Sitting on a trash bag bursting with beer bottles and baby diapers, drinking our mandatory morning Red Bulls, my coworker and I watched a full-grown buffalo meander between the hotel cabins we cleaned to pay our rent. We were planning what hike we could squeeze in if we managed to get off work by 4 p.m. — we had this conversation nearly every day.
“Dude, this is, like, the best job in America,” one of us would inevitably say.
“And nobody knows about it.” This was always the response.
My coworker Braydon and I are both 19 and coincidentally have both lived in southeastern Michigan for a decent but not complete chunk of our lives. More importantly, we both associate the state with a misery so all-encompassing that we had to flee to Wyoming to outrun it.
When I was 16, I moved from bustling melting-pot New Jersey to the small-town Midwest. This made me who I am, but also made me painfully aware that there is a happier world outside of my hometown. As if I’m in a too-long marriage, I am obligated to love Michigan for all it’s given me (my best friends and my in-state tuition) but I can’t help but resent its smallness and sameness.
The most significant difference between Braydon and I is that I’ve been in college for the past year, and he has not. This makes him seem older than me for some odd reason, like he’s been out in the adult world while I’ve been forking over too much money to play at a more advanced version of high school.
Yet, there we both were, in the middle of June in Yellowstone National Park, working as housekeepers for eight hours a day in exchange for a bed, food and the complete freedom to explore two million acres of God’s country as soon as we clocked out.
Months before all of this, I was in my East Quad Residence Hall twin XL bed and feeling like a loser.
It was the tail end of my freshman year and I didn’t have an internship or a study abroad gig or some other third thing that would bring me closer to that vague finish line. Perhaps I hadn’t networked hard enough. Maybe if I had joined more clubs or “locked in,” things would be different. I sat in the Shapiro Undergraduate Library during finals season while I should have been studying, sadly thumbing through LinkedIn wondering how so many of my peers had found the time to be volunteers or leaders or founders in high school while I’d been an employee at various fast food drive-thrus. I felt too comically underqualified to even apply to any summer opportunities, yet I knew I had to leave my hometown — if not for the sake of my resume, then for the sake of my sanity.
I pictured the summer I would have in Michigan: the swarms of mayflies and the suffocating humidity, the flat drive past the never-ending construction and long nights bussing tables in an ailing restaurant for $12 an hour (post-raise). I pictured my friends and I wandering department stores, buying nothing, talking about how we’re all grown up, how we need to get it together, how so-and-so has joined the ranks of engaged teenagers that seem to plague our graduating class.
So, I started googling. My searches included, but were not limited to: “job with housing”; “how to live and work out of state no qualifications”; “escape routes near me with roof”.
Then, I found it.
Turns out, there’s a not-so-secret job market brewing under this one, commonly referred to as seasonal work, in which participants travel to the beautiful places we pay thousands to visit — not to vacation, but to work. Popular locations include national parks, ski lodges, resorts or small businesses in tourist towns.
While all ages flock to these jobs, the majority of employees are in the extremes of life: their 20s or their 70s. The work itself typically includes housekeeping, food service, retail and management. If you’re lucky, room and board is deducted from paychecks at a rate much lower than rent in Ann Arbor.
Through an obsessive search of various seasonal work job boards, I applied to everything I could. Weeks later, I landed an interview for the position of “Yellowstone Housekeeper”. This turned out to be a seven-minute phone call with a nice lady from Denver, who basically asked if I was a criminal and when I said no, she told me I started on the first of May. Within the hour I exchanged a decent chunk of my savings for a plane ticket to Bozeman, Montana.
So, if it’s that easy, why isn’t everyone doing this all the time?
Well, most seasonal jobs are geographically isolated, lack stability and are generally unrealistic for adults with dependents. With no insurance and no 401(k), the very nature of the work is temporary and necessitates putting a decent amount of trust in flaky companies and nice ladies from Denver.
Additionally, there’s a certain type of person that is willing, if not eager, to abandon the earthly world for six months to live in the woods — and they aren’t always the clean-cut sort. Drug addiction and sexual harassment are rampant issues in seasonal work, solid department management is a coin toss and the company I worked for had a less than stellar reputation with conflict resolution. Suffice to say, my living situation was worth the $600 a month I paid for it — no potable water, unpleasant food, no air conditioning and the closest hospital roughly two and a half hours away.
And even so, the three months I spent in Yellowstone were easily the best of my life. I was overpaid to scrub shit off of toilets. I summited mountains, swam in glacial lakes and slept under the stars. I, a fundamentally misanthropic person, made effortless and unconditional friendships. We hiked together, took road trips to Walmart and built hopeless campfires in the rain. I derived a primal, unbeatable joy from being in the mountains and being with people.
