'It will feel better when it quits hurting.'
Cowboy Proverb
Reemerging into Wyoming, I began to realize that something was terribly wrong. Something was wrong, even before all my money fell into Jackson Hole.
There was little hint of it along the John D. Rockefeller Memorial Parkway south of Yellowstone, although I’m sure he had a hand in it. There was no insinuation of it in the clouds, billowing over the large rock breasts of the Tetons, looming almost fourteen thousand feet above us, although there was some kind of big American thunder battle going on. Some of the rocks in the range were almost three billion years old, but what was wrong was much younger than that. The bighorn sheep-eating Shoshone used to climb to ‘The Enclosure’ on the upper slope just below the peak of Grand Teton, for vision quests, before the fur ran out.
Whatever fur still existed would be ahead of us, in the enclosures in Jackson, along with what was left of the vision. Some of it may have still existed at Jenny Lake, but I couldn’t be sure, because we couldn’t find a place in the parking lot. Or maybe that was why the epiphany occurred, about what was wrong.
Below the thousand pristine acres of Jenny Lake alpine water, were a thousand less-than-pristine acres of parking lot, full of SUVs and RVs and ATVs and other acronyms, and luggage racks and bike racks and ski racks and board racks. The authenticity they had all come to see, was destroyed in their droves.
Tourists still swarm from Wild Bill Hickok’s real gravesite to the modern patch of kitschy Americana downtown Deadwood, or to the town of William Cody, who transformed Hickok’s tragedy into farce. Behind the Ben Cartwrights, the Daniel Boones, the Huckleberry Finns, the Roy Rogers, and all that dirt road manufactured charm and innocence, is an industrial machine.
The American dream is an assemblage of Orwellian infrastructure, artfully concealed behind a Rockwellian romantic human façade, the space within which we render technology invisible to our senses, while retaining its instrumental capacities.
The Rockwellian veil is the new substitute for authenticity, for living in Nature, for facing death with dignity and courage. There is no requirement for truth, or redemption. We live in a manufactured innocence, a studiously maintained aura of the small-town heartland ideal.
The proportions of the Orwellian heartland defy our spatial intuition. Its pace of evolution defies our sense of time. Humans are blissfully unaware of how much steel surrounds them wherever they go. The real America has become a land of cryptic conversations between radio-frequency ID scanners and software and passing railroad cars, serially numbered energy-efficient widgets manipulating infinite data, completing the veil and sealing the last reality leaks. The interfaces have thickened and acquired intelligence in proportion to our desire to convert Orwellian reality into Rockwellian innocence.
Of those still too poor to do all their shopping in Whole Foods, there are still visceral encounters with back-end realities like the factory-farm processed pink slime world of Tyson Fresh Meats and Cargill Foods.
The veil may still be imperfect, but the special effects are improving. The arms race between technological forces pulling us out of Eden, and the camouflaging forces striving to return us to a simulation of it, is entering its endgame. Marketing narratives are becoming more sophisticated, and American pop culture continues to recycle the long-term memory of Rockwell’s sensitivity.
There are also new enemies of affirmation and redemption, the political progressives who seem exist only to deny bourgeois principles of innocence, loyalty, courage, virtue, self-sacrifice, love, faith, community, or achievement of any kind, are ascendent. Their myth of the nonexistent American yesteryear has itself assumed mythic status by now.
However the sentimental Rockwellian myth persists because it is useful and necessary to maintain the industrial equilibrium and momentum.
But those who want a more seamless illusion must pay more. In 1899, the economist Thorstein Veblen wrote in The Theory of the Leisure Class, described the birth of this deceit in the pastoralized estates of the rich.
Which is how Robyn and I came into Jackson Hole, the most complete Rockwellian veil vale in America, an artificial heartland Eden so impeccable that only the superrich could afford to live there.
Teton County is the wealthiest in the country. Wyoming has no personal or corporate income tax and relatively low property taxes thanks to mining revenue. Even the artificial hearts are Orwellian. Former Vice-President Dick Cheney had a single one-off special defibrillator manufactured by Medtronic with the Wi-Fi feature deactivated, so no one would be able to kill him online. One late night television host was less kind. What better place for a guy who has had four heart attacks than… thin air, rugged hiking and all-beef dinners? Why don't they get some snow for him to shovel…
Robyn and I drove onto the lined pavement of North Milward Street, beside the stream, to the Inn on the Creek. We were made welcome by English and German and Swiss and Welsh flags and shutters on a Tudor beam and riverstone façade, flowerpots, Lindsay, and two ducks. Five months earlier, I had trouble booking the place. Thank you for your interest in Inn on the Creek. Sorry we are booked for the nights you are interested in. Unfortunately, we do not take a waitlist in case of cancellations. We would like to invite you to stop by the property while your in town to take a tour. A week later I took advantage of a cancellation, and booked a ‘creek-side’ room. Broke is what happens when a cowboy lets his yearnins get ahead of his
earnins.
