A LADY WALKS INTO A PUB

A Oregonian, An Arizonan and an Indonesian met in a bar…….happens all the time in Yellowstone’s employee pub. I visit the pubs a reasonable amount. Besides all the Ranger talks, the bingo night and coming up soon the trivia night, there’s nothing much to do at night at Mammoth.  TV is nonexistent (except in the pubs); internet is so slow watching a giant sloth move a few inches takes even more time than usual on Hulu or Netflix. But one thing Yellowstone’s nights have that is rare everywhere else is the world is an international employees’ pub.

There are actually two pubs at Mammoth Hot Springs. In either pub, unlike most other pubs in America that are not in airports, you will meet an amazing array of people from all over the world. The public pub, the one I call the ‘big persons’ pub’ which is a little ageist I admit, is right off the Mammoth Dining Room, on the first floor of my dorm building. There Patrick, a Buckeye from Ohio, or Jessica from Houston, both young but already proficient at bartending, will pleasantly pour you a decent cabernet in a real wine glass. (Side note - Ive never white-water rafted with one of my bartenders before. Such a pleasant raft down the Gallatin, Patrick!)

This public pub, called The Lounge in rather large letters on the side of the building, is all low tables and comfortable seating with a foot rest at the bar and mirrored glass to reflect the bottles of Courvoisier and Ketel One. The visitors staying at Mammoth’s main lodge are paying tidy sums for rooms without a phone or TV or even bathrooms in most cases. They expect a pretty decent selection of good alcohol. When I’m really tired of Moosedrool (the Missoula microbrew not the real thing) or another even more local microbrew, I go to the big people’s pub for a glass of decent cabernet or merlot and to talk with visitors from all over the world.

The employees’ pub is pretty stark but clean, which is made possible by the cracked tile floor. It’s in an old building tucked into employee housing (my ‘hood) sandwiched in between two dorms which usually have their fair share of young employees. The pub has a couple pool tables, a TV pretty much constantly turned to sports channels, a juke box and a pretty decent if limited selection of local microbrews at good prices.

Forget drinking the wine. Long experience tells the pub managers that most of the employees going there regularly are either sports fans or younger employees who haven’t developed a taste for wines costing over $5 a glass. PBR is a favorite beer in this crowd.

Even at the employees’ pub you are reminded how limiting our dependency on only one language can be. I’m always afraid those young people from Russia are telling great stories (don’t Russians tell really great stories? Think Dostoyevsky or Solzhenitsyn) about a mother bear and her twin cubs. Xanterra employees mostly come from all over the United States but there are still quite a few that come from abroad. Working at Yellowstone is a pretty safe transition for a young foreigner with limited English skills. Most young Americans are open and friendly and are glad to share their taste in beers with the kid from Slovenia or Russia or Ecuador.

I find the location of two pubs, one pretty much directly beneath me and one just a few steps away, irresistible. Location, location, location.  I don’t even need a designated driver – ever. I also find the wide range of people in both pubs to be fascinating.

And for this crowd, the pubs here at Mammoth function like I suspect the pubs in small towns in the US and all over Ireland – a meeting place for friends and ideas. The Park is smart to make sure that in addition to the employee rec center, a pub is available for employees. It’s really not about the job for most of us.  It’s about the Park. Most of us don’t have a ‘home’ unless we define it as the Park itself. We need a place to hang out and talk.  What do we talk about? The Park, of course. The animals, the birds, the wetlands, the activities, the stupid tourists who get way too close to Mama Elk or Brother Bison.

Last night I met a botanist at the employee pub who is monitoring Yellowstone wetlands for the Park Service. He's worked seasonally in the Park for years to get the position he currently holds. He is pretty typical of the cadre of Xanterra and Park seasonals who work here during the summer, perhaps at another Park during the winter or perhaps back home doing odd jobs, working ski patrol or anything else they can just in order to be back again next year. Sometimes they get lucky enough to get a full-time job like him in the Park. If they don’t, they’ll be back next year because living in the Park is what they do and what they dream of doing fulltime.

Living in the Park means you are a member of an elite subculture not inclined to think about Martha Stewart but rather Mother Grizzly.  Many employees would think it silly to be rapturous over new wine stems but deem it perfectly normal to wax on and on and on about an eaglet hatching. It doesn’t matter that everything you own fits into the trunk and backseat of your car – as long as there is room for your gear and for your kayak or canoe on top.

I don’t know if I’ll become one of those people who live the rest of the year in a way that frees them up to live in Yellowstone in the summer. It’s interesting to think about. I confess I am still rapturous about my 4" memory foam topper for my dorm bed arriving this morning. Perhaps I’ll blog about it one day. But right now, it’s just about that time of night. Time to get down to the pub.