The Ultimate Summer Job

Were you lucky enough to have that perfect summer job? Perhaps you didn’t know it at the time, like me.

I was on the grounds crew in Medora for a summer season in the 1990s. Part of the Theodore Roosevelt National Park, Medora is the number one tourist attraction in the state of North Dakota. Fewer than 150 residents live there year-round, but in late-May, the town becomes a bustle. College kids and other transplants bring buzz to the air as they open the town’s seasonal gift shops, restaurants, hotels – and the summer dormitories that house them.

For the first two weeks of the season, workers like me were lined up and picked off each morning to be tested for various jobs around town before final assignments were made: deep cleaning the hotel, setting up retail shops or chopping vegetables in the restaurant. Then, there was the most competitive job: the grounds crew. We all begged to be on the Crew. They walked with superiority amongst all of the summer staff and cast eyes down on those who didn’t make the cut. Each day of that two-week interview, we all performed our best for Don, commander of the Medora Grounds Crew.

An Army veteran with a slow gait and garbled voice, Don came out of retirement a few months each year to turn a set of scrappy kids into a tightly-run grounds crew. Every day, Don wore his U.S. Army baseball-style hat as part of his self-dictated uniform, a good match for his quiet yet authoritative demeanor. He was a town legend. More commanding than the town police, you’d see him driving his oversized 1980’s navy blue GMC suburban truck, inspecting for disorder. We all kept his secret, that beyond his tough exterior he held a teddy bear heart. We occasionally got glimpses of it, usually during off-hours times when his grinning wife was at his side.

Don demanded perfection. He would make us re-rake sloppy areas when our arms were still breaking muscles. He’d give us a 20-minute lecture on how to achieve perfect rows of mower lines. We’d have to replant rows of flowers if the design didn’t delight. Before we punched out each night, we had to pass Don’s inspection of tool and machine clean-up. With each groaning re-work and over-emphasis on precision, we had no clue we were raising our own bar of excellence.

Thursday was mowing day. We’d roll out of the shop on foot, eight of us pushing mowers, two arming weed-whackers. Our crew snaked through town south to north, calculated as we gave its’ needed weekly trim. Don followed, always nearby, in his old blue truck. Sometimes we’d look up and see a glimpse of blue truck two or three streets away (easily visible in small towns like this) yet knew his eyes were on us.

I became fast friends with Sherry. We were both farm girls from different parts of the state, with deep respect for hard work coupled with hard play. She drove a black Pontiac Fiero, with a stereo bass booster making whole use of the trunk. All summer long we played the same curated mix tape. I can’t hear the song “Cotton Eyed Joe” without envisioning myself in the passenger seat experiencing the built-in massager of the trunk bass. Sherry and I even snuck off to the Sturgis Rally that summer, which is a separate story. We were often assigned to flower cart duty. You could hear us laughing as we tore through town in the yellow two-seater, flatbed electric cart, with hair in ponytails and boombox in the back. If you looked closely, you’d see garden hoses and weeding tools strewn in the back as we nurtured the town’s 100,000 petunias and begonias. *

The whole crew became a Crew, with the same rules of hard work and hard play. Along with that comes many teenage practical jokes – but we had to ensure that the blue suburban was clear on the OTHER side of town. One fine day, it was well past five o’clock and we should have had the flower cart plugged in at the maintenance shed. Instead, Sherry and I were teasing the boys in our crew. I can’t remember what we did. I’m pretty sure it had to do with our powers of wielding the water hose on a hot summer day.

Out of nowhere, Don stormed over in his big ol’ Blue. We’ve never heard him yell that loud. And at us, the precious girls of his crew!  Sherry and I were speechless, heads hung low all the way to the maintenance shed. We skipped dinner that night and went back to the staff dormitory.

“He YELLED at us,” Sherry and I would take turns saying. “Don yelled, at US!” We always worked so hard to make him proud, and his disappointment hit us hard.

The next morning, perhaps as part of self-imposed punishment, we went for a 6:00am run on the outskirts of town. That morning we learned Don monitored the outskirts of town in addition to the inbounds of town. The old blue truck comes slowly barreling down the highway, as sure as the sunrise. We weren’t sure what Don would do. Would he still be mad at us disobeying his rules?

Don rolls up to us, his arm extending out of the window with an invisible white flag. He had tears in his eyes as he apologized for yelling at us. Sherry and I breathed a sigh of relief and shed a few tears of our own that Don was no longer mad.

Don died a few years later, his earthly duties complete and Medora mission of beauty passed onto another crew commander. He taught me to take deeper pride in my work, one mower row and one petunia at a time. He taught me the power of a team, all working in synchrony towards a common goal: to bring beauty to the town, and molding a scrappy set of kids into a team that makes memories last a lifetime.

It truly was one of my most memorable summers ever. What about you? What was your Ultimate Summer Job? What imprint has it made on you? I’m all ears.

*100,000 petunias and begonias may or may not be an exaggeration.