Read Online Two Medicine by John Hansen - Free Book Online

like. It was about the size of the
old VW vans from the 60’s, but sloping in the back, and with a long
Rolls-Royce-like snout serving as the grill on the front – a very
odd-looking, slightly European-esque, archaic vehicle.
    As I walked toward the bus
a young guy with a big head of blonde, bushy hair stuck his face
out of the driver’s window and leaned an elbow out and
nodded.
    He smiled as he said, “You
must be my ride… Going to Two Medicine?”
    “ Yeah,” I said as I walked
over, cautiously surveying the jalopy.
    “ Nice suitcase,” he said,
nodding at my gear with a not-unfriendly smirk, and then told me to
throw my things in the back.
    I tossed my bag in a back
seat and then climbed in the front next to him. The bus actually
had four passenger doors on each side and five bench seats, not
counting ours in front. Besides me it was otherwise completely
empty as we started off down the street.
    “ So this is a ‘jammer?’” I
asked.
    “ Yep, gets its name from
grinding the gear shift – which you’ll hear pretty soon as we climb
some of the hills on the road to your stop.”
    The guy sported a scruffy
beard and was wearing a safari-style khaki outfit - obviously some
hokey kind of uniform the park fashioned for the jammer drivers. I
worried as I took a side-ways glance at him that my Two Medicine
job was going to have me wear something like that all summer. It
occurred to me, not for the first time, and not for the last, as
the driver ground the gear stick into second gear as we climbed a
road out of the Lodge parking lot shaking us back and forth in our
seats, that I hardly knew anything about my new job. I felt another
wave of nervous doubt creep up into my chest. What was I doing? In the haste to get
packed and booked out there, and with limited information to start
with, I had never actually nailed down what I would be doing
day-to-day, other than “working in the camp store.”
    “ So you’re working at Two
Medicine?” he asked again as we bounced along, as if reading my
mind through his bushy, blonde mass of bouncing hair. The shocks on
the old bus creaked loudly over every pothole in the
road.
    “ Do you know anything
about it out there? About the store?” I asked.
    He glanced over at me and
smirked, “It’s way the heck ‘out there’ alright, the farthest
outpost in the park – and right next to the Blackfoot reservation
too. You picked a doozy of a place to get roped into. Lotta’ crazy
shit happens on the res…” he said.
    I didn’t really catch his
warning, unfortunately, because we suddenly crested a hill and I
was greeted with my first full view of the real Rocky Mountains –
the Northern Montana sort – which are the most beautiful and most
harsh of the whole rest of the vast Mountain chain, which stretches
from Canada to New Mexico from beginning to end.
    On either side of the road
as we drove up higher was thick forest, some hardwoods here and
there, but many more pines than anything else, especially where the
ground was rockier and drier. Lodgepole pines that could cope with
the dry soil shot up straight from the dense grasses and blocked
out the sun; green and brown shrubs and smaller trees bunched in a
thick riot at their base. The land had a dustier, stonier look to
it than I expected – more “Western” than I had seen in the tourist
pictures online. But, I liked it. It looked… rough.
    Rolling hills a little
ways off past our road led to up to enormous mountain peaks far off
in the distance, dotted with white patches of late snow – even in
June. It was hard to get a sense of the hugeness of the far-away
peaks as they rose in front of us and beside us along the valley in
which we were driving. As the jammer bus lurched over another crest
of asphalt, a wide stretch of deep indigo sky spread out overhead
above the peaks and made the green, brown, and, in some places
white forest stand out even more starkly, more striking and
hard.
     
    How do you describe a