A View To Drive For

Wyoming is like a whole 'nother world, light years away from Washington. It's the least populous state in the Union, yet if you were to ask a foreigner to describe their image of the United States, chances are they would describe, at least in part, Wyoming. Wyoming seems to exist in a kind of temporal limbo, where the Old West won't lie quietly in it's shallow grave. Here, cyber cafes sit next to old bars, Thai food across from an outfitter's, sushi and sled rides.

The town of Jackson embodies all of this, it's primary industry is tourism, leading it to embrace this cultural schizophrenia. During the summer months, tourists can watch western-style shootouts and walk on pseudo-authentic wooden sidewalks eating Haagen-Dazs. Somehow, it's just not my thing. During the winter, except for a few skiers and hunters, the tourism trade shuts down. It can give you the feeling of being in a ghost town, especially on Sundays, when the stores close early, and no one is to be found.

It's a half hour drive from Jackson to the Teton Science School. Starting along a road that winds alongside the mountains. On your left are steep, forbidding hills out of a spaghetti western, no doubt full of bloodthirsty Indians (in fact played by out-of-work Italians). To the right is the National Elk Refuge, a broad, flat plain continuing for miles until it terminates in hills. Herds of elk range across it, grazing. You enter Grand Tetons National Park and turn onto Gros Venture Road, a two lane asphalt strip through the plain. Signs make it abundantly clear that you are not alone on this road: "Caution: Animal Migration Area", signs for bison crossing, and one in the Burma Shave tradition extolling you to drive carefully, lest you make a widow of some cow moose.

Thoroughly warned you barrel down the road, your head on a swivel, scanning the horizon for the brown, shaggy lumps of doom that are bison. Along the side of the road are small turnouts, ever so often you can see a large pick-up idling; inside is a hunter, sipping his coffee and glassing the horizon with binoculars. The man is looking for an elk to wander into range, at which point he will leap from his warm Ford cocoon, walk a few paces off the road, and blast away with his rifle. Call me a purist, but somehow that just doesn't seem sporting. Several miles down, the town of Kelly flares briefly and dies down just as quickly. Kelly's claim to fame is a post office, a store (open only during the summer) and a cluster of yurts. Kelly's population, by it's very nature transient and non-conformist, found the Mongolian mobile home well-suited to the plains, swept by the cold, secular winds.

After Kelly the yellow line disappears from the road, a few dirt tracks branch off like sulking children into the hills. A right on Ditch Creek Road takes you into the hills, and rounding a corner, brings you to the Teton Science School. My home for the next month.

The buildings here look very much in place, belonging to the landscape. A dining hall with large picture windows facing the Tetons dominates the front of the campus. You can sit, warm and sipping tea, looking at a panorama actually worthy of the term "epic". The Tetons rear out of the horizon, rough hewn by a giant. Jagged, craggy, and breathtaking. The Tetons are young mountains, formed by great geologic upheaval. Watching the sun slowly put it's fingers on the mountain in the morning, tickling the peaks, then slowly highlighting it's way down the slope, is one of the most pleasant sights to ever wake up to. It feels as though there is no distance between you and the mountains, at the same time fearful and benevolent; the lonesome plains in between erase time and distance. The schizophrenia of Jackson slips away under the stare of the Tetons.

We're not in Kansas anymore.

-Trey