It was past one in the morning when I parked outside the maintenance shed out of sight of the base lodge behind a strategically planted screen of evergreens. This was where the tourists weren’t supposed to wander-a floodlighted enclosure of oil-stained packed snow and scattered equipment ranging from snowmobiles to grooming machines to bits and pieces of chairlift paraphernalia, all looking like a dented, scarred, and rusting factory graveyard.
As I crossed toward the shed, hoping to fish casually for information from the night creatures inside, I heard the distinct combination of rattling, roaring, and the high-pitched whine of an approaching big groomer. I stopped and watched an enormous Bombardier round the corner, its lights and oversize flashing caterpillar tracks making it look like a mechanical bug from a futuristic nightmare.
Engine still running, the vehicle stopped outside the building’s double bay doors, and a large, heavy, wild-haired man dressed in filthy insulated coveralls and a mustache the size of a horse’s tail emerged from the cab above the tracks and swung down onto the ground.
“Hey, Max,” he called over to me, using my cover name. “They throw you out of the Butte?”
Bucky Arsenault was one of the chief groomers, a veteran of twenty years or more whom I’d only met a couple of times, and then only briefly, the night and day shifts having different hours and different cultures.
“Threw myself out,” I answered him. “Not my kind of crowd.”
He nodded. “Know what you mean. I don’t even go there no more. What’re ya doin’ up here?”
I shrugged. “Too early to hit the hay. Thought I’d shoot the shit a little with whoever’s in there.”
Bucky looked at me doubtfully. “You know those guys?”
“Nope.”
“Don’t want to. Trust me. Bunch of teenage, dope-smoking losers, if you ask me. You don’t seem the type.” He hesitated a moment and then said, “How soon you want to go to bed? Got a few more hours in you?”
“Sure.”
He jerked a thumb at his noisy rig. “Climb in, then. I’ll show you the real mountain. I just gotta grab something from inside. Won’t take me a minute.”
The Bombardier’s cab was surprisingly new and modern, given Tucker Peak’s overall shabbiness. Seated in a comfortable, upholstered chair, surrounded by sound-deadening glass and faced with a console and steering mechanism reminiscent of a spaceship, I was forced to take the intergalactic metaphor even further when Bucky drove us out of the compound, up the nearest slope like a rocket gathering speed, and straight into the black void of night. Pressed back in my seat, watching the moonscape of contoured snow unfold before the groomer’s powerful lights, I was surprised by how utterly foreign it all looked, how unlike the familiar, placid web of trails I’d observed the first time I’d driven over the access road and seen the mountain spread out before me.
Crawling across the same geography at night as though in a heated cocoon, I found the impression completely different. The ground was misleadingly at odds with my perception of it, looking flat in places where our machine would lurch into a depression or suddenly attack an incline. Trees, chairlift towers, and spindly snowmaking water hydrants-tall and thin like metallic storks surrounded by nests of heavy collision-dampening bumpers-all sprang out of the blackness like colorless specters and vanished with equal suddenness. And through it all, like an electronic conscience rambling about whatever came to mind, the radio on the dash muttered barely audible, nonstop scraps of dialogue.
“Rumor has it you were here before the mountain was,” I said to him, not as loudly as I would have thought necessary, given the roar of the engine outside the cab.
He laughed. “Feels that way.”
“Must’ve seen a lot of changes.”
“Oh, yeah.” He reached under his seat, pulled out a Styrofoam cup and delicately spat a glob of tobacco juice into it. “Started out, we’d groom with homemade tillers pulled by anything that’d work: caterpillars, tractors, whatever. Dangerous and stupid, I guess, and more hassle than it was worth, if you ask me, but it gave the mountain bragging rights and brought in skiers.”
“Bragging about a groomed mountain, you mean?” I asked.
“Yeah. It’s always something: the grooming, the number of trails, the snowmaking percentage, the extra-attentive employees. Now it’s fast quads for chairs, slope-side condos, and a lot more non-skiing stuff. That’s why they built the nightclub and’re shootin’ for a golf course and that hotel, lucky for you.”
“I don’t mind the work,” I said.
“Well, you’ll always get it at a mountain resort, all the way to when they declare bankruptcy. Just how the business works. It’s like building a house of cards-you only stop going when the whole thing falls down.”
An artificial snowstorm sprang into our lights without warning, sparkling like a meteor shower. Underneath it was a fresh mound of sugary snow as tall as a house. Bucky stopped his machine shy of the actual downpour. He keyed the mike and exchanged a few quiet words with someone. Almost instantly, the snow stopped and a bundled-up, apelike creature in a hard hat and wearing several white reflectors sewed to his clothing appeared on a snowmobile-a “sled” to its users-and careened recklessly in our direction, coming to a halt beside Bucky’s door.
He opened it up to the cold night air and waited for the man to clamber up onto the treads beside him. Wind and noise filled the small cabin.
“Thought you were supposed to be done up here,” Bucky said.
Only by the cab’s interior light could I see that the white reflective tape on the snowmaker’s uniform was actually bright yellow, yet another illusion created by the Bombardier’s harsh lighting.
