Brandon R. Schrand’s “The Enders Hotel”

By Jenny Shank, 5-16-08

The Enders Hotel
By Brandon R. Schrand
University of Nebraska Press
230 pages, $17.95

Brandon R. Schrand’s vivid new memoir chronicles his childhood growing up in the Enders Hotel in Soda Springs, Idaho.  In the 1970’s, Schrand’s grandparents restored the place, originally built in 1919, and welcomed all kinds of people, especially the itinerant laborers of the region.  Schrand, who teaches creative writing at the University of Idaho, moved back and forth to the Enders as his mother’s and stepfather’s jobs came and went.  “Because we were job seekers,” he writes, “we endured the perpetual ebb and flow of work—the overtime followed, always, by the lay-offs, the shut-downs, the walkouts.”

Eventually the family settles in to live in the hotel permanently, offering Schrand a front-row seat to a revolving show of humanity that included drunks, homeless, ex-cons, murderers, and all manner of other colorful people who came to stay in the hotel, drink in its bar, and eat in its café.

Schrand’s tale includes some of the normal rituals of a rural Idaho boyhood, such as shooting lessons at a firing range, a hunting trip (distinctive because Schrand’s grandmother takes him hunting), fun with a nearby geyser, and an outdoor clubhouse where he and his friends hatch schemes, one of the more innocent of which was to build a Huck Finn-style raft out of stolen wooden pallets.  The craft proves only barely river-worthy, floating below the surface of the water as the boys ride it. 

But because Schrand grows up in a family of recovering alcoholics (with a 1920’s bootlegger forebear) and spends a lot of time working and hanging out around the Enders, witnessing adults’ traumas, there is much that’s uncommon about his childhood, too, such as a shooting on the barroom floor when Schrand is a toddler, a touching encounter with an artist who stays in the Enders while she tries to stop drinking, and a strange incident in which one of Schrand’s substitute teachers, who works part time at the café, helps him to cheat on a test.

Schrand’s early years at the Enders, before he is saddled with endless chores, are an uncomplicated joy, as he tags along behind his grandfather, who calls him “The Brat,” and enjoys unlimited soda fountain drinks.  “To run all the staircases and hallways in such a place and to eat every meal in a café was nothing short of paradise,” Schrand writes, “The long yellow lunch counter in the café was L-shaped and looked like sunshine.  And for every meal I would sit at a different barstool making myself at home.”

One of the blights on his childhood, however, is the unpredictable behavior of his parents.  Schrand describes some physical abuse at their hands, but The Enders Hotel isn’t a slash-and-burn tell-all.  He describes clearly what happened, but he doesn’t stand in judgment; as a grown man he seems to understand and forgive their behavior.  Early in the book, Schrand describes a disturbing scene in which his drunken mother stumbles into the café in a “boozy staggered gait” and demands that Brandon leave with her, while a lunchtime crowd watches the spectacle.  She snatches him by the wrist and drags him out, cussing him and hurting him.  But the next day she apologizes, and vows to quit drinking, which she appears to accomplish.  Throughout the rest of the book, she is a steady, hardworking presence. 

Schrand’s relationship with his stepfather Bud Schrand proves more complicated.  Bud is a union electrician who is in and out of work due to the sketchy economy of the times.  When he’s out of work, he pitches in at the Enders, but it’s plain that his status there troubles this proud man.  As Brandon gets older, he’s assigned more and more jobs by his father, who holds him to such exacting standards that no teenager could live up to them, and when Bud deems that the job done in a “half-assed” way, he occasionally smacks Brandon.

The ongoing drama with Schrand’s parents and his beloved, generous grandfather’s worsening emphysema constitute the overarching plot, but while these elements simmer, Schrand moves from story to story, introducing one colorful character after another, some of whom linger for only a few pages before they move on from the hotel and this book.  But these figures loom much larger in Schrand’s imagination, such as Trapper Jim, a homeless man whom Schrand supplies with kitchen scraps in exchange for some muskrat traps of his own, and two “hard” looking men who die when they pass out or fall asleep in their running car.

Schrand seems to measure himself against the men who come and go from the Enders as he grows older, always seeking his troubled biological father, and his activities with his friends become less innocent, as those of all boys do.  They collect discarded bottles behind bars and drink the contents, and progress from smoking cigarettes to a failed attempt at smoking loose-leaf tea, and then on to actual drugs.  Luckily for readers, Schrand lands on his feet, and proves himself a top-notch yarn spinner with this richly described, poignant memoir.

Brandon Schrand will appear at Common Knowledge Bookstore in Sandpoint, Idaho (May 16, 4:30 p.m.), Fact & Fiction in Missoula (June 13), and at The Enders Hotel in Soda Springs, Idaho (June 30, 5 p.m.).