and black gloves. He was stringy and well-used, and the three days’ stubble on his cheeks was, well, black.
He rolled the window down, squinting against the snowflakes and the white light. “Hey, bub, you sure picked a funny day for hitch-hiking. Where you bound?”
“North to Alaska, Mister.” The phrase was from the John Wayne movie of the same name, and its theme song, which proclaimed: “North to Alaska. We’re going North, the Rush is on!”
“From the looks of this weather, we must be almost up there already, bub. Hop in, I’ll take you to Jackson, just twenty miles up this Hoback Canyon road. You can get breakfast there.”
“Breakfast? It must be afternoon by now.”
“Shoot, bub, it’s not even seven-thirty on a beautiful morning in full Wyoming spring conditions. C’mon, hop in.”
He looked to me like Jack Palance, the bad black-hatted gunfighter in a number of classic Westerns, or maybe like Richard Boone, the antihero hero of the 1950s TV Series, “Have Gun, Will Travel.” I don’t know if he was a gunfighter or not, but he surely wasn’t bad. His name, I kid you not, was, of course, Jim Black, and that old Nash was warm and cozy and full of song and laughter as we skidded and sputtered slowly through the snowy Hoback canyon and came down into the little town of Jackson.
The snow stopped and the sun shone as we drove down the main street, with its many false-front buildings, themselves fronted by wooden boardwalks. Jim slid his rig to a stop in front of the Silver Dollar Bar and Café. “Whoa there. Get yourself the best breakfast in town here, bub. Try the Silver Dollar pancakes.”
I offered him breakfast, but he declined. “Got to get this rig up over to Cody for the bike races, and had best be moving along. There’ll be snow aplenty time I get to Yellowstone”
“Those races might be quite a goat-rope, if it’s snowing as much up there as it was where you picked me up. Thanks, and drive carefully.”
Jim laughed, winked, waved a gloved hand, and was gone, whistling one last chorus of “North to Alaska.”
I pushed my way in through the bat-wing doors (they might probably be there to this day, if you don’t believe me), took a revolving stool at the counter, and gazed down at the rows and rows of silver dollars inlaid all along the counter (which at night was the bar, and no doubt even busier than for breakfast). I left my Gladstone, minus the shaving kit and towel, under the watchful but friendly eye of the grizzled old-timer seated next to me, and cleaned up in the washroom. Then I cleaned up again, this time on the best plate of pancakes and link sausage and (western) coffee I could ever remember eating.
Moving out onto the opposite side of the sunlit main street, I lifted my thumb once again. I had barely time to feel those pancakes begin to settle before a brand-new Volkswagon bus stopped.
Its driver looked like he would be more at home in Olde Lyme, Connecticut than in Jackson, Wyoming. He was clad in khaki ‘chinos’, an open-necked short-sleeved shirt, and had one of those little plastic thingy’s in his breast pocket with several pens, and the obligatory 1950s slide-rule. But, like everyone else in western Wyoming, he seemed to be chronically-infected with Smile Disease. “Where can I take you, my young friend?”
“Name’s Steve, and I’m headed north, up to Montana and then to the AlCan for Alaska. Appreciate any lift you can give me.”
“Well, I can only get you five miles or so up the road, but at least that’s a start out of town, and there’s sure to be someone who will be heading north.”
We hung a left at the little park in the center of town, the one with arches of elk antlers framing the entry paths, and moved north in the lee of a long bluff to the west.
“That’s Gros Ventre, Fat Belly, Butte. A lot of things have French names around here, tagged by the French Canadians who came down into this country after beaver. They were among the first of the Mountain Men. I’m turning off west just after we pass the Butte, over to Warm Springs Ranch.”
I suppose the words “Mountain Men” set the fever alight in my brain, and then, as we came up to the end of the Gros Ventre Butte, I saw them in the morning sun, standing to the northwest and front-lighted from the east. I saw them, something lifted up inside me, and I never have been the same, even to this day, forty years and more later.
There they stood, compact in an uneven broken line, glistening crests of rock and snow and ice. They were just a short range, separated from the rest of the chain of the Rockies by flat spaces to north and south, and cut by deep west-running canyons between the peaks. Though you could not, from where we were, see the chain of blue lakes along their eastern front, the green dip of conifers told you the lakes were there.
“What are those mountains, mister?”
“Those, my boy, are the Grand Tetons, and out in front of you is Jackson Hole. The Snake River runs through it. The Mountain Men crossed through the Hole in the 1820s and 30s, looking for beaver, moving back and forth to their yearly rendezvous sites: west of the range in Pierre’s Hole, southwest on the Bear River, over southeast on the Sweetwater, and down south of the Hoback on the Green River. They gathered each spring, coming in from wherever they had spent the winter, to trade, to raise hell, and to plan the year’s beaver hunts. Jackson Hole was a sort of center-point, a cross-roads on their trails of exploration during the high time of the Mountain Men. They called it a ‘shining time’, and those are the Shining Mountains. I’ve always wondered where that phrase came from, though it’s plain to see what it signifies. Last year I read that when the French explorer, Pierre La Verendrye, was looking for furs way over north and west of Lake Superior, back in the 1740s, almost a hundred years before the Mountain Men got out here, the Indians told him that far to the west there were mountains ‘that shined by night as well as by day.’ They had it right, for sure. Just be here in the moonlight, and you’ll see.”
Thoughts of Alaska vaporized. This was my place.
“Stop the car. I mean, slow down, please. Do you think there might be any work around here, mister? I can do most anything, especially if it’s outside.”
“Well, I don’t know, but there is the National Park headquarters up the road there at Moose, and I think they usually take on seasonal help for the summer. Tell you what, I’ll run you up to the park, past Moose Junction, it’s just a few miles further on than I was going anyway, and you can try your luck.”
We drove through the valley of Jackson Hole, elk and trumpeter swans to the right of us in the National Wildlife Refuge. The visual passage was clear to the north, and always the peaks lay to the west. We dipped down to cross the Snake at Moose Junction, passing the Chuckwagon, a tourist restaurant under tent canvas, with huge grates and cauldrons already firing up. At the Chuckwagon, I came to learn, if it was made of beef, you could order it. If it wasn’t made of beef, they were temporarily out of it. Alongside the river lay the log-framed Chapel of the Transfiguration, through whose huge altar window the simple wooden cross was silhouetted against the soaring peaks. On the other side of the road was a small general store, also of peeled logs, with a telephone hung outside, next to a Sinclair Oil gasoline pump.
Once past the river bridge, the road wound up onto a forested benchland fronting the mountains. A sign proclaimed: “Welcome to Grand Teton National Park.”
I hopped out, offering my thanks to the driver for going considerably out of his way for my convenience, and walked into the entrance road.
Park headquarters was a cluster of log buildings with green
