The Wastepaper Basket

It’s 11:00 pm in Glacierview Alaska, the spring of 2024. The sky is a light pink– in about an hour, the open mountain landscape will cloud with rolling mists from lionshead mountain, and the sky will turn a bruised, grey blue like twilight. That’s midnight in this part of Alaska– and it’s the darkest that it’s going to get that day. 

I stand outside my one room cabin, getting large doses of the fresh air. I always heard people talk about the “clean” air of nature, but growing up on a farm in the Ozarks, nature and cleanliness never really computed. But Alaska was another story– a few weeks after this day, I would get the opportunity to climb the nearby glaciers free of charge, and get a swig of real glacier run-off. The ice is clean, the air is clean, even the moose droppings along the grey gravel feels meant to be there. It’s the indoors that’s dirty.

As I stare into sky, my coworker, Kevin, passes by to settle in his own cabin. Kevin and I are cabin neighbors– our physical proximity is the largest thing we have connecting us. While I was at the time a christian 20 year old girl taking her first solo trip, Kevin was in his late 30’s, a seasoned traveler just getting back from months homesteading in hawaii, with an even more colorful past from his childhood in Germany. Despite our different backgrounds, Kevin always seemed to look out for me, and I didn’t take it for granted.

He stops to say hello, a bright look on his face.

“Did you see Dolly today?”

I shrug. I’ve had a day off– with no car and no town within miles, my days off are spent in the one room cabin, trying to scrape together a novel and binge-watching House MD. 

The bright look on Kevin’s face sharpens- he’s got gossip. And I know exactly what it’ll be.

“She had a real breakdown today,” Kevin says. “Probably her worst– in front of the customers, too.”

“What did she do?”

Kevin shrugs.

“She was shouting at Mike– or because of Mike, I don’t know. But she broke a plate, she was throwing things behind the counter. I think she’s got cabin fever.”

Kevin leaves, but it’s certainly not the end of the conversation– in the upcoming months together we’ll repeat the same exchange in different ways. And I was sure that it couldn’t get worse– so I had a boss that was descending into madness in the Alaskan wilderness. Big whoop.

Kevin wasn’t the only coworker I had connected with– there were four of us in total, though that dwindled down to three relatively quickly. With all the language barriers, finding out the true reasons between our coworker leaving was like playing a game of telephone. But in the beginning, there were four, all hired through a site called WorkAway. There was me, the only girl, shaking in my boots and rarely leaving my cabin. Kevin was the charismatic center to our group, a bilingual middleman for the relationships. Enrique, the mexican WorkAway, was a returner to the Cafe and RV Park, a man already quiet in Spanish, but even sparser in english. I was always bothering Enrique, pulling out my translator any chance I could get. Although Kevin and I shared a language, there was a warmth to Enrique that magnetised me to him. Our last and short lived coworker was Dao Feng, but he preferred to be called Tom. Dao Feng had been Dolly’s choice, a chinese WorkAway that shared a culture and was closer to her in age. I could never guess Dao Feng’s age– like Enrique, he was still learning english, but unlike Enrique, he was determined to find himself an American wife.

Almost three years later, it’s hard for me to unravel what was Dolly’s fanciful matchmaking, and what was Dao-Feng’s actual intention. Whatever his end goal was, it was clear that Dao Feng had chosen me as his equal– Kevin didn’t take himself nearly as seriously as the somber Dao Feng, and Enrique was usually treated as some lower worker. This was partly due to Dao-Feng’s warped, semi-aristocratic sensibilities, and partly due to Dolly’s own treatment of kind, generous Enrique. So I was the suitable conversation companion– I was painfully polite, quiet, and spoke often about my love for film. Dao Feng had quickly chosen who he deemed as his “intellectual match”… and just as quickly, I spent a great deal of time ignoring him.

Those three months went by painfully slow. We were a skeleton crew, even barer with Dao Feng suddenly disappeared, with three of us to do the jobs of outdoor maintenance, waitering, coffee arts, booking management, dishwashing, sanitation, cooking, and prepping. In a given shift I would conceivable do all of these things for a chunk of time– but for the most part, I served tables. This was all right with me– that’s where the interesting people were.

