On the counter by the register was a line of business cards in little plastic holders. He noticed that three of them were for real estate agents. He took one of each and stuffed them into his shirt pocket. “I’m sorry for turning your place into a dinner theater,” he said.
“It’s okay. We’re still doing breakfast,” Jenny said with a wink.
___
Sophia turned off the highway and followed the long line of taillights that led through the crowded cluster of hotels, gas stations, and fake frontier buildings outside of Bryce Canyon. She was listening to the audiobook of Far from the Madding Crowd, and she thought to herself how ironic it was that the only traffic she dealt with anymore was in national parks.
She had been listening to a section of the book where Bathsheba and Troy encountered a pregnant woman on the road who was destitute and making her way painfully toward the Casterbridge workhouse. She was Fanny, Troy’s old love. Troy sent Bathsheba ahead in the carriage before she could recognize the woman, then he gave Fanny all the money in his pocket. She spent the last of her strength reaching her destination, and a few hours later, she died in childbirth, along with the baby. Their coffin was later brought to Troy and Bathsheba, who discovered the two bodies inside.
As Sophia sat in the backed-up traffic, waiting to get through the entry station, she thought about the bodies she’d seen in museums, mummies desiccated and sometimes entwined. She thought about the ones she’d seen in photographs curled together in stone burial cists. One pairing from Mexico was layered in yellow and blue feathers, the bodies decorated with turquoise. Sophia realized that behind all the data, context, and information, there was a great sadness to the ruins she studied, a sorrow the artifacts would only sometimes reveal. The rest of the stories came from what Dr. Songetay called a historical imagination. He caught hell for that term from his colleagues but never walked it back.
The swirl of thoughts triggered by her book, and the idea of mummies trapped forever in museums, made her eyes misty. The whole purpose of Thomas Hardy was to give her something to think about that wasn’t archeological, but at this point in her life, her work was a black hole that pulled everything into it. At the entry station to Bryce Canyon, she could have used her government plate to skirt the line, but she wanted to talk to her friend Lucy, who was working the gate today. She even moved over, so she’d be in her lane, then she rolled down her window and waited. The two of them met during the seasonal employee orientation. Lucy smiled when she saw her.
While Lucy helped visitors on the other side, Sophia checked her phone for messages.
“Oh crap, are you crying?” Lucy asked, pointing to Sophia’s face.
“Me?” Sophia said, dabbing her eye with the pad of her finger. “No. Well, yes. It’s this stupid audiobook I’m listening to. I should stick with the Shins, right?”
“How’s the research?”
“It’s good. I need to crunch some numbers, though.”
“I’d love to get out in the field,” Lucy said, gesturing to her sandstone enclosure and the lines of cars. “What book is it?”
“Far from the Madding Crowd,” Sophia said.
“I love that book. Well, I saw the movie,” Lucy said.
Sophia sat straight. “Both are good. I better get moving before they honk. It’s been a crazy couple of days. I’ll take you out sometime and we can catch up. Text me.”
“Yes. You’re doing a talk at the lodge today, right?”
“Yep. I’m supposed to share my research project with the taxpayers. Here’s to transparency.”
“Right? I will be stuck out here. So, break a leg.” Lucy gave her a double thumbs-up.
Sophia passed through the entry gate, crossing the threshold from the regular world to the front country of the park, the most artificial of transitions. She pulled ahead, plodding along with the rest of the traffic past the visitor’s center with its stone, timber, and glass architecture—half college campus, half shopping mall—designed for the visitor who can’t be without amenities for even an afternoon.
Sophia meandered through the parking lot and turned down the incline to the drab backside of the building where the staff parked. It reminded her of the false front sets on a movie backlot; with two and a half million pairs of eyes on the front, there’s no sense wasting money where it won’t be seen. In 1916, when they set up the National Park Service, they couldn’t have imagined all this.
As she was parking, she ran the legislative language through her head: parks were meant to preserve the scenery and nature and historical objects, and somehow also leave them unimpaired. All these buildings and roads and buses seemed like the opposite of preservation. Not all the parks were circuses like this one, though. Where she was doing her fieldwork, there was only backcountry, no offices or kiosks, no pavement or parking lots. The contrast was extreme. Everyone working for the Park Service or the BLM seemed to understand these contradictions, but all of it was complicated. Learning the ins and outs clarified very little.
She took her backpack to the door, where she punched in a key code. The air was filled with a deep pine scent and the hush of the ponderosas. It seemed like a shame to come up here just to go inside, but she had paperwork to complete before her presentation, or she wouldn’t get paid. She was also hoping to grab a few minutes of the park archeologist’s time.
She headed upstairs and checked her small mail cubby. Inside was a newsletter, an invitation to a potluck for seasonal employees, and a schedule of her interpretive presentations for the rest of the summer. There were three more to do after this one. She stuffed everything into her backpack and went down the hall to the archeologist’s office, whose door was open.
“Hi, Dalinda,” Sophia said. “You got a minute?”
Dalinda looked up and cracked a smile, followed by an eye roll that Sophia wasn’t sure how to interpret. She was wearing the gray-and-green uniform, her hair in a bun. Sophia’s eyes lingered on Dalinda’s silver, turquoise, and coral earrings. When Dalinda relaxed her smile, her crow’s feet disappeared. Sophia then noticed her desk, which was strewn with three-ring binders. “Come in and sit,” Dalinda said. “I’m just finishing an email.”
“If you’re busy, I can—”
“It’ll be worse later,” Dalinda said, beckoning.
Sophia set her backpack on the floor and sat down while Dalinda returned to her typing.
The office walls were covered in maps. A few were framed watercolors capturing the exquisite misapprehensions nineteenth-century cartographers had about the American West. The rest were working maps thumbtacked to the wall and flagged with notes on colored squares. They were plain but beautiful in their own way, like mathematical formulas, exact where the others were imagined. One displayed the distribution of debitage in lithic scatters. Another revealed stratigraphic layers of Indigenous habitations. Each map told a different story of the people who once lived here. Sophia thought about how maps charted space but also invoked time. Every map described a place but also told a story about the thoughts and attitudes of the age that produced it.
Sophia unzipped her backpack, took out a notebook, and wrote that idea down.
Another of Dalinda’s maps showed an array of sacred sites in the park. This one had been marked and amended by hand many times. It was part of an ethnographic project Dalinda was working on with tribal liaisons. Native people had been bitten by the government so many times, the project was constantly at risk. So much of the information here was protected. Somebody couldn’t just walk in and get access to it, even with a Freedom of Information Act request.