Wyoming Fact and Fiction: Jackson Wyoming

 All in all, maybe I'm just one of those guys who is most comfortable at home.

I posted a comment on this item on Wyoming Fact and Fiction the other day:

Wyoming Fact and Fiction: Jackson Wyoming: At times I have people say to me, “Jackson, that’s not even Wyoming, I hate it when people come to Wyoming and only visit Jackson Hole, Yel...

Now, by way of background, at the time  I posted it, I was getting ready to head out on depositions in Jackson.  When this appears, I will just be back from them.

 The view out of my recent hotel room.  This is how I see a lot of places.  But one hotel room, as long as its fairly decent, is pretty similar to any other.  At least in Jackson, where I know my way around, I operate mostly on foot and get in some walking.

Oh, how neat, is the common reaction to something like that, but traveling for legal work, at least for me, is not at all the same as traveling for fun.  That might not be apparent to the folks who stop in here, as I post a lot of photographs that derive from that travel, and that probably makes it look like a lot of fun.  But, placed in context, I left Casper around 8:00 am on Monday, drove to Big Piney, worked there, and then drove to Jackson, and worked that night.  I worked every day and night after that.  So, by the end of the trip, what I'd seen was mostly the Snow King hotel, where I stayed (which is a nice hotel) and the route where I walked to depositions, and then inside of the law firm where their depos were taken (a very famous firm, fwiw).

Very nice conference room of very well known law firm. That's my large briefcase.  It is not well known.  My old beat up one, however, had a reputation of its own.

Folks who see my entries on Facebook, which are not numerous, would have seen a couple of photographs of glasses of beer from the Snake River Brew Pub, where I ate a couple of times.  It was on the way to and from the depositions.  Easy to get to for a guy who isn't driving.  When in Jackson, I generally walk, as it's hard to find a parking spot.

Glass of Snake River beer.  I never drove to the pub, I walked.  That's not too unusual for me, however.  Once in Portland I walked several miles everyday to depositions as I didn't have a rental car.

Now, I'll be frank that not everyone experiences their work travel this way.  I've been a lot of places for work where I never saw a thing, and I know that this is very common.  I've been to Houston a lot of times, but I've never seen the USS Texas.  I've been to Dallas and haven't seen the sites.  And so on.  I'm focused on work for work travel, as I'm working.  Maybe too focused, according to some people who know me and worry about me.  But that's what most work travel is like.  Having said that, I will hear from some traveling lawyers who go do fun things where they go, depending upon what their view of fun is.  I'm not one of them.

So that taints my view of Jackson, as a lot of the times that I'm up here, that's why I'm up here.

Snow in the Tetons, as viewed from my hotel room.

But I also don't like it much as its so touristy, and things touristy always strike me as fake.  That's why I like places like Maui better than Oahu.   I'm not keen on touristy places, as I don't like fake much.

It isn't that there isn't something real here, or a reflection of the real.  The area itself is beautiful.  The park is real. The wildlife is real.  During hunting season, the hunting is real (although a lot of out of state folks for any one purpose strikes me as strange).  The skiing is real.   The lawyers, the law firms, the courts and the state offices are all very real, and made up of very real people.

But the doormen dressed as cowboys?  That's not real and I know that.  All the young people in their twenties hanging around being cool, for Jackson is like a college town without a college, are at the height of their unreal periods.  I know that those same hipsters in the brew pub with dirty t-shirts and weird hats, sporting hip testators, are going on to be accountants and lawyers and the like, even if they don't know it yet.

And then there's the sad aspect of any tourist town, which Jackson has