Mar-A-Lago West

I think a lot of my discomfort over our new president is with where he chooses to spend his weekends.  Instead of jetting down to Florida to play golf, mingle with his well-heeled guests, and occasionally leak top-secret info to visiting Russians, he should instead head to Jenny Lake Lodge in Grand Teton National Park.  I'm convinced it would give him a new perspective on some of his signed presidential orders and it would certainly force him to look at the environment differently.

In the spirit of full disclosure, let us get some facts out of the way.  There are some similarities between Jenny and Mar-a-Lago.  They both rely on immigrants from Central America on temporary visas to get the work done.  Of course, Trump's Florida resort extends their head hunting to Middle Eastern countries when the pickings south of our border get slim.  Both resorts do manage, however, to help their housekeeping staffs get around walls both real and imagined.  Also, even though I've never been to Mar-a-Lago, I suspect it, like Jenny, is populated by mostly white people.  I've spent two weeks at Jenny for over twenty years now and I don't think I've ever seen a guest who was a person of color.

Come to think of it, one rarely sees non-white people, if you don't count all the oriental people with cameras around their necks, in National Parks.  Here is a case in point.  Katherine once used the outhouse close to the canoe launch at Colter Bay.  As she was walking in, a black woman dressed in hiking clothes was coming out.  As Katherine made a move to use one of the stalls, an elderly white woman warned, "Oh, don't use that one.  A negro was just in there!"  The white lady was taken aback when Katherine informed her that she was scum.  Sad to say, that so far has been our only encounter with a non-white vacationer in the Tetons

The comparisons between Jenny and Mar-a-Lago stop there.  There are plenty of differences that would probably give Boss Tweet pause.  First of all, there is the whole business with tweets.  Not happening at Jenny Lake.  In order to get enough bars to make some kind of a connection on a smart phone, you have to find a relatively open, unforested spot away from the cabins and hope to find a signal.  Once you do find a signal, you have to keep moving because signals come and go in the middle of a national forest.

Even more problematical, there would be nothing to tweet about.  There are no televisions at Jenny.  That means no FoxNews, no bottom crawls telling viewers the latest thing to be furious about.  The Donald would go crazy.  No more pacing up and down in his room ranting about fake news.  No more getting his intel in thirty second sound bites.  There is an old lady who delivers The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today each morning, but all of those involve reading and precious few of the articles in those publications (excepting USA Today) are illustrated.  There would be nothing for him to think about, no deals to make.

Jenny is in a national park.  That is another thing that is anathema to our President.  Just across String Lake from the lodge is prime fracking territory if it weren't for those annoying mountains.  There is no property for sale and if there was, the park service would not allow him to build a tower emblazoned with the name TRUMP all over the place.  And even if he could, the park service would frown on private golf courses running along the bottom of the Cathedral Group.  It would be the whole liberal bias (DISGRACEFUL) running rampant through the national park culture that would drive him up a wall.

To add insult to injury, Jenny Lake Lodge is completely powered by the wind turbine farm you might have noticed along I-80 between Laramie and Rawlings.  I mean here is Jenny, residing in the largest coal producing state in the country, relying on something as ephemeral as wind power.  There ought to be a law and if Trump ever figures out how to govern, there just might be.

Finally, Jenny is a pretty egalitarian place.  Just look at the photo above.  It doesn't shout posh luxury.  Sure, there are lots of wealthy people up there, but nobody seems to notice.  Everybody looks the same after a ten mile hike.  Everybody's cabin is spartan, old, weathered, with the same two rocking chairs on the porch.  Everybody spends time sitting on those porches in the late afternoon.  Everybody's views are at the mercy of the trees that keep growing and getting in the way.  You don't get to tell the park service to cut down a tree that might interrupt your view of The Grand.  Our cabin, Bluebell, started out with a great view of Mount Rockchuck (Wyoming for marmot) that is now being impeded by a stand of lodgepole pines.  Everybody's cabin will have a mouse from time to time.  Sometimes, you might end up with a bat.  Hey, it is a national forest.  The only special treatment is directed toward the critters.

The dining room is the most egalitarian place of all.  There are five prix fixe menus that rotate.  Boss Tweet would have a hard time.  There might be a small steak on one of the menus, but there are no ketchup bottles on the tables.  I doubt if there are any on the entire property.  There are no power tables to preside over.  And even though there are a number of "famous" people who show up, none of the guests seem to care.  They are all too busy getting advice from the wait staff on the best hike for the next day.  Harrison Ford lives in the area and he called up the main desk once to see if he could get a late dinner reservation for his rather large party.  The time he asked for would have made the staff work late and there really wasn't a table big enough to accommodate his party, so Angela told him to try elsewhere.  I mean, how cool is that?  Presidents Clinton and Bush have dined at Jenny, but I'll bet they had a hard time convincing Angela to give them a table and I'll bet none of the guests even looked twice.

I'm a pretty typical Jenny guest.  If Trump and Melania and company were sitting at table thirteen (that's as close to a special table as Jenny has), I wouldn't feel compelled to run over and get an autograph, or tell him what a fine job he was doing.  I would, however, be appalled if he tried to order a steak well done and drown it in ketchup.  For me, that would be a deal breaker.

Vail Associates bought The Grand Teton Lodge Company a number of years ago.  It was one of those mergers that business types would say made good sense (I guess), but most of the guests I knew were outraged by the whole corporate scene trying to invade our space.  One of Vail's first ideas was to build a conference center on the property that would act as a draw for corporate events, board of director getaways, society weddings, etc.  It would be the kind of space for corporate meetings complete with power point presentations, white boards, continental breakfasts, name tags, and team building exercises (Just as soccer is impossible without traffic cones, business must be impossible without team building exercises.).  But the long time guests at Jenny were having none of it.  We wrote letters, made angry phone calls, and were getting ready to storm Vail's corporate headquarters.  I'm proud to say that Vail caved and allowed Jenny to retain its charm.

Donald Trump just wouldn't fit in.