The Barracks
A short tale about the Winter Olympics, dog poop and a famous landlord.
Readers of yore may recall that I have a thing about snow sports.
I’ve been watching a lot of the Winter Olympics and, in the super pipe events, I had a strange moment of recognition.
Of one of the coaches.
That was my first clue that the world has moved on. I’m old now. I have reached the age where I recognise the coaches—but not the athletes.
It’s Danny Kass. He’s a coach for the US snowboard teams now. Who would have guessed?
Danny Kass, if you don’t know, won silver in the Salt Lake City games in the superpipe. This was back in 2002, when snowboarding was still a fringe event, an upstart that no one was convinced was going to catch on.
Sitting on my couch, feeling really old, seeing this guy—the ultimate snowboard BRO back in the day—triggered some fond memories.
It also coincides with a gap in The Notebooks—somewhere in between that sun-laced glade with Luke in the summer of 2006 and the car crash—so away we go…
—
In January 2008, I boarded the Amtrak Lake Shore Limited out of New York. Cheapest way to cross the country: $234 bucks for a seat in coach. Steam hissed out of the sewers and the edges of the rails were crusted white with hoarfrost.
Found myself a two-seater, spread my pillow and knitting all over it and hid in the toilet at the local stops. No one troubled my decrepit belongings and I had a spread-out sleep that was equally untroubled by seat mate, snores or conductor.
This is a trick that probably won’t work anymore—I bet they’re wise to it now—but back in 2008, it worked a treat.
In Chicago, I had some time to kill while I waited to board the California Zephyr.
The Amtrak waiting area was busy.
Amish-trak.
In Reno, I’d already missed the daily bus up to Mammoth—or maybe it wasn’t coming until the next day. I don’t remember. I got a room in an anonymous Holiday Inn from which I could see the lights of the Reno sign.
The biggest little city in the world.
Staring out that window early evening, wondering what the hell to do with myself until I could get up to Mammoth, I fielded a call from Chris, my new boss, head of the June Lake ski school where I’d just been hired as a seasonal instructor.
“Mammoth won’t give you employee housing again this year.”
“What?” Oh, shit.
“Yeah, I talked to them. Something about unlicensed overnight guests last year.”
Well, fuck.
There goes not just a roof and a bed in Mammoth but my new job too. Good bye June Lake ski school, I thought sadly. I hardly knew ye.
There was a pause while I tried and failed to come up with an excuse.
Chris, to his eternal credit, gave a snort down the line. “Whatever. I know what they’re like in employee housing. We’ll see you up at the mountain on Thursday. Good luck finding a room.”
Click.
I wasn’t fired—but I had nowhere to live.
Undaunted, and spurred on by the massive storm that was unleashing its fury, and several feet of fresh pow, all over the Sierras the next day, I boarded the green and white hopper bus to Mammoth Lakes.
We crawled out of Reno through swirling fat flakes. On the highway out of the city, I counted four 18-wheeler rigs that had jackknifed on the ice and buried themselves in house-sized snowdrifts along the shoulder. The occasional orange-lit plow churned down the inside lane but otherwise it was a quiet drive.
We headed through high alpine country to Mammoth via Carson City, with its seven dollar all-U-can eat buffet at the Golden Nugget casino, through Bridgeport, with its endless views of the bucked sawtooth eastern edge of Yosemite, past Mono Lake, with its newly-minted volcano cone islands not 500 years old, where the road turns up to the snow-closed passes towards SanFran.
Someone told me a story once about Mono Lake that began like this:
On a hat-shaped island, deep
in Mono Lake,
shaded lovers dwell in dreams,
but half-asleep.
I don’t remember the rest of it.
My phone rang. It was Will, bless him, from Wisconsin, whose surname is gone to the mists of my trivia-logged brain, but who was the only responder to a set of frantic texts I scattered far and wide to everyone I knew in Mammoth, and to everyone they knew, who might have a room, or a bed going spare anywhere in the Sierras.
Will had a couch.
And a hug, when I rocked up on his porch less than an hour later with my backpack and my skis and a need to put ear plugs straight in and pass out on his couch, with a bandana wrapped around my eyes to keep out the light.
Around me, the sounds of him playing Nintendo with a couple buddies, then making burritos, then going out for beers, then coming back late in stage whispers. I scarcely turned over all night.
The next morning, a determined resolution not to spend another night on Will’s couch. I boarded the bus to June Lake, still thumbing through a litany of ‘no, dude, sorry’ and ‘oh shit’ messages that kept coming in.
