2006-08-24 - 3:27 a.m.
Jackson Hole, Wyoming.
I was last here in Jackson Hole, and in particular at the Jackson Lake Lodge, some six years ago, in the year 2000. It is a weird thing, though. While I am here, I am more aware than ever of the nature of time passing. The hotel hasn’t changed a bit since I visited last time, with the possible exception of the fact they now have wireless in the main lodge. This doesn’t do me any good, of course, as the wireless card in my computer has decided to take this week as just the right time to conk out.
Like a cranky old man, I totally disapprove of the wireless-equipped main lounge, as it takes the focus away from the wonderful view, and puts it on the idiotic people, sitting around in their chairs, surfing the net or doing “work” that they should have just put aside since they’re supposed to be on vacation. It strikes me that it would be more reasonable if they put the wireless in the various rooms, and left the main lounge, with its gigantic floor-to-ceiling view of the misty Mount Moran and of the sprawling moose meadow below, timelessly un-connected.
In addition, I’ve noticed that the demographic of the hotel’s staff has entirely changed. Six years ago, the staff here was comprised of young and cute mostly Midwestern college kids, who spent the summers out here so they could work some place pretty, while making a little bit of cash besides.
It seemed as though these kids mostly worked the restaurants and snack bars and stores, and then they’d go hiking and partying on their days off. By day, they’d wear the hideous black slacks and uniform shirts, with the little “Hello My Name is Brad (or Sherrie)” name plates. On their off time, though, they’d don their jeans and t-shirts, grab their back packs and baseball caps, and head out on the trail for various adventures, their sweet blonde hair billowing in the breeze, their muscular, toned calves heaving in their jogging shorts.
These days, the staff at the Jackson Lake Lodge LOOKS the same, but none of them are Americans! The hiring company seems to have followed the lead of the gay porn industry and gone totally international, searching the East European third world to find good looking white kids willing to work for little or no money. I think that in recent years, the young American college crowd are unwilling to slave for the low wages offered by the hotel company – so they are recruiting workers from Bratislava, Bulgaria, and Macedonia, where the kids are so desperate to get an American work visa, they’ll work for next to nothing the various cafes and restaurants.
When the smug, portly, and horrible American customers bark out orders and snarl idiotic commands, the peasant class cuties think nothing of it. Well, that isn’t true. The foreign kids treat the American customers with an attitudinous hauteur that is oddly repellant when seen at an American hotel. You’d expect it in Switzerland, I suppose.
American college kids, by contrast, will just walk out, unless they are paid a lot of money. The parallels to the gay porn world is borderline disturbing – gay porn producers are more and more populating their films with East European lads because they come cheap. Yet, it’s amusing that, even though the hotel owners are doing the exact same thing – hiring only good looking kids for no money – they get to lure them with US work visas, while such inducements are totally out of place when pursuing a gay porn career. And yet, the kids are being hired totally for the same purposes – because American kids won’t do the work!
The mountains and the hiking trails haven’t changed a bit, either. However, six years on, I am almost unrecognizable. In 2000, I was a luscious young thing in my mid-30s. Now I am an ogre in my 40s. How horrible! In 2000, I pranced up and down these trails like a young goat, spry and perky, with all the future before me. Now, I haul my obese bulk up the trail, puffing and panting, howling and moaning, like a ghastly old ghoul.
Today, I went up a trail that I climbed six years ago. I had totally forgotten it, I must say, and I only found myself remembering bits of it as I discovered them on the trail. It was rather like a soap opera character who has amnesia. Do you know what I am talking about? The flaxen haired blonde girl comes back to Arcadia with no memory, but sees flashes off things, here and there, until she recalls everything. It was the same thing with this trail. I was all, “Say, doesn’t this trail lead out onto a tiny pond? Why, yes! There it is!”
In fact, if I must be honest, the entire trip has taken a surreal turn, due to the fact that my stepfather, he who was nearly arrested at the ticket gate for not having valid ID, has developed a wicked case of pneumonia. It actually began a few days ago, when my stepdad suddenly came down with a chest cold, which he believed he contracted at the home of the minister where we stopped en route to Jackson. Kids, you see. They are filthy, children are, and the little one had a bit of a cold, I believe.
My stepdad, being of rather precarious condition generally, absorbed the kids’ illness almost immediately. The general consensus is that he inhaled a bit of baby snot, or some goozy salmonella-y milk. We who are more physically fit are able to just shake such things off – but he is more of a hot house flower. And so, just that night, there he was, wheezing and coughing in the most horrific way.
During the first couple days of the trip, he begged off the various hikes that my mother and I went on, claiming that he was too sick. So he missed a quite delightful hike up to Rendezvous Mountain, via an aerial gondola, through several fields of beautiful wildflowers. Then he missed the little hike we took to Emma Matilda Lake, which was crystal clear and blissfully quiet, entirely deserted except for the two of us.
Through all this, my stepdad remained miserably sequestered in his hotel room, sleeping most of the day and night, and making the most ghastly moaning and coughing noises. It was clear that whatever was going on, he had much more than just a chest cold. Fortunately, the Jackson Lake Lodge has its own clinic, perched next to the horse corrals, and so off my stepdad went the next morning for a check up. With a few flicks of her wrist, the doctor was instantly able to diagnose a case of pneumonia, and once she saw my stepdad’s insurance card, well, she picked up the phone to dial us an ambulance to the nearby town of Jackson Hole. I have no doubt that it would have been a Lexus ambulance, crewed by Nubian slaves serving peeled grapes and morphine frosting.
We quickly nipped that notion in the bud and my mother vowed to drive dad to the hospital herself, to a savings of something like a thousand bucks. It actually turns out that the Jackson Hole hospital is very sweet, since it is reportedly where a large number of vacationing multi-millionaire tycoons go when they are in town on a fishing trip and they have the ill fortune to have a heart attack. Yet, one must confess that from the moment we arrived at this hospital, as pleasant as it was, the vacation was more than effectively over. And how could it not be?
The poor stepdad was fixed up with various oxygen masks and IV tubes which pinged and beeped most unnervingly. He looked just like one of the characters on a soap opera hospital scene! The doctors decided to keep him overnight – and then the night after – so they could run nebulizer tests and administer various ointments and spooky elixirs.
It is an odd thing to be in a place known world over for pleasure and beauty – but to be there to take care of a sick relative. I can recall how I flew down to Las Vegas to visit my dying biological father – the surreal feeling of finding mortality and illness in a land of pleasure and joy was very similar.
And because my stepdad was ensconced at the hospital, unable to do more than pout and fret, but otherwise in perfectly decent condition with no danger of dying, my mother and I were at wits’ end. There wasn’t actually any need for us to perform “bedside duty,” which stepdad would have resented anyway. So we’d visit stepdad for a few hours and then we’d go for a hike up some picturesque hill. We’d then go and visit him again, and watch as he’d eat his loathsome hospital dinner. He’s a diabetic, but not terribly conscientious about it, but the hospital staff put him on the diabetic diet, which meant he could not have ice cream for dessert. They wouldn’t even let him have tartar sauce on his fried fish sandwich! But they would let him keep his mayonnaise – go figure. After watching him eat, mom and I went off to this fabulous chuckwagon barbecue in the middle of the park. Really, though, how much could we enjoy the food with all this on our mind? Well, quite a bit, actually – but it was still sad and unsettling, knowing that stepdad was in the hospital.
Tomorrow is likely to be a bit of a test, as stepdad has been released from the hospital, but with this gigantic and humongous oxygen-generating machine. We’re supposed to drop the damn thing off at the airport, but he will need tanks of oxygen aboard the plane. How someone will be allowed on board a plane without legal ID and a gigantic oxygen tank, which could be filled with Muslim explosives for all the TSA goons know, is ultimately anyone’s guess.
