was it with this competence barometer? I thought back to my conversation with Tully, when I recalled for her—in hindsight, one of the few times I had for anybody—that my mother was told she had an incompetent cervix. I wasn’t surprised that a male doctor in the late 80s and early 90s could describe a woman’s reproductive organs in terms of competence, as though they were mere functions and not attached to a complex organism with will and autonomy. But here we were, in the 21st fucking century and the competence talking point was still alive and well.
Once I finally stopped coughing, I decided to mostly leave it with Ian. He and I would be up before the sun to leave for a hitch tomorrow—at that, my first hitch. I didn’t want to preemptively sour the mood, so I held back. “I think you mean all that as a compliment, but there’s a lot to unpack there, so I’m just going to leave it.”
Bridger practically danced back in through the door. I had never met an adult male whose resting tenor better matched that of a cartoon character. And yet, here was this whippersnapper named for the southwest Montana range he’d grown up near, fresh out of undergrad, traipsing through the unobtrusive confines of the Rain Shadow as we lived and breathed. I couldn’t help but feel an indeterminate mix of awe and incredulity around him. I felt like David Attenborough witnessing a rare, volatile mammal species deep in a remote jungle. I gave Bridger a wide berth when I could. Not because he was threatening so much as I was maybe irrationally concerned he’d trample me if neither of us paid close attention.
“Hey,” I said as he glided away.
I heard him call back “hey” from somewhere out of sight.
“Did I hear you guys singing ‘Space Oddity’ out the bathroom windows when I woke up this morning? Or did I dream that shit?” My room was near the middle of the hallway on the level that all of our bedrooms were on. There were bathrooms on either end. For an older structure, the house was surprisingly well sound-proofed between rooms. I put it together that their voices had carried from the open windows.
I thought I heard a faint muahaha laugh from Bridger at the top of the stairs.
“You did not dream that shit,” Ian said, now behind me. He’d remained relatively static from his performative fridge rummage, which impressed me only because it felt like we’d gone back in time at least a decade with the whole competence comment.
“But it wasn’t ‘Space Oddity’!” Bridger’s voice carried through the rafters as he’d made it back to the top of the stairs. In short order, I’d understand why neither of these comments were technically misleading. I’m surprised, however, that I wasn’t already more rapt with fascination over the fast alliance that had formed between Bridger and Ian. Had I been, I might’ve had more empathy sooner for them and other men I’d worked with on public lands. In retrospect, I think the unrealistic emphasis on masculinity there and elsewhere hurts men as much as anybody.
