Free Waiting; The True Confessions of a Waitress by Debra Ginsberg

scared, I didn’t move. I opted instead to continue fighting the trucker off in silence, moving his hands constantly and occasionally slapping him. He drifted off, finally, and fell across me. It took all the strength I had to shove him back to his side of the seat.
    We pulled into Butte at dawn and the trucker woke up, yawned, and smiled over at me as if we’d shared a particularly pleasant and intimate night together.
    “Buy you a cup of coffee?” he asked.
    “No thanks,” I said crisply and disembarked, losing myself in the diner where we stopped. When the bus pulled out forty min utes later, I changed my seat, opting to sit next to a very large woman who ate from a seemingly bottomless box of pastries. I watched the trucker get back on the bus, scan around for me, shrug, and sit down in his old seat. When he finally left the bus in Bozeman, I felt I was exhaling for the first time in hours.
    There were a series of tour buses waiting at the Wyoming Greyhound station to take tourists into Yellowstone. In contrast to the bleak misery of the Greyhound, the driver of the next bus was relentlessly perky, pointing out areas of interest in a coun tryside that seemed so foreign to me it might as well have been on the moon. I paid little attention to the spiel until we passed an area that was carpeted with animal bones.
    “Winter kill,” explained the bus driver. “This is where they come to die.”
    Somehow, I couldn’t help feeling that this was a bad omen.
    By the time I arrived in the village of Lakeshore, I was tired, ratty, and overcome by the high altitude, which was making me light-headed. I checked into the main office and was processed like a piece of salmon caught in a net. The dormitories assigned to employees were small, gray, and depressing. When I hauled my belongings into my new room and laid them down on the creaking bed, I finally allowed myself a few tears of self-pity. I had the sinking feeling that Yellowstone was not going to be the haven I’d anticipated. I felt I’d started what was supposed to be an enriching experience on a sour note (I was having a little trouble banishing the trucker from my thoughts) and I wasn’t sure I could bounce back in such forbidding territory. Moreover, instead of feeling wildly independent, I just felt unbearable lonely.
    But again it occurred to me that my situation was a direct result of my own actions. Nobody had forced me to come to this land of summer snow and bleached bones. If it seemed grim, I had nobody to blame but myself. And of course, I had only just gotten there. I still didn’t know what was behind Door Number Three. And so I donned a sweater and headed down to the hotel bar.
    Employee dorms were single sex by floor, two to a room. My roommate, Susie, was a year older than me and from a very wealthy family in Virginia. Her parents, she said, were totally opposed to her coming to Wyoming. They considered it slum ming of the highest order. She was engaged to a politician whom she claimed not to like very much but whose diamond engage ment ring she displayed proudly on her left fourth finger. She needed to get away from him for a while, she said, and from the suffocating atmosphere of her home. She had been hired as a clerk at the front desk, a coveted position. I wondered who, exactly, determined the placement for all these summer employ ees and what kind of bizarre system was used to determine room mates. Not that it mattered, because my roommate and I got along pretty well, but the whole thing did seem fairly arbitrary.
    There were a couple of days of orientation before we took our positions, and we were provided with a sheaf of rules and warnings to absorb. Hiking through the park was encouraged, but we were to watch for fresh bear droppings (it was bear sea son, after all), never keep food in our tents, and follow estab lished and maintained trails. We were not to fraternize with tourists. Lights out at 11 P . M . We were forbidden to become