Day 3: August 12
The highlight of the first part of the day is the shower. I quite enjoy showers at the best of times, when they’re more creature comfort than adventure, but one of the highlights of the Copper King is the weirdest contraption that has ever sprayed water on me. A great skeleton of piping, it has three valves that regulate pressure at various points of the shower. The pipes that surround the showerer are also filled with little pin pricks that spray water (the Copper King’s proprietor warned that if you turned the valves such that all of the water came out of the pin pricks instead of the shower head, it would hurt a great deal and you therefore shouldn’t do it; he was overstating it somewhat). Following the shower and the included breakfast, we took a tour of the Copper King. Our guide was a woman in her twenties who apparently delivered the tour by rote memorization, as evidenced both by her high rate of speech, her total lack of inflection and by her need for cue cards once she forgot the words.
The only sight we specifically wanted to see in Butte was the local brothel, which had been continuously operational until 1982 when the Madam was sent to prison – for tax evasion (the brothel holds some kind of world record on which I’m not quite clear; I believe it’s something like “oldest surviving building originally constructed for use as a brothel”). Entrance to the brothel was free, and we were greeted by a jumble of artifacts including, most notably, an old school and decidedly unerotic-looking vibrator. It’s moderately-interesting, but as long as we’re there we figure we might as well take the tour for a few dollars. We hand our money to the moustached man surveying our move, and ask him when the next tour is. “Right now,” he replies, grabbing a flashlight.
It turns out this man is Rudy, who is the current owner of the brothel, which he bought after co-leading a movement to save it when it was slated for destruction in the early nineties. This got him a fair bit of media coverage, including an appearance on Jay Leno’s Headlines feature, which features unintentionally humourous headlines, advertisements, and the like. Rudy’s appearance was when the Butte paper ran a feature on the efforts to save the brothel, highlighting the efforts of a former prostitute at the brothel. Under the headline, which was something like “Former call-girl fights to save brothel”, was a picture of Rudy lounging on a bed with eyes that, deliberately or not, look like they’re inviting the viewer to come hither.
The tour itself is fascinating. Because Rudy has evidently not yet succeeded in securing serious government or other funding to restore the building to its former glory, it looks basically like it did when he acquired the building, just a little cleaned up. The artifacts in the front room are just things he found in the basement, which hadn’t been used for the last years of the brothel’s operation. He’s opened up a room that had been boarded over in the sixties, with a lipsticked cigarette still sitting in the ash tray. The tour was so good, in fact, that it made me question the benefit of restoring some historical buildings. For the rooms that did have to be cleaned up a bit, the last madam – the one imprisoned for tax evasion – was helpful in advising. She’s still alive, but doesn’t come around much anymore due to a recent stroke. I ask Rudy whether the Pekin was originally used as a brothel, but he responds emphatically in the negative. Pity.
Inexplicably, we decided to eat lunch at another place recommended by the fellow from the Copper King. This one was a mesquite barbecue place and, in contrast to the Pekin, was delicious. I guess the lesson is that you don’t go for Italian food in Bangkok, and you don’t go for Chinese food in Montana.
We want to get to Yellowstone for the night, but we figure that we can afford some more time in Butte, for which we’ve both developed a great affection. The historical district, where we’re staying, is reputed to have some great antique shops, so we decide to check those out. Catrin pays more attention in these stores than I do, but I note with interest a petition in a store run by two delightful old ladies opposing setting more Montana land aside as wilderness (it complains of a plan initiated by environmental groups and out of state logging companies that is now receiving consideration by Congress). What surprises me is that the petition, in its lengthy preamble, does not attempt to explain what harm the bill would do, satisfying itself with asserting that “we don’t need more wilderness”. As with Albertans, I have some trouble with the contrast between Montanans’ great friendliness and their frequently apparently evil political views.
It is regrettably time to leave Butte, which is, I’m happy to report, more beaut than butt. As we drive out, we see what appears to be a giant statue of the Virgin Mary on the surrounding hillside. This town does not cease to surprise.
Not far outside of Butte, we cross the continental divide. I briefly wonder whether a trip from Edmonton to Fredericton should include passage over the continental divide, but the scenery is beautiful and I put the thought out of my mind. On the trip south, we allegedly pass through a number of small Montana towns, but I’m noticing that it’s sort of difficult to evaluate on the basis of population density alone what constitutes a town in Montana, which seems to enjoy an evenly-distributed, if sparse, population. We also get lost for the first time and, despite my assurances that I know exactly where we are (Montana), I eventually agree to pull into the nearest city to orient ourselves and buy lunch. This turns out to be Bozeman, where we pick up some groceries (including an embarrassing attempt by Catrin to buy “a hundred grams” of smoked turkey breast) and eat them for lunch in the supermarket parking lot. I have eaten some of my favourite meals in supermarket parking lots.
