I'll admit it. Major blog fail on my part here. I swear I have like three posts just sitting in limbo waiting for me to edit them. Someday I will edit them and send them out into the interwebs but they just aren't ready yet. Rather than focus on fixing those however, I am going to forge ahead and pretend like it hasn't been since May 17th that I've written a blog.
So here I am. Its been a month since I arrived in Glacier National Park after a 27 hour bus ride and 4 hours of being forgotten in Kalispell. Honestly it feels like I've never been anywhere else but here. Its reached that point where the real world feels like a dream and I can't imagine doing anything but this.
I'm sitting here now, trying to think of how to describe all of this for you and I'm faltering. Maybe if I start with basics the rest will follow. I work five days a week here; breakfast, lunch, dinner or some combination of those. Breakfast is by far the worst since I can never go to sleep early enough to make up for a 6:00 am start. Especially since there is always something more fun than sleep going on here. Dinner is supposedly the hardest shift because its the busiest but I often find its my favorite. The restaurant is under construction at the moment which means we work in a makeshift dining room combined with the bar. Guests are angry and management is a mess, but my co-workers are awesome and that usually makes up for all the problems. It feels like waitressing bootcamp here, I have never waited on so many tables at the same time. My second night working dinner I was in the bar; there was no one until 6:30 and then I had about six tables at once. I freaked out. After that though, I learned to watch my co-workers. I'm the youngest of the servers here, these women and men around me have more skills and more experience then I can possibly imagine. They are badass servers and I'm trying to learn as much as I can in the short time I'm here.
Weekends here are spent hiking. Period. This past week is the first that I've spent not out on the trails and I feel like I let the park down. Since my arrival here a month ago I've climbed two mountains and hiked over fifty miles. I have seen big horn sheep wander right past us as we ate lunch on our climb up Mount Alton, watched as mountain goats scale rocky cliffs (and meander right past the our dorm as we hang out on the deck), sunbathed while a bear and three cubs cross below us on the road, and stopped as a moose chewed on some scrub brush right off the corner of the trail. I love that this is what I do on my days off. I can wake up homesick and hungover, ready to call my parents and head back to Minnesota, but then head outside to join my friends in a day long climb to the summit of a mountain where the vistas look like movie posters, and all I can do is swear that I will never leave here.
The nightlife here is... well, nothing like I've ever experienced before. We party all the time. Monday, Wednesdays, Thursdays, Sundays. Each day is someone's "weekend." About a week into my arrival here, our employee rec room, known as "the pub" opened. Since then we've had dance parties, movie nights, themed parties, birthday parties, 'oh hey we got kicked off the porch so lets go to the pub and keep drinking' parties... the nightlife here is unstoppable. After coming down with a brutal cold last week, I've finally mustered up the ability to put myself to bed on nights that I need to. Other people here are still going strong, up late and drinking every night, but most of us have a hit our respective walls and have been forced to take care of our bodies more. Working an eight hour shift on two hours of sleep is not something I want to do again.
The rest of our spare time when we aren't working, hiking, or in the pub is spent hanging out on the porch. On days like today when the weather is disgusting I feel at a loss for what to do. From the porch we see everyone heading up or heading to their day at work. Conversation is easy to make here and no one is unwelcome. My favorite days have been days where I thought I would go back to my room to write an email or watch a movie and instead I've spent four hours sitting in the sun on the porch just chilling with people.
The people here are incredible. I say this because I have never met anyone like them. Its hard to describe the type of personality that is drawn to seasonal work but it is a personality. The first few days I worried that I wouldn't fit but then slowly realized that fitting in isn't really what happens. We are all we have here. Guests don't understand the way we experience the park or the work that we do. We have no phone service and internet is limited. Very few of us would be friends outside of Many Glacier, but we are friends because of Many Glacier.
Being here has made me rethink my future plans. Before heading out here, I was dead set on grad school. And I still am. Except that, if I don't get into the schools I'm looking at applying to in the coming year, I know what I'm going to do. I'm going to the Florida Keys for the winter and beginning my next few years as a seasonal worker. These are jobs for a rambling soul, for people not ready to grow up, for people who are connected to many places at once.
That's all I can explain for now. I'll try to keep writing. Here I've had the best and the worst of days, highs and lows and inbetweens. What I know for sure is that after this, I won't be the same.
