A cook in the Mountains
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The following is an excerpt from “A Cook in the Mountains”, an autobiographical short story about the author’s experiences living and working at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory during one of the “largest annual migrations of field biologists” in the summer of 2019.
I don’t work in kitchens anymore. Bless the chefs, but I’m out. Thankfully I had enough sense to quit drinking when I did, so I at least have my liver to show for it. I still have marks on my hands and arms from various cuts and burns, but those scars don’t hurt anymore, and the ones in my brain are healing too. Back when I stopped drinking, I took a contract for the summer of 2019 to work as a cook at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory in Gothic Colorado. Living and working on national parkland, a summer away from the Texas heat and the revelries of Austin, were both appealing prospects to me as I entered sobriety. And so, off I went to the former silver mining town turned research facility.
At that time I did not know the difference between the term “high altitude”, which casually applies to much of the western United States along with anywhere over 3,000 ft in elevation, and the term “alpine”. I found myself cooking breakfast and lunch for 200 people, at 9,500 ft above sea level, five days a week, from 5:15 am to 1:15 pm, Wednesday through Sunday, for three months. I slept on a bed, with a mattress, on a bed frame, in a canvas tent, with a can of mace for bears, a machete for mountain lions, and nothing but a prayer for moose. The tent had a roof and four walls, measuring 10 x 15 ft. It stood on a concrete slab with a recessed gravel floor, all that remained of the cabin that had been destroyed in an avalanche two winters prior. Nothing sealed the tent’s walls to the floor, and as such, the local ground squirrel population and myself regularly terrified each other. I was at a distinct disadvantage in this dynamic, as I only had one point of egress, whereas the ground squirrels could freely pass through the entire perimeter of the tent.
So I would return to work, huffing and puffing from my strenuous two-minute round-trip walk to-and-from Little Big Top for the second half of my work day. The facilities were absolutely gorgeous. Newly built, the dining hall, kitchen, and support staff amenities were immaculate. Even the steel cage that kept bears out of the kitchen’s food dumpster, recycling, and grease traps was aesthetically designed and pleasing to the eye. It felt like a dream. Partially from the liminal nature of the space when it was not filled with diners, and partially from the surreality of the kitchen itself. I had full access to a brand new, fully equipped kitchen, with the freedom to make whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted to. I’d get there at 5:15 am, set out a continental breakfast by 5:30 for the first set of field researchers, then cook a breakfast buffet for 200 people at 7. At 8 I’d go change, getting back about the time my prep cook and dishwasher would arrive. Then we’d knock out a hot lunch and dessert for Noon, and clean up for the next shift.
The kitchen was clean. Free of the ghosts and grime that can build up over years of industrial use that some kitchens and staff are subject to. I felt like I was the dirtiest thing in that place, but I was working on that. In addition to not drinking, I began therapy. I could no longer employ the well-used coping mechanisms I had relied on for the first decade of my time in the service industry, but I also didn’t have a coked out chef yelling at me for eight hours straight. I did have the responsibility to feed 200 people twice a day, and I had a prep cook and a dishwasher to help me do it. I say help with a lot of love, as most of the dishwashers were college students working for meal tickets, and the prep cook had never worked in a kitchen before, but they were a joy to work with and I couldn’t have done it without them.
What I did have to do without them, was adjust any and all of my recipes for cooking at altitude in a remote facility. The higher in elevation you go, not only is less Oxygen available, but there is less atmospheric pressure in the air, making moisture evaporate faster and water to boil at lower temperatures. At 9,500 ft, water boils at about 195°F, versus the 212°F normal to sea level. Water can’t get hotter than its boiling point, so turning up the heat would just make it evaporate faster. This meant things would need longer to cook, but were also more likely to dry out. Leavening agents and procedures in baking also had to be modified to accommodate the lower atmospheric pressure, and recipes had to be adjusted to anticipate longer baking periods. This made me feel like a chemist, oddly thrust into lab work along with all the other scientists, I was the kind of chemist who makes pizzas and cookies and vegan mac-and-cheese and gluten-free pancakes and other such wondrous what-have-yous.
