CRATER LAKE

Crater Lake

       A few days after high school graduation in 1961, I got a summer job as busboy in the cafeteria at Crater Lake National Park. The concession company hired mostly college students to work in the cafeteria and lodge. Mr. and Mrs. Griffin, the owners, felt that all those bright young faces were good for business. And we were cheap labor, willing to work six or seven days a week. A majority of the students hired were girls, because most of the jobs had to do with waitressing, maid service, and operating souvenir stands. 

     So there were a lot of pretty, unattached females around. I was eighteen, but still hadn't had much experience with girls. I'd always been really shy around them. Scared might be more like it. But now I was going to college, I had scholarships, I had a job, I was out on my own. This would be my big chance.

     There were two sisters on the staff, so near in age that they often were mistaken for twins. I fell in love with the older sister. She would be a senior in the fall, which made her three years older than me, a huge gap. I didn't care. I thought she was beautiful, but in a relaxed sort of way, with a low, easy laugh that said she didn't take her looks as seriously as many women do, didn't want to taunt you with her beauty. 

     It wasn't hard to get acquainted, on an Ohhello, Iknowwhoyouare basis. All the staff ate in the cafeteria where I bused tables. Employees ate in our own section, and were supposed to bus their own dishes. But we would always cruise the section with our buscarts anyway, to banter with the others. Sometimes if we weren't too busy we'd do somebody a favor, if they were stuck at the end of one of the tables against the wall, and get them a dessert or whatever from the food counter. We had some stature because we controlled the music, and they'd have to ask us if they wanted to hear a certain song. The Ray Conniff Singers were big then, and we all had our favorites. "Harbor Lights" was one of mine. It spoke of parting, of a love more frustrated than realized. Maybe that's what attracted me, the longing to go down to the harbor and depart, in the dark amid strange sounds and smells, for unknown parts of the world, connected to, but not bound by, a love at home. And maybe, after some odyssey that left you scarred but whole, you'd come back and she'd still be there for you. 

     When my secret love would come in I'd think of something to get her to notice me, like making sure the place she wanted to sit was clean. Without crowding her, I'd eavesdrop if she and her friends got to talking about music they liked, and I'd go over and play something I'd heard her mention. If she noticed and smiled in my direction, I'd clean tables like a whirlwind the rest of the day.          

     Sometimes we'd have to stay after closing, clear the cafeteria, and scrub and wax the floor. We’d be lucky if we got done by midnight. Mr. Griffin would give each of us a chit for a meal in the main lodge's dining room for that chore, since it was extra work. Those meals were pretty snazzy - tablecloths, real silverware, wineglasses, the works - and expensive. And there weren't a lot of the chits around. So any guy with a couple of them in his pocket was considered pretty good date material. 

     I saved up two chits and gathered my courage. Normally I wouldn't have had the nerve. She was so beautiful, so grownup - so... well, womanly. But I was feeling like pretty hot stuff. The way that happened was I'd gotten a day off, and since I liked to run, I'd jogged the ten miles around the rim to where the trail went down to the boat docks, and got a ride around the lake on one of the launches operated by a Coast Guard vet for the park concession owners. It was a great day, and when I got back up to the rim it was still before noon. What the hell, I thought, and took a right turn instead of a left. That would take me the rest of the way around the rim, instead of the short way back: a day's run/walk of roughly thirty-six miles instead of twenty. 

     It was wonderful for a while. I'd had lunch and water down at the lake. I was on top of the world, jogging along at 7,000 feet, on a bright day, topping a ridge where the road was a bridge leading right up into the lone white cumulus cloud anointing the blue of the rest of the sky. That lasted a few more miles, then reality set in. 

     Several kids from the staff were hanging out in the lobby of the lodge when I stumbled in, well after dark - feet blistered, badly sunburned, woozy from dehydration and electrolyte depletion. They just gawked at how fried I was. There was quite a buzz about it for a while, about how it was a crazy thing to do, but great that I could pull it off. I was a temporary star in our galaxy.

     I wrapped my newly bolstered confidence around me and went up and asked that dream woman if she'd like to have dinner with me in the lodge dining room. I had two chits. Got 'em for waxing the cafeteria floor, I told her as I proudly offered her the fruits of my hard work. 

     She looked at me for a moment - rather a longer moment for me than for her, I think. I will never forget her look. She smiled. It was, as always with her, a genuine smile. She seemed pleased, and a little surprised, that I had asked. She even seemed to like me, but, I began to sense, in a kid brother sort of way. To this day, I think of the word "bemused" when I recall her look. 

     "No thanks, Dean," she said. "But really, thanks for asking." Damn. The usual class: no phony excuses, just... No, thanks.

     Harold Lawrence, the boat crew chief, had a special presence among us. He was older, all of twenty-six or so. He'd been in the Coast Guard; he'd been around. He drove boats for a living, entrusted with people's lives out on waters that could get dangerously rough, while the rest of us drove buscarts and sold souvenirs. Ashore, he loved his fun, and could kick-start a party by walking into a room. He also carried a certain edge; there was a detectable aura of danger about him at times.

