Chapt. 3 The (Golf Cart) Rubber Meets the Road . . . Work Begins

Duly oriented on safety and park protocols, we plunged headfirst into learning the duties we were expected to perform to earn the gorgeous rhodie-ringed campsite we'd be enjoying for the next 30 days.

Because we had filled a "relief" or "back-up" spot, we had three different types of tasks that we would be rotating through, depending on the day.

This relief position, it should be noted, put us firmly on the bottom of the Golf Cart Hierarchy. It's a caste system that looks something like this: Rangers get the fancy carts that look like they could summit a mountain. Next in line are the yurt people and the dedicated-to-campsite-cleanup folks, whose carts stay by their trailers and are outfitted the way they want them for their respective jobs.

Talk about decadence.

Our jack-of-all-trades status meant that we took pretty much whatever was available -- a long-in-the-tooth vehicle with a pool noodle wedged under the windscreen to block the rain. I'm not bitter about it. Or maybe I was but I managed to work through it. I'm no stranger to adversity.

We learned the art of campsite cleanup from a host of many years' experience -- one of the many we've met who work year-round, moving to a different park every 30 to 90 days. Most know where they'll be months in advance, and have a broad range of experience from maintenance to construction to more traditional campground work, which increases their ability to easily line up postings.

This was a pretty low-key lesson with one important takeaway. Anything that gets cleaned out of a firepit goes to a place called the "boneyard," a remote concrete-enclosed area where flotsam can sit and smolder for days. It reminded me of the Valley of Ashes from The Great Gatsby only without the billboards, adultery and vehicular homicide. "Don't put campfire trash into the compactor . . . it could burn for days," our tutor advised.

I made a mental note of my first goal: Do not cause a conflagration in the compactor.

I expected campsite cleanup would amount to dog doodie duty. I was pleasantly surprised when at the end of June I had only one notch on my doodie belt. The vast, vast, vast majority of sites needed little-to-no cleanup.

The worst? Cigarette butts in the firepit. Ugh. Oh, and no, campers, the leftovers from your crab and oyster feasts are not going to decompose or be eaten by . . . anything . . . before the next campers arrive in three hours. And putting them under a bush really doesn't help the situation much.

Most commonly-retrieved trash? The tiny corners off Hershey bars (evidence of s'mores) and the wrappers off juice box straws (evidence of children).

Also in our duty rotation was yurt cleaning. Our park had lots of 'em. Most people only reserve a yurt for a couple of nights, so there's a lot of cleaning to be done each day. There's a sanitation protocol for this, which we learned at the feet of a couple who had clearly done this more than a few times. Bottom line: rest easy, campers . . . your damned yurt is cleaner than my kitchen.

They may not have been overwhelmed with confidence in our ability when Randy, attempting to fill the disinfecting cleaner container, rocketed some liquid directly into his face. "This reminds me to locate the eyewash station," our host remarked. Dryly.

The majority of our time was spent staffing the park's hospitality center . . . and this was by far our favorite gig. We chatted with people from around the country and the world. A seventy-something who was bicycling (for the second time) down the entire west coast. Three generations of families who had been coming to our park for decades. A young couple with a toddler who waited out days of rain (there were many of those in June) in a tent before hooking up the child's pull-behind trailer and biking on to . . . who knows where. Various adventure-seekers of all ages. The experienced. The clueless.

We sold t-shirts and firewood, answered questions ("When will the rain stop?" was a hands-down favorite), checked in yurt-dwellers and observed the life of the camp. Two rangers stopped in one day and asked for stickers to reward kids they saw wearing their bike helmets. "It's the absolute best way to spend your break," they explained.

The scariest part of the hospitality gig was the threat of inadvertently setting off the building's alarm upon opening or closing. "You can hear the alarm clear down in D loop," our ranger-boss warned us.

Second goal: Do not set off the alarm.

I'm happy to report that we achieved this goal. We also (mostly) balanced our cash drawer each day, which was another achievement I had hoped to be able to claim.

Oriented and trained (kind of) we settled into the rhythm of the park and its many and varied guests. More on that in the next installment.

This was our idyllic little world for the month of June. The rhododendrons were absolutely spectacular when we arrived. Sigh.