Of course, it’s easy to be happy in a beautiful place with beautiful people. This is not the revelation. In fact, there is no revelation — there is just the gradual realization that life, at its best, is actually quite simple and does not necessarily require an exclusive summer gig with a low acceptance rate.
Back in April, I had jokingly told a friend — who was panicking over her lack of an internship — that she should just move to Wyoming with me. She turned to me with a blank stare and asked how screwing around for a summer would look on her resume.
At the time I didn’t think much of this easy dismissal of an extraordinary opportunity simply because it did not directly involve professional development. Now I understand this comment as proof of the ugly culture that feeds especially well in competitive environments, in places like the University of Michigan.
Working in Yellowstone, there was a noticeable lack of privilege in the air — something I didn’t realize I had grown so accustomed to having lived in Ann Arbor for the past year. It was refreshing to have a conversation in which all participants were not paying tuition to participate. It was a much needed breather from The College Experience — a term invented by the people who can afford it.
Of course, I am one of these people. After all, I chose to go to the University over a “less prestigious” school to which I had a full-ride. However, I didn’t choose to pay such a pretty penny for the experience. I chose the University for the name and the bragging rights — something that I was told would hold weight when I went out to get an adult job in the real world.
However, in this real world of Yellowstone, nobody gave a damn about the name of my college. Even the fact that I was in college didn’t seem to impress people. The majority of educated folk were the older people, of whom I met many. They held degrees and former careers as botanists and brain surgeons and businessmen, yet came to work in Yellowstone for almost the same reasons I did — the feeling that they had done what they were supposed to do, reached the finish line and still were not completely satisfied.
In a competitive environment like the University, the finish line is always in sight, but just out of reach. Everything we do is in some pursuit of the Next Big Thing. After we ace our classes, we must pick the correct assortment of pre-professional clubs. We must acquire the necessary leadership positions, and post about said positions on LinkedIn. We must attend networking events, choose the correct people to speak to and be fundamentally memorable. We must find and secure a research position that deals completely and perfectly with our desired career path (and also post this on LinkedIn). We must work hard in order to play hard, because don’t forget — balance is key! In all of this, there is very little time to screw around.
This summer, while screwing around, I lived 200 yards away from Old Faithful geyser, one of the most iconic attractions in Yellowstone. There are roughly 1,000 geysers in the world, half of which are in Yellowstone National Park. It is a remarkable, once-in-a-lifetime sort of place.
While Old Faithful is not the most impressive geyser (my personal favorite is Lone Star Geyser), she is famous for her timeliness. She gives a show roughly every 90 minutes, which is good for business.
Over the course of the summer, multiple times a day, I watched crowds of hundreds gather, waiting patiently and accumulating more and more people as the time grew closer. When the scalding water would finally burst up, the people would scream and cheer and pull out their phones to record. The eruption lasts for less than five minutes. At the end, the people would clap and then, en masse, clear out of the area and flood the three hotel gift shops in the village to purchase rewards for their patience.
Within one minute, the viewing boardwalk would be empty, sans candy wrappers and soda cans left behind.
The strange clockwork of the tourists fleeing was fascinating to me. They had come to watch Old Faithful because they were told to, wearing their “I <3 MONTANA” t-shirts and their shiny, unused hiking boots. After the show was done, they searched for Next Best Thing to see in the park, because there’s never going to be enough time to see all of it, so they have to do the right things and they cannot waste a minute if this whole expensive venture is going to be worthwhile. There is no time to screw around.
Watching the march of the tourists felt funnily similar to witnessing the collegiate scramble. Both experiences are inherently transactional, yet pointing this out feels uncomfortable. Both the tourist and the student are overwhelmed with a for-no-reason rush to check the boxes, while facing the same sinister pressure: to do it all while having an inordinate amount of fun, or else you’re not doing it right. Both the tourist and the student are spending too much money while wearing too much merchandise.
In the same way I could not grab the tourists by their collars and tell them to wait for the steam to settle, I cannot tell students to ditch the internship and move to Wyoming. My fundamental conditions for the good life — my beautiful place and my beautiful people — are not the same as yours.
All the same, you and I probably need the same reminder: There’s plenty of time to screw around.
Statement Columnist Siena Beres can be reached at sberes@umich.edu.
The post The best job in America: Or, an alternative to the summer internship problem appeared first on The Michigan Daily.
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