     Women especially seemed to notice him. He wore sunglasses with lenses that curved around to the side to protect the eyes from sunlight glancing off the water, but he still had faint crow's feet at the corners of his eyes, enough to make him look salty but not old. He was always sunburned, and his dark blond hair was bleached and blown about by the wind whenever he came in off the lake.

     I had a pretty serious run-in with Harold. He was sitting in the employee section of the cafeteria, regaling younger workers with some story. He had a few beers aboard; he was feeling his oats and enjoying his status as star of the current show. 

     I came by with my buscart. Harold turned and told me to go get him something from the kitchen. Didn't ask me. Told me. 

     "I'm a busboy, not a waiter, Harold," I said. "Get it yourself." 

     The party was over in an instant. Harold sat and looked at me a long moment. He let that dangerous part of him that we'd only seen hints of come right out through his face. He lifted his chin at me. 

     "Go get it," he said. 

     "No," I said. 

     Everyone just stared at us, staying clear of the sparks. I stood there in front of him, as resolute as I was scared. Still skewering me with his eyes, he finally understood that, however badly I might come out of it, I was ready to go the distance rather than have him order me about like that. He let it drop. Sometime later, he apologized to me, in front of some of the same people who'd been there when it happened. I thought that showed real class.

     Some time after that, and after I had asked the woman for a date to the lodge dining room, I was walking along the hall in the first floor of the lodge, and happened to look in through the door of the cocktail lounge, that exotic place forbidden to eighteen-year-olds like me. She and Harold were sitting opposite each other at a small table, their elbows almost touching. They didn't see me stop for a moment. They didn't see anyone but each other. They weren't all moony and romantic; they were just two intense adults interested in each other. In fact, I thought that she took Harold with a grain of salt, that though she found him interesting, she seemed to have a boundary in place that wouldn't let him too close for too long. Still, I would have given anything, or done anything, to have her look at me the way she looked at him.

     That fall, I entered Oregon State University as a freshman in engineering. I got good grades, my scholarships were renewed, and I was re-hired the following summer, 1962, for my old job at Crater Lake.

     By midsummer I was restless. Crater Lake was a beautiful place, but busing tables wasn't the most adventuresome way to spend a summer. And Oregon State began to seem a less attractive place to go back to. I liked the engineering classes, but there were no women in them, just a bunch of guys like me with glasses and 24-scale loglog split bamboo slide rules. Besides, I had a yen to study foreign languages, or poetry; something that had less to do with things and more with humans. I decided to collect my pay, buy a good bicycle, ride around the Western states with the most beautiful mountains and rivers, and find a new college.     

     The kids on the staff threw a party for me, with a cake that said "Happy Bicycling Dean". I rode down into northern California to visit a buddy in Yreka, then headed back across Oregon to visit my mother in Pasco, just across the line in Washington. My older brother Lance had settled back there after his Army hitch; Mom had taken Darrell and moved back there to be near Lance and his wife and the grandkids, after I graduated from high school.

     South of Lapine, Oregon, the railroad tracks crossed the highway at a sharp angle. My front tire caught in the groove beside one rail; the bike and I went down hard. One crank was bent so badly the bike was unrideable. I went to the library in Bend while I was waiting for a Greyhound to take me and my busted bike to Spokane, up in Washington near the Idaho line. I found a reference book of colleges and universities, and went through all the listings in mountain states, and culled out the ones with strong liberal arts programs. Colorado College sounded best.

     When my bike was fixed, I pedaled east out of Spokane, crossing the Idaho panhandle in a day. That night, I slept in a campground at the base of the long climb to the summit, which was the Montana state line. The next morning I started the long grind, switchback after switchback of steep mountain highway, all in the lowest gears of the 10-speed Raleigh. A freight train was making the same climb, and often the tracks came close to the highway. The engineer and I began to wave to each other; got to be pretty good buddies, in fact. It turned out that the mechanics of his engine and the mechanics of my engine yielded the same average speed all the way up that mountain. So we developed a sign language, encouraging one another, then making fun of the one who momentarily fell behind. This went on for half a day. 

     Finally that freight train and I rolled onto the summit, crossing the Idaho/Montana line together. The engineer leaned out and gave a halfwave, halfsalute, and I was gone. Mileposts, the second hand on my watch, and a brain that was still number-happy from engineering classes, said I was making fifty miles an hour down into the St. Regis River valley. I made it beyond Kalispell, where I got so many flat tires that I couldn't keep moving. Money was running low, and at this rate I'd never make it to Colorado College in time to start school in the fall. I got on a train for Colorado Springs.

     The college was just what I was looking for. The campus was beautiful, the Rockies behind it were beautiful. They studied English and poetry and philosophy and all that good stuff. And there were girls all over the place. But it was a private college, and much more expensive than I could afford. Transfer students couldn't get scholarships in their first year. You had to pay your own way for that year, and if you did well enough, you could apply for scholarships.

     I'd been thinking about getting my military obligation out of the way anyway. I'd rather have gone to college, but didn't have the money to do it the way I wanted to. I told the admissions officer I'd just get the service out of the way, and see him in three or four years. "Fine," he said. I could almost hear "yeah, right" under his breath.