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.
