Hole

By Vanessa Wong

It crossed my mind a few times last summer that perhaps I had reached some sort of threshold — that maybe I had gone past the point of big, transformative moments.

I dropped out of a graduate program, quit my job and hopped on a plane to Wyoming. Just by clicking around on the Internet, I had found a seasonal job at a resort in Jackson Hole and spent my days waiting and bussing tables.

Nights, after we’d all smell like barbecued meat, I’d sit with the other servers on these crates behind the restaurant and smoke hand-rolled cigarettes.

I had dropped out of school in the middle of the semester, so I was the first of the seasonal workers to arrive for the summer. It started out with just four of us out there every night. The three of them were all townies with other places to be, porch lights waiting on for them somewhere in houses throughout town, their real lives not too far.

But every week, as summer got closer, more and more workers would join us. Eventually, there were a dozen of us on those crates, and it turned lively — with everyone chatting, smoking, making plans for the rest of the night.

Days off, I wandered aimlessly through the couple blocks of town. Or, sometimes, a group of us would take a day trip, heading on occasion, to a nearby lake, where we would swim. The tall mountains loomed in the background.

The resort put me up for cheap in the employee housing. It was really just a dilapidated dorm room, but I should have felt lucky to have it. The space was limited, so not all of the resort employees got it. You had to pass an interview first. The only thing they asked me is why I wanted to spend the season there. Wyoming, I had told them, was kind of a random choice; it seemed far enough away, but didn’t require me to commit to anything too foreign.

I stayed on past the peak season.

When it was slow in the restaurant, they would send me to the kitchen to prep food. I’d stand there, slicing vegetables, thinking about how I had left everything behind in Honolulu, as if I were trying to force some big, epic realization abut my life.

The crates behind the restaurant piled up throughout the summer. They used to hold milk or something, I don’t know. I don’t know where they came from, and it’s like it never dawned on us that we could move them anywhere else.

Vanessa Wong makes art, and your coffee, and studies anthropology.

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