America: Through an Immigrant's Eyes

At 6:30 a.m. we groan as we hear, “Beep beep beep”.

After finally somehow getting out of bed, I slip on a long-sleeve shirt, and a sweater with jeans. My warm coat, hat, gloves, and scarf sit by the door ready to protect me from the 20 degree morning. Dom just wears a light jacket over a polo shirt since he is an Eskimo.

I pour my granola, and fill up Dom’s bowl with oatmeal. He walks out the door with it.

“It’s snowing,” he usually says as the door shuts and chilly air sneaks in.

He walks a few steps on the slippery concrete sidewalk to the community kitchen next door. He greets our friendly neighbor who is already eating breakfast, warms up his oatmeal in the microwave, and comes back.

At 7:50 a.m., he goes outside to warm up Alejandro. Then at 7:53 a.m. we drive to work. We arrive at 7:57 a.m. and walk in the back door of Jackson Lake Lodge.

What the Lodge will look like if the snow ever melts.

We swipe our employee IDs in the clock-in machine at 8:00 a.m.

Then we enter the warehouse where we will spend our eight hours. Dom goes in the room with desks and computers. He smiles as he sits at his desk, and signs in. He spends the next few hours doing data entry of the inventory of the Grand Teton Lodge Company’s stores.

I spend my hours pulling vendor inventory sheets out of a file. I find the marked items on the rows and rows of shelves of evergreen lotions, cowboy soaps, pine-cone candles, moose dish towels, elk mugs, bear figurines, Grand Teton postcards, etc. that need to be boxed and sent to other stores. They must be put on the shelves by May 20 when the stores open and the guests arrive.

Sometimes Dom helps me, and we ooh and ahh at how nice the gifts are and wonder who will buy the ice cream scoop with an elk antler handle, or the gigantic pewter moose sculpture.

At lunch we eat our turkey sandwiches, talk about how we miss mom’s homemade wheat bread, and sit in the empty lobby of the lodge and gape at the snowy mountains in the floor-length windows. We wonder how the scene before us will ever turn from white to green.

Will it ever look like this?

The next few hours Fed-Ex or UPS stops by with boxes of all shapes and sizes. We stack them on metal carts and push them through the lodge to the special sorting rooms for the gifts, and clothes. We imagine how full these rooms will be with boxes in a few weeks–waiting to be unloaded, tagged, and put on shelves for guests to peruse.

Then at 4:30p.m. we swipe our employee badges again, and arrive to our dorm room five minutes later.

We quickly change into our workout clothes. I layer and layer, and start my jog on the road that goes into the Grand Teton Park. As I run I gaze in awe at God’s creation, dwell on how blessed I am to live in such untouched wilderness, and pray that I don’t run into a bear, and if I do that I won’t scream, but be calm and back away, and trust that a car would show up to drive me away from harm.

Dom works out in the rec room: doing chin-ups on the bar that is over the door, lifting barbells, and using tension ropes and special things that make push-ups harder. He wishes he had a gym, but this will do.

At dinner time we warm up the chicken we made earlier in the week, boil water for our Thai instant noodles, and add some veggies to the mix. Then we sit and chat with our fellow workers at the table in the hangout area. Every night we hear new ways of how to protect ourselves from bears and hear spine-tingling tales of how bears attacked crazy hikers or tourists.

Then we go back to our room, send emails, call home, and sleep.

Things will change though.

On May 3rd the cafeteria’s doors will open, and the community kitchen’s doors will shut. Gone will be the days of worrying about if we bought enough food for the week on our hour-long drives into town. Finally we will taste this food we have heard good and bad rumors about.

Then on May 30th I will wear a green Pioneer Grill polo shirt, khaki pants, and non-slip shoes and start my job as a waitress where I will get to be around good food, be very busy, make good tips and have fun—so I’ve been told.

Dom’s favorite part of this day is our five minute commute to work. In Bangkok, at one point his commute was 1 hour and 30 minutes in the polluted, humid, hot downtown. He always arrived to work with a sweat-soaked shirt and exhausted.

Now he arrives at work with a dry shirt, and refreshed. Life is good.