“Don’t get your shorts in a twist,” he answered. “You can have at it right now. Goddamn cheap-piece-of-shit nozzle froze up on me. Screwed up my schedule all to hell. It ain’t as much as the boss wanted, but she can fuck herself if she can figure out how.”
Bucky laughed. “Linda’s the best boss you’ll ever have, man or woman. You just don’t know what you’re doing out here.”
The man swatted him on the arm. “Fuck you and this bucket of bolts. Some of us’re doing men’s work out here, not running a taxi service. Who’s your fare?”
Arsenault didn’t even look at me. “Lambert-carpenter-new guy. I’m showing him the scenery from the best seat in the house.”
The snowmaker leaned across and spoke to me directly. “Anytime you want to get away from this bunch of pussies, let me know. You won’t know mountain work till you spend a night with us.”
I gave him a thumbs-up. “You got a deal.”
The man jumped down, fired his sled up, and raced away. Moments later, dragging a snow gun still attached to its length of hose, which whipped back and forth like a lassoed anaconda, both man and machine slithered into the night, the sound of his machine’s high scream drowned out by the Bombardier’s steady rumble.
Bucky dropped the wide plow ahead of us and began the complex task of spreading out the enormous pile of artificial snow, talking all the while.
“Very crude bunch, snowmakers. You might want to watch out before you accept that invitation.”
I studied his profile, unable to read his expression under the huge mustache, and then decided to take a chance. “Isn’t that where you started out?”
He laughed. “We were all gentlemen back then. Never used such language.”
“Oh, right. I really believe that.”
“Yeah,” he conceded, laughing. “I’m too old to make snow now, but I did love it. Almost makes you feel like God.”
I let a moment’s silence elapse before asking him, “You said the resort’s doing more and more non-skiing stuff. Any resentment there from the employees-against all the fat cats moving in with their toys and money?”
He cut me a quick look. “You writing a book?”
I realized my mistake. “Maybe just talking about myself,” I said to cover. “I been out of work for months. I come in here, see all the fancy cars, condos, and cash being kicked around. Kind of pissed me off.”
Again, it was the wrong choice of words. His expression displayed a deepening suspicion. I began thinking I was more tired than I’d thought.
“What d’ya want?” he asked me. “You’re gettin’ some of it. I pick up a communist or something?”
I ducked in another direction, feeling increasingly off balance. “Shit, no. But I heard cops were asking about a bunch of burglaries-talk they might’ve been inside jobs. Made me wonder what was up.”
Luckily, he followed my lead and got me out of trouble. His voice became sad and his demeanor philosophical. “Yeah, you’re right,” he conceded. “Shouldn’t be so sensitive. Old guy like me lives in the past too much.” He waved a hand at the void around us. “All this used to be about skiing, and maybe breaking even, if you didn’t pay yourself much. I don’t know where you’re from originally, but I was born in New Jersey. Came up here as a kid whenever I could, did anything they asked me just so I could ski. We were all like that-ski bums working for peanuts and day passes. You ate, slept, skied, got laid if you were lucky, worked when you had to, and skied again as soon as you could.”
He shook his head, repeating, “But you’re right. That’s all gone and buried. Now it’s a rat race like any other, maybe worse since this is a one-company town, like the lumber camps a hundred years ago. I heard about those burglaries-made me sick. That’s why I snapped at you just now, all that bullshit about us against them. But that’s the way it really is. I’m just kidding myself-maybe some of the employees are ripping off the condos.” He paused before adding, “Everything’s gotten upside down, like with those protesters that’ve been in our face the last few days. We used to be the ones wearing the white hat-good for the economy, good for unemployment. Back then, people knew that cutting ski trails opened up a more diversified environment. All sorts of animals started campin’ out here because of that combination of slope and forest. Now we’re just nature killers.”
Throughout all this, we’d been crisscrossing the wide trail, spreading the proud snowmaker’s artificial product as if it had suddenly appeared from heaven. The ironies and contradictions of Bucky’s dilemma were just as palpable and confusing.
“Not that I think they’re totally off base,” he added as if I’d challenged him. “It’s gone way beyond cutting down a few trees. I can’t say the TPL, or whatever, are wrong about using water the way we do. It looks okay to us, but what do we know? Or care? We’re not talking skiing anymore. It’s just about money.”
He abruptly stopped his machine and twisted around in his seat to stare at me. “I changed my mind. You’re not a writer. You’re a goddamn shrink. How’d you get me to say all this shit, anyhow? I was a happy man before I met you.”
I looked at him, slightly at a loss. He was right about my being subversive, after all, even if he had my profession wrong. It made me feel like I’d robbed him of something irreplaceable.
Happily, he then reached across and punched my shoulder. “Lucky thing I don’t give a good goddamn, huh?” And he burst out laughing.
But I wasn’t so sure. What he had laid out in his rambling, curiously effective way had struck me as a parable for many of society’s ills, far beyond this small, struggling commercial enclave. And his final ambiguity about what it all meant and where it might be heading struck a deep, resounding chord.