We headed down to the Town Square statue of John Colter on a bucking bronco, and the elk-antler U-shaped arches at each corner of George Washington Park. Ski hill topiary topography rose in the background. Rows of Rockwellian shops lined the square, lined with SUVs and their luggage racks and bike racks and ski racks and board racks. Hide Out Leather Apparel, Turpin’s & Co., Pendleton, Alaska Fur Gallery, Wyoming Outfitters, Jackson Mercantile, Rare Gallery, Wyoming Country Outfitters, Belle Cose, al-ti-tude. Robyn posed for a photo, hiding behind a bronze cowboy named ‘Slim,’ and then said she would meet me later. There were illusions of the Old West- a complete Conestoga wagon on a storefront roof, the Saddle Rock Family Saloon complete with cigar store Indian and Uncle Sam, wagon wheels on the outside of the benches on the boardwalk, fractal white Christmas lights, horses and stars and lanterns and pines and stained glass, and mountains and an Indian headdress and fire hose. A bronze Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer and Becky hovered over a bronze park bench. There was a big bronze moose, a bronze Indian bronze Winnie and Pooh in a hidden corner enclave. Redford and Newman sported Wyoming t-shirts as Butch Cassidy and Sundance in one shop window, near a building mural of a young girl riding a bucking bronco carpet. Davies Reid Rugs Made for the American West. A re-enactment of a gunfight occurred in the late afternoon. There was an undertaker, a hangman, and big-bellied gunfighter. The guns, all Colt Single Action Army issue, were loud. A gun and three of a kind always beats three of a kind.
Gunslingers in the Old West took advantage of the empty chamber by stuffing it with a rolled-up $5 bill. If they came out second best in a duel, they could still pay for a decent burial. A red stagecoach with black horses and yellow-rimmed wagon wheels rolled by. I wandered into a shop selling Mexican onyx rock sheet panels, backlit to show off their orange hearts. In another, was a real triceratops skull, on sale for $458,000.
I told the salesclerk I was looking for something a little more compact, and wandered into the watch place next door. The owner was from Lima, but any innate disposition to negotiate had been thoroughly expunged. I had selected a new tough guy timepiece and asked about a discount.
“It’s only a watch.” He said. “Harrison Ford lives here. He has over three hundred.” I had no reply to that. Even with a whip in one hand and a lightsaber in the other, there was no way I was getting a discount. Besides, I had to check it out with Robyn.
We met in time for our reservation at the Snake River Grill. This would be the most shi shi place on our trip. I had seen people lining up in late afternoon, while I was trying out the triceratops. Under the red and bray and black and white siding, and the logo of an Indian riding a Snake River cutthroat bareback, we entered a world of tinkling glass and clanking cutlery and popping corks and hubbub. Our waitress’s name was Berry, and how could it not have been. Berry had served Harrison Ford, and told us about his three hundred watches. It must be hard to keep a secret in Jackson. The clientele were sporting a few watches themselves. And a good percentage of the precious stones of the planet. An elderly black guy with a turquoise stud earring was seated with a blonde a third his age, at the next table. He never looked at anything but her torso. She never took her eyes off the menu. Each man is good in the sight of the Great Spirit.
Berry did us proud. I had the buffalo carpaccio with giant Spanish capers and arugula on toast (and a sixty dollar buffalo steak), and Robyn had a grilled shoestring potato-encrusted halibut, as good as anything I've cooked at Kenny's cabin in Barkley Sound. Berry nodded, as she poured out a 2010 Domaine Boissonnet Gigondas.
“You get it.” She said. I looked over at Turquoise. She had ordered Dom Perignon. The emptier the barrel, the louder the noise.
Robyn and I said goodnight to Berry, and retired to the extravagant comfort of our creekside room, back at the Inn. We had lived a day of Rockwellian splendor, blissfully unaware of the Orwellian infrastructure that had made it all possible. But the bridle was about to come off the nightmare.
Trucks. There were trucks. Not just the odd downshifting gearbox or the rattlesnake hiss of an occasional airbrake, but the full cacaphony orchestra of the industrial cathedral, rig after eighteen-wheeler after transport after tractor-trailer after flatbed after pickup. Even the plumbing groaned all night, in protest. There is a time for many words, and there is also a time for sleep. But there hadn't been much of either, next morning at breakfast. All the guests were cheerfully discussing their plans for the day, and the owners and staff were cheerfully egging them on. Casey, the owner pouring our fresh-squeezed Rockwell, asked how we slept. He was the astute one. His wife presented me with our Buffalo bill, with the same eye contact that Turquoise's escort had demonstrated in the Grill, the previous evening.
Casey came running after us, on our departure.
“Y’all like Champagne?” He asked. I nodded. He was back in a minute with a bottle of Domaine Carneros.
“Sorry about your sleep.” He said. Nice guy, Casey, although real Champagne would have been better. In the end it appears that Casey lost more sleep than we did.