Now, June Lake is a funny mountain. Most of the skiing is up out of sight. You park beside an ancient two-seater chairlift with a central pole (so you know it’s really old) and have to ride twenty minutes up to the lodge, and then two more lifts after that to get above the tree-line. The awkward set-up had kept June Lake pretty much off everyone’s tourist radar in 2008.
What it had was park—and backcountry access.
You got June on the same lift ticket as Mammoth but, twenty miles away up 395, it may as well have been on the moon for most of the SoCal gapers who never ventured beyond well-provisioned, jacuzzi-plentiful Mammoth.
When the storms dumped, the access loop road to June would close—avalanche risk, from those steep slides roadside—so the only people who got to ride the mountain were the locals. On storm days, the trees all along the face of June and down the valley underneath Carson Peak would be full of mountain employees and locals—and no one else.
It was a well-kept secret: for the pow-hounds, and the pros, June was the real deal.
I was glad to be teaching at June and didn’t mind the bus commute from Mammoth. I looked at my phone again. Just needed a damn place to live.
Straight off the bus and over to the chairlift, the first person I walked into was a guy I knew from last season in Mammoth. Stoner Nick, from one of the Carolinas!
He was a few years younger than me, maybe 19, blue eyes of stained-glass-window-pane perfection.
“Nick!”
“Heyyyy….” He probably didn’t remember my name. I decided not to care.
“How’s it going? You’re working in June too?”
In the rental shop, he said.
It turned out Nick, like me, had been denied re-entry to the Mammoth employee housing. He didn’t tell me his transgression—but I knew without guessing.
“I’m living in June now.” Said proudly, eyes unfocused.
“In June?” I shuddered to myself. I didn’t mind working this far out but the idea of living this far out of Mammoth, this far from a grocery store, hadn’t even crossed my mind.
“Yeah, it’s so sweet. It’s a shared house, there’s ….” He paused and I could practically see him thinking, counting audibly. “Nine of us? No, wait, ten, counting Bearman.”
“Is that … someone’s dog?”
He looked confused. “No, his dog’s called Brodie. He shits everywhere.”
“Bearman?”
“No, the dog, Brodie.”
“So who’s Bearman?”
He shrugged. “You know. Bearman. He works down at the Lodge as a masseuse.”
I shook my head sharply, as if to clear a fog. This conversation was getting away from me.
“Ok, so, ten of you in a shared house, here in June. Is there room for one more?”
“There’s a room spare…”
“Perfect!” I had moved in already. In my head, bags unpacked.
“No, it’s kind of the party room at the moment … no one lives in there. It’s a communal space. There’s dog shit on the carpet.”
That didn’t sound very communal to me but I was desperate. I can clean dog shit out of a carpet. No big deal. “When can I move in?”
“Oh, I don’t know… you’d have to talk to everyone, make sure they’re all ok with it… ”
This seemed an informal application process.
“That’s it? Just get everyone to say yes?”
He shrugged. “That’s Barracks rules. You can’t move into The Barracks unless everyone is cool with it.”
What fresh hell was this? “The Barracks?” Please let it not be a cult, I thought.
But, also, if it is a cult, please let the rent be cheap.
“Yeah, you know, The Grenade Games? The Grenade Army? This is the Barracks.” He raised his eyebrows at the significance.
I had heard of Grenade, the popular snowboard brand with their stickers of grenades and explosions. Whatever, I shrugged. Boys and their toys.
“Ok, but, I mean, who do you pay rent to?” Dog shit on the carpet or not, I knew someone was getting paid. You got to. This America, man.
“There’s a dude in Mammoth who collects the rent. We send a postal order once a month for a couple hundred bucks.”
“But who’s the owner?” Beautiful eyes notwithstanding, talking to Nick was the verbal equivalent of wading through molasses.
“I told you. The guy who started the Grenade brand. The Barracks used to be a hotel back in the 70s but he bought it for his buddies to crash in during the Grenade Games. You know the Olympic snowboarder? Danny Kass. He’s the one who started Grenade and bought the Barracks. He loves June Lake.”
—
So that’s how former Olympian and US snowboarding coach Danny Kass became my landlord, for a spell, back in 2008.
But first, I had to get the nod from all the other denizens of The Barracks…
—
TO BE CONTINUED.
—
Pair this with Joker and the Thief by Wolfmother.
Man. Your 2008 was way cooler than my 2008. Also: how many lives have you lived?! Very much looking forward to the full memoir one day.
You are such a great story teller...I wanted to find out what happened next, and you left us hanging. Really enjoy your style and this is coming from a 60 year old Literature/Creative Writing (nonfiction) student. Waiting for more of the story....