One of the quirks of Glacierview was the specificity if customers we brought in. Though nestled between glacier, pine, and gargantuan wild mountains, the Cafe sat only yards away from the roaring highway. Closing your eyes on busy days, the rushing vehicles could sound like bullet trains sailing past, or great crashing waves going forwards, forwards–

Sitting on the highway in between landmarks was half of the business plan of the cafe. It was the only place to get food for about an hour in either direction, besides being one of the only signs of life for miles and miles. After the first three weeks serving tables, I had seen a handful of every flavor of guest we attracted. You could have played bingo on the common archetypes we drew in– every day there would be at least one huge family, either from China or India. Never from Japan, never from Pakistan, always China and India. There were also loads of boomer couples on their ninth or tenth cross country road trip; these were the ones that would pull me by the elbow and tell me what needed changing in the recipes. A subtype of the boomer couple would be Scandinavian heterosexual hikers, usually with matching activewear, and most commonly German.

A rarer type of customer, but seen regularly, were the bikers, always skating by in groups. The bikers talked loud, but kept to themselves, not very interested in conversation. The seasonal workers were the same in that sense– I had thought that as fellow out-of-state-vagabonds, I would find a sense of comradery with the employees of other lodges, parks, and camps. I could blame it on their attitudes, but in hindsight I’m convinced that my absolute wide-eyed-wonder scared them off.

I couldn’t go a single day without seeing at least most of these characters– there were a few that stood out more than others, like the southern woman with the gold teeth that held my arm as she ordered so sweetly, so softly– though I only met her for a few minutes, the way she held on to me sticks in my mind. She had the best, slow growing smile, and she held me like she was trying to hold me close, trying to stay present. There was also the boy, the one who worked at the airline and was set to become a millionaire. He had come from Puerto Rico, and though only a year or two older, was married and divorced. Bored out of my mind (and lets be reminded, bambi-eyed and blinking in the sun) I stuck to the boy like glue. Dolly was happy to give me an early lunch to take a table and talk with the guest– he had driven four hours to buy a new Tesla, but hadn’t planned out a route to keep it charged. The boy wasn’t absolutely remarkable, but he had brown curls and smelled heavenly. I tried to keep something going for months after, still adamant that if he wasn’t a christian yet I could convert him. It was a pattern I’ve followed until very, very recently– but I’d like to think that the boy helped begin the breaking of that pattern.

Dolly was happy to see me flirting in the early days– she asked me every day about “my” man, if he had called, if we would see each other again. Dolly started out extremely interested in me and my life– it was in our contract that we had a free meal with every shift, but Dolly fed me snacks from her last trip to china, along with expensive fermented teas, fresh cookies, and her home-cooked dumplings. She would always tell me how pretty I was, no matter how long I spent in the dish pit, no matter how sunburned I became. She trusted me to keep busy, to clean, to take care of customers, and on slow days was so relaxed that she would watch her dramas by the window, sipping tea and looking out at the mountains. It was a peaceful spot– and peaceful to watch her. This didn’t last long– but I couldn’t tell you how her descent actually began.

I’ll blame it on the work I was doing on my off-hours– at the time I came to Alaska attempting to write a pirate fantasy, but quickly changed course after a dream I had that came as a result of binging so much House MD. Though the pirate fantasy is still a distant dream of mine to bring to life, the Hugh Laurie-infused feverish afternoon dream sparked a project that would later become my first full length screenplay. If I had been less focused on curating Pinterest boards and sketching shots in my notebook, I might have quit a lot sooner… but that’s being generous.

I spent three months working at the park– the day that I walked into the kitchen with a look in my eyes, Kevin didn’t have to guess.

“I’m thinking about quitting,” I told him. Kevin was all support, of course– his question was, why had it taken me so long?