‘It was nice to meet you both and I am sorry about your lack of
adequate sleep at Inn on the Creek… The noise aspect is variable from
guest to guest with the vast majority expressing a contented night's
rest. As proprietor of Inn on the Creek I attempt to ask every guest:
how did you sleep? This pertinent question allows me to evaluate the
responses and make improvements for our guest's experiences at the
Inn… This summer Jackson is experiencing a major highway
reconstruction project that effects tourists and locals alike. And to add
to the bustling nature of Jackson is the revival of the construction
industry that has been dormant the past four years. Personally I never
felt that I would welcome back all the noises associated with
construction… for your desire to sleep with the window open and the
use of no fan or a/c I can empathize. My wife and I live on the slopes
of Snowking Mountain, one mile from the Inn, with no a/c, prefer the
windows open for the fresh wonderful mountain air but use a fan to
quiet the outside nightly activity of hooting owls, screech owls, the
coyotes howling, our dogs barking at the wandering moose and deer,
and yes late night traffic noise from the valley below. I like the
wilderness sounds! So back to the noise issue. I honestly feel that had
you nighted at other Jackson lodging establishments along the same
route with your windows open and no "white reduction noise" efforts
that you would experienced similar discomforts. Closing windows and
using a fan definitely reduces outside noise issues. I would say the
majority of our guests utilize those techniques and succeed in
securing a restful night. That being said, I know this offers you no
appeasement. Can I stop traffic from 10:00 pm to 7:00am?’
No, Casey, you can’t. The Orwellian is inexorable, the Rockwellian fragile, the world noisier, the sign on the Inn that morning prescient. Vacancy.
Before we left Jackson, Robyn wanted to have ‘another look round.’ We stopped into an art gallery of track lighting and Old West memories.
Woodrow F. Call: There's durn people makin' towns everywhere.
Gus McCrae: And it's our fault, too.
Woodrow F. Call: Our fault?
Gus McCrae: Well, we chased out the Indians, didn't we? Hung all the
good bandits. Did it ever occur to you that everything we
done was a mistake? You and me done our work too
well, Woodrow. Hell, we killed off all the people that
made this country interesting to begin with, didn't we?
Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove
Perhaps not all the people. The diva dressed in leather and silver and turquoise behind her desk was interesting. Above her oversized Stetson hung two pink and purple cartoons of cowboys and cowgirls, playing pool and pinball.
“Just looking.” We said, in reply to her inquiry. The quickest way to double your money is to fold it over and put it back into your pocket. But I did buy the watch and, while I was doing that, and not paying attention, Robyn left and returned, with a short rope, a sweet smile, and a hot brand.
“You have to see this.” She said. Of course I did. She took my hand and led me down the boardwalk, providing a glimpse at how painful this was going to be. We entered another gallery, another dimension. He had half glasses, and half a smile.
“Turpin.” He said. “Ron Turpin.” I was thinking Dick, as in highway robbery.
“You from Vancouver Island?” He asked. I nodded.
“I used to be a guide there.” He said.
“Really.” I said.
“Yep.” He said. “Shot a lot of bears in your back yard.” There seemed to be a lot of that going around. I was wearing my Preserve BC Wildlife t-shirt. But it isn't hunger that drives millions of armed American Males to forests and hills every autumn, as the high incidence of heart failure among the hunters will prove. Somehow the hunting process has to do with masculinity, but I don't quite know how.
“You must have a disabled brother in Bozeman.” I said. For a flicker of a moment, he looked annoyed. Ron used to take his pleasure in the destruction of the rare and beautiful, but somewhere along the carnage, he was reborn as a sculptor, and a missionary. Ron carried his message to China, but I suspect there was too much noise for his signal.
“I’m a Christian now.” He said. Oh joy. He pulled out the bronze.
Robyn likes frogs. I had to admit that this one was masterfully done. I asked him how much. He told me, like he was lining up on a bear. I offered him less, but I had no negotiating room. Anything I did now would only make me look tighter than the bark on the tree outside in the sidewalk.
“It isn’t worth fussing about unless the bone is showing or you ain’t got no feeling in it.” He said. I bought the frog.
“God bless.” He said, as we were leaving. It was too late for all that. All my buffalo bills went ballistic in Jackson; my money had lasted about as long as a rattler in a cowboy’s boot.
On our way to the exit, Robyn and I went by the Cowboy Bar's tan and blue and tin and neon bucking bronco marquis, to visit the old Wort Hotel. Inside the men's room was blonde cartoon cowgirl cleavage on a wooden rocking horse, with a feather duster for a tail. But the only authenticity in Jackson came in the form of the bronze couple hugging at foot of stairway, wrapped around the bannister at the bottom of the staircase with the big elk head on the fireplace at the top. At first it looked like an embrace of joy, until you looked down, at the broken bronze wagon wheel beside them.
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