The original plan was to camp in Yellowstone, but Catrin’s fear of bears has not abated (especially since, in contrast to Jasper which has never experienced a bear-related human fatality, five people have been killed by bears in Yellowstone). She generously offers to sleep in the car again, but I’m pretty sure taking her up on this would make me somehow unchivalrous, so we drive to West Yellowstone, just outside the park gate, and look for a room. Despite it being midweek, most places are full, but we eventually find a cabin and RV park that advertises vacancy. I hope that these vacancies are for the cabin and not the RV park. I go to the office to check, but it is locked. As I am looking for another entrance, a dreadlocked tornado emerges from the locked door and invites me in.
“Sorry,” apologizes the tornado, who introduces herself as the park’s owner, “I lock the door whenever I’m not in the front part of the office. I really should put a sign up. I use a lot of signs. See?” She presents me with a handful of ballpoint on looseleaf signs proclaiming things like “Still asleep – ring bell” and “Back in five minutes”. It emerges that the advertised vacancy exists in both sections of her park – “If it was only for RVs, I’d have put up this sign,” she explains, holding up one that reads “Cabins full”. She then proceeds to identify me as a Canadian based on my accent, and explain, unsolicited, that she lives in West Yellowstone because of the snowboarding. I am glad to escape her one-sided conversation and get to the cabin, which is essentially a separated motel room (fortunately, it is priced accordingly).
Soundtrack:
Things I’ve Learned From Women Who’ve Dumped Me, Various (spoken word comedy)
Neil Young Unplugged, Neil Young
Has Been, William Shatner
Day 4: August 13
We know we are underappreciating Yellowstone when we start booing the elk. I feel a little bad about this, since it’s not their fault that they’re elk, but there really comes a point at which you have to put your foot down. We’d be driving through the park and we’d see a grouping of cars pulled over with people with cameras and binoculars looking excitedly at something, and we’d wonder whether it was a grizzly, or even a wolf (which I’ve never seen, though one of the bikers we stayed with at the Copper King said he’d seen one in Yellowstone earlier in the week) and it would just be another damned elk. I really do hate to be a patronizing homer, but visitors to Jasper, even the Japanese tourists, are much more discriminating about what they point excitedly at.
Truth be told, Yellowstone’s a bit of a disappointment. This might be because it couldn’t possibly live up to its advance billing, or it could be because our schedule didn’t allow us to backpack or do any of the other activities that might have allowed us to more fully appreciate the place, but I think that maybe it’s just because Yellowstone is overrated. As noted above, it fell short of its reputation as a hotspot for wildlife viewing (though we did eventually get a good look at a bald eagle, and I also got the closest I’ve ever been to a moose – maybe those of us who grew up near the Rockies have just been spoiled in this regard), and, if we were to rank parks in terms of beauty and majesty, Yellowstone would be well back of both Glacier and Jasper.
What it does have going for it is geothermal activity, and walking amongst the assorted geysers and boiling pools and bubbling mud pits is, in my view, the only reason for anybody with access to other national parks to bother with Yellowstone. One of the interpretive centres we saw included quotes from early explorers about the wonderful nature of the area and about how it needed to be preserved. Somehow, though, I have trouble imagining that this was the early explorers’ dominant reaction. Surely to them the blighted landscape, smell of sulphur, and emerging boiling water must have made the place look like a gate to hell (one child we saw, talking aloud in a world of his own as children sometimes do, offered a pretty nice description of one of the areas as a “crazy alien mud planet”). Towards the end of the day, we also watch an eruption of Old Faithful, which is a pretty powerful display of Earth’s power, even though the eruption we saw was apparently a relatively small one. Sitting around with hundreds of other tourists watching steam emerge from a big hole in the ground until, surprisingly suddenly, water starts spewing out dozens of feet in the air is a surreal experience.
We spend the night at a motel in Gardner, Montana, at the north end of the park. We sleep unmolested by bears.
Soundtrack:
- Mix CD made for Catrin by a friend of hers after she broke up with her last boyfriend, Various
- Real Live, Bob Dylan
- XXX, Alice Cooper
- Victory Day, Tom Cochrane and Red Rider
- XXX, Joan Jett
- Hit Parade, Spirit of the West
No comments:
Post a Comment