At the time, I was so depressed, I didn’t think I could be happy ever again. That I could find any sense of accomplishment or positivity in the profession that had pushed me to the verge of a complete breakdown was surprising to say the least. Somehow, in the face of what at times was cartoonishly absurd levels of adversity, I had found my love of cooking again. This was in no small part aided by the people I was lucky enough to work with and feed, an eccentric bunch to say the least, living in the mountains for science.
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Jeremy Cousins, August 2023
In the day time, the temperature would reach over 90°F in the sun, and at night, it was between 30 and 40. It snowed in June. The firewood had not cured, and the wood stove inside the tent had no flue, so the fire would regularly choke itself out with smoke. It would fill the tent, stinging my eyes, nose, and throat, any heat generated lost as I desperately opened the flaps to the frigid night air. By the end of that summer, the inside of the tent was caked with a thick layer of soot. It was retired that year, rest in peace Little Big Top.
The tent was conveniently located, allowing me to sleep in till 5:10 for my 5:15 shift. I would wake up, pull my clothes on over the long underwear, winter socks, scarf, hat, and gloves that I slept in, before trudging blearily to work. After breakfast service ended, I would step back out to Little Big Top to change for lunch, replacing my winter undergarments with regular wear before returning to work.
The unique challenges faced during my time at Gothic were not limited to my sleeping arrangement or my terranean host-family. At that altitude, you get about 30% less Oxygen in the air. The air we breathe is a mixture of gases; Primarily Nitrogen, Oxygen, Argon, and Carbon Dioxide, with Oxygen being the one we need to not die, and several other gases that may or may not cause irreparable damage to the human body at high concentrations. Not considering water vapor; at sea level, air is generally a composition of about 78% Nitrogen and 20.9% Oxygen, with Argon and Carbon Dioxide comprising about 0.93% and 0.03% of the remainder, respectively. The higher you go above sea level, the less Oxygen is available to you. At 1,000ft Oxygen is still plentiful in the air; composing about 20.1% of the gas mixture. At 3,000 ft above sea level, altitude precautions are recommended, as Oxygen then only makes up about 18.6% of the air, or about 88% of the available oxygen at sea level. At 9,500 ft, where I was living and working that summer, Oxygen only accounts for about 14.55% of the air, or 70% of the available Oxygen at sea level. While my ability to function in these conditions did improve after the first few weeks, I still got winded by everything other than sitting or standing for the remaining two months I was there.
However, Oxygen and atmospheric pressure weren’t the only things in short supply at the RMBL kitchen. Food deliveries happened only once a week, and being that far out, if they didn’t deliver something, we didn’t have it. Most days there would be some ingredient or other crucial to the planned meal that wasn’t there. Furthermore, I was responsible for providing options for all dietary restrictions, such as vegan, dairy free, nut free, etc. This called for a lot of what I like to call “recipe improvisation”, which made me feel like a complete and utter madman.
More of an alchemist trying to turn shit into gold than a proper chemist or cook, I would hear myself utter shocking phrases like, “Please don’t let this canned jackfruit chicken salad be an affront to God,” as I snapped back to the grim reality of what I had done in the name of feeding these researchers on any given day; an already troubled mind pushed closer to the brink of insanity by eggless omelets and the wrong kinds of basil. Of course, the recent sobriety and the inability to drink about it compounded my frustrations, but despite these difficulties, I am proud to say that my food was good and well received. The sheer joy on the faces of people when I would wheel out a meal or dessert with a version of it for every dietary restriction, to see people realize they weren’t going to be left out, made me sincerely happy. Having a couple hundred people applaud me for my cooking, as in actually clapping, was an experience I did not have before or after that summer.