It started with the shouting– not at me, so I excused her behavior for an embarrassingly long time. And not at my coworkers, either– just shouts, complaints. Then it was the customers– Dolly made it clear that she always favored the large Chinese families that came through, most times ending up sitting at the table itself, taking off her apron and chatting happily away. The Park had been a pizza joint years back, but when Mark and Dolly had bought it they had decided to add on to the old menu, laying new to the old like confusing layers of sediment. Along with meat lovers pizza there was fried fish sandwiches, fried peanut noodles, steamed dumplings, milk tea, lattes, sriracha based sandwiches, brownies, peanut butter cookies, and everything in between. The food was alright, but the menu planning drove Kevin absolutely insane. Yet it seemed to attract the exact kind of customers Dolly liked– there we were, a cafe in the middle of nowhere, cooking home-made familiar cooking to families thousands and thousands from home. To them, Dolly was a mystical aunt, more of a hostess than a business owner.

This attitude didn’t apply if you were indian.

Dolly’s racism was, and is, absolutely baffling to me. To this day, her business’s negative reviews are largely from the black and brown guests that had the misfortune of popping in during her shift. But her racism wasn’t the only thing stacking up negative reviews– you see, Dolly had a singular kind of business plan. Reuse, ignore, recycle. Her first frustrations with me seemed to bloom when I insisted in replacing sludge-drenched trashbags, instead of reusing the stinking plastic like she had asked. Dolly was also known to recycle guests food, sometimes dumping untouched soup and dumpling into storage containers that were later sold to future guests. The Coffee bar was the same– I had some experience as a barista, so usually I was left to my lonesome in this regard. I was gifted the drink menu, whose recipes I studied dutifully, and most days flew solo behind the counter. But on the days that Dolly decided to hover around me, she insisted that I throw the recipes out the window. Dolly’s version of a dark chocolate mocha was a single shot inside warmed milk, with half a packet of swiss-miss tossed inside for that authentic chocolatey flavor. Her mocha was decadent compared to her iced americanos; three day old drip coffee from deli buckets in the fridge, poured over ice. 

If I pointed to the recipes, Dolly would get impatient– sometimes she relented, but most days she scolded. “It’s so expensive,” she would say. “It tastes the same.”

Something else Dolly found expensive was feeding me.

I had been beginning to feel the pressure for a few weeks before Enrique found me. It started, like everything else, in the small things– she asked me not to order fish for my shift meal, since it was so expensive. Then it was a ban on peanut butter lattes, which though paid for she deemed “wasteful.” And then the list kept growing– as did my tips. I kept my mouth shut when Dolly would hand me five, ten dollars from a tip jar that had filled from my own tables. I thanked her and left, ignoring Kevin’s looks. 

“It’s illegal!” He would laugh. “Seriously, it’s an offense, she doesn’t do any math on the tips YOU earn, she just scrapes off the top of the jar.”

But I didn’t say a word– it was hard enough getting her to let me eat.

The ban on ingredients grew longer and longer– until one day she started charging me outright for the meals. Still, I kept my mouth shut. I was staying for six months, and I didn’t have a backup plan. If I caused trouble this early, how much worse would it get? And besides, part of the work agreement was free groceries in the staff kitchen. I’d stop buying shift meals and only eat staff food. 

When Enrique went looking for me, he came bearing food. This became a regular occurrence– he would look for me after shift bringing wrapped tinfoil or saran-wrap packages of leftovers, chorizo, bacon, fried rice. We had fried rice up to our EARS in Alaska. Dolly was always making it in bulk. 

When Enrique first gave me my mobile picnic, he made sure his message got across.

“Dolly,” he said, “She’s looking for you.”

I misunderstood him– what did she want after my shift? My feet were already aching to be relieved, and the thought of hopping back in the kitchen was exhausting.

Enrique shook his head.

“She’s watching you,” He said. “I’m looking out for you– but she’s watching you.”

It turns out, that for reasons unknown to even Dolly herself, she was convinced that if I wasn’t monitored, I would start stealing. She told everyone about this– Enrique was cleared, but Kevin and I were under suspicion. Despite following all her food bans with great consideration, Dolly was terrified that I was sneaking secret food, and if given the chance, would run off with the entire cash register. This is why she always made me turn my back to her when she entered in the system code– and as she grew more paranoid, turning my back evolved into covering my eyes and stepping away several feet, on the slight chance that I would turn around quickly to steal the code.

And then they stopped buying groceries.

My idea to quit was after a small incident– though there were many more to come. Dolly’s cruelties didn’t stand out to me, seeming oddly familiar to recent lived experience at the time. I had never been raised to believe that I deserved to be talked to kindly, could stand up for myself, or was allowed to leave situations that put me in danger. Bundle those together, and I would have called that home. But one day Dolly scolded me in front of a customer, and it clicked. You would have thought that a dozen other reasons would have forced me out– her changing the recipe I had given her for my grandmother’s chocolate chip cookies, requesting more and more flour added to the batter to make them cheaper. The living conditions of the meagre one-room shack, with paper-thin curtains that did little to block out the eternal light, and was always too cold or too hot. Her not-so-subtle matchmaking to make me Dao-Feng’s future bride… the list could go, and will go on, forever.

But one day, Dolly called me loudly to come look at the chairs. I said i was glad to, and looked over the counter I was managing to stare at the chairs– Dolly stomped her foot. 

“Come here.” She pouted.

“What do you need?” I asked calmly. 

Guests began to watch us awkwardly– Dolly repeated herself a few times, as did I. Growing tired of the game, I followed her around the counter to look at the chairs. Loudly, proudly, she scolded me in front of customers that I hadn’t cleaned them right, and that I was shaming the business with the streaks left behind. I nodded– returned to my task. And decided to quit.

I would like to paint myself as a much braver person– I don’t want to admit the careful, secret 6:00 am meeting I had with her husband, the journal of notes I had of issues to be resolved. I don’t want to tell you about trying to stay– about the sick feeling as I looked at Mark’s lame excuses, realizing that I’d actually have to grow a pair and take care of myself. I tell you because it’s honest, and maybe relatable; I tell you that I put in three weeks notice in that hellhole. Mark begged– really begged. Fourth of july was coming up, their busy season…

I tell you with pride that the day I put in my notice, I asked Dolly for my tips. With increasing pleasure I can tell you she had never blown up like she did then– Mark never told her that I had quit, so she screamed as she threw cash at me, telling me if it was so illegal I should “take a vacation.”  And I can add that in the last week of working at the park, three guests pulled me aside telling me that I was keeping the palace running… and doing an excellent job. And I can also tell you that when it came time for Mark to drive me over three hours to the airport, I climbed in the front seat, opened my notebook, and began to write. Mark tried to talk for all three hours– and I didn’t give him a single word. I remember him getting almost desperate in the end– he had never tried to be kind to me before, but it was sinking in that he was sending me off with such low estimations of him. When all else failed, in sight of the parking lot, I remember him licking his lips– so nervous he had become a character of himself.

“You know,” he said with a shaky laugh. “You’re going to do– so well in your next job. You’re such a great worker. It’s a shame… we’re sorry it didn’t work out.”

He looked at me to see if I was paying attention. I was– to my notebook. I can admit the guilty pleasure I felt from playing a bitch.

“You’ve got some…” he paused for a long time as he made his turn. “…great qualities.”

Without current events, all of Alaska could have been a chapter in my life I get to laugh about. The time I let my nightmare bosses talk me into staying three extra weeks, and the husband felt so bad about it that Kevin and I were allowed to spend fourth of July afternoon eating kettle corn and watching cars get thrown off a cliff. (An ingenious solution to a holiday that requires darkness to set off fireworks– having experiences it, I can attest that schoolbuses catapulted from cliffs are just as patriotism-inducing as gunpowder)

I can tell you all of this, but I tell you the story as part of a whole picture. As I flew back to Missouri in the summer of 2024, I didn’t realize that I had only begun a pattern– one that would bring me across the ocean, to forests and summer camps, to madhouses and nude swims, to more screaming, more hiding, more staying quiet. I look back on that Alaska trip with two feelings; a feeling of accomplishment, and a feeling of grief. 

Dolly, it seemed, was the new standard.