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Those summer seasons when I worked at the state park I carried a confusing set of keys ringed on a clip that was hooked to my belt loop and jingle-jangled when I walked but which I couldn’t hear when I was pushing the mower or swinging the weed-whip.
The smallest key was easy, and it was a padlock key to unlock the padlock on the shed where we kept the supplies and tools to clean the latrines.
The key with the big thumb was easy, too, for being so big, and that opened the garage door of the big newer garage where we kept pallets of firewood and the thresher and our trailers.
Three keys, however, were the same type: “SC1” in hardware-store lingo, which meant the most common key blank for Schlage door locks. And to distinguish them, otherwise unremarkable, I named them by the profile of their teeth.
One I called The Grand Canyon because it had one deep valley in the teeth, V-shaped of course and not square-bottomed with the Colorado River running at the bottom. That key opened both the old garage where we kept our Polaris Ranger and small engines, and also the smaller, taller garage with the great well-water tanks with thousands of gallons of water in them. I’ve never been to the Grand Canyon.
Another key I called The Twin Peaks because it had two valleys cut in the shaft of the key. I suppose I should’ve called it Twin Valleys, but I saw peaks. So, as I looked down at it, holding it in my right hand, the key was peak – valley – peak – valley – thumb. That opened the door of the pump house where the spring was artesian and the shed was built right over the water and pumped it. That was high up the hill and it was curious how a spring could come up so high over the river valley. I never watched Twin Peaks. I think it would’ve been right in my wheelhouse, too, back when I was in high school.
The third key opened the SAN building, which was the building with hot showers and running water and toilets. There were many short teeth on the key, and because they looked like a range of high mountains, I called it The Continental Divide.
I have been eye-level with the Continental Divide. That was in the Windy Range, on the Wind River Indian Reservation. My brother and I hiked up from our base camp among the glacial lakes at 10,000 feet, up along the glacier-melt brook that fell down the mountain, up the swale among the wildflowers and mosquitoes, up the pass to the saddle, and turning left up to the highest point on Horse Mountain. “Twelve-point-two-times-ten-to-the-three feet,” said my brother, who was studying engineering at the university at the time.
We looked around, and below us were glaciers, and then the Wilson’s Creek basin, and the hazy brown central Wyoming plains, and the pass going down one direction and down another, and then turning fully we stared straight ahead West and there was the Continental Divide white and gray some many miles away.
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