Strong was still in Jardine
at the end of June, 1923. The fellows at the mine had just held "a kind of an impromptu field meet." There had been jumping and "tricks of all descriptions." Strong himself had won the high jump and the "stand-on-head" contest. "A Greek here won most all the rest," he said. "He ought to be in the circus, sure can put himself into some awful shapes."
They worked two more days, Strong and his friend did, then set off to "ramble again," though the boss wanted them to stay longer. "If there would be any trouble getting someone else, I would stay," Strong said, "but there's a lot of men here."
...
I have been to Gardiner, Montana. I have been up the mountain to Jardine. It was March, 1999. There was a lawn in Gardiner full of snowmobiles for rent, twenty snowmobiles or more, though snow was gone from village streets and lawns. These snowmobiles were rented out for trips into Yellowstone. I saw trailer courts in Gardiner, here and there, with rough, graveled streets. There was a gritty taste to a morning walk. Sand blown up by the wind ended up in your mouth, the wind was coming that hard; a woman said: "You've got to keep stones in your pockets." The wind was shaking sagebrush and pines in the mountains surrounding Gardiner, coming down past great chunks of rock and the tracks of gullies on the mountainsides.
My impression of Gardiner - it seems to be a nickel and dime sort of town tossed down next to the twenty dollar gold piece that is Yellowstone. The worst of it is all the elk wandering freely about the town. Along Main Street, homeowners wanting to keep elk out of their yards have fenced off their lawns. Elsewhere - elk dung, elk tracks tearing up the grass, elk nibbling plants down to their roots. Walking after dark one evening, my wife and I encountered a group of twenty five or thirty elk coming across the street to the Post Office parking lot to investigate the Black Lab running loose. Elk stand in the street wherever they wish, and vehicles must weave a way through them. When I complain about the elk to my Wisconsin-raised daughter who now lives in Missoula, Montana, she says: "Better elk in the streets than homeless people."
I say to the fellow who manages our motel, I say "The first thing I would do is get rid of the elk. They are like vermin."
He says, "It's not so easy as that. We can't do anything about them. It's not bad now, with only a hundred or so in town. In the winter when the snow is deep in the Park, we might get as many as a thousand elk roaming through town looking for food. Worse than that, in the winter we have buffalo coming into town too. They are much more temperamental. Every year in the Park someone gets hurt by a buffalo, once in a while someone gets killed."
An old stone building that looks like it used to be the jail still has bars cemented into stone; the bars cover all the windows. The structure sits at the edge of the Yellowstone River just off Main Street in Gardiner. There are no shingles on the roof. It is a proud structure but will soon drop into disrepair if it is not shingled.
In some ways, Gardiner looks terribly shabby. Motels and the shops for tourists are relatively new and well taken care of, but many are closed in this season. One motel that is closed has a sign out front recommending another in town. Many Gardiner residents live in that western cardboard box, the trailer house. You are somewhat at a loss to explain the disparity between the beauty of the park and the shabbiness of the park's northern gateway. Would "ugly" be too harsh a word? I don't blame the people who live here. Are they indentured servants? Are they mining the vein that is our national park system? What in our way of doing things allows such a place to develop?
This sounds like a harsh judgment of good people. I'm not sure I know whom to skewer. Are greed and beauty two sides of the same coin? I'm not sure I know enough to make a judgment - enough about Gardiner, about the perimeters of other national parks, about the conditions that encourage people to mine tourism.
To be continued....
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*"The Northern Entrance" was published originally in North Dakota Quarterly.
The elk sound like the sacred cows in India.
Posted by: Ivy | November 13, 2004 at 04:22 AM
Yeah, like those cows, only bigger....
Posted by: Tom Montag | November 13, 2004 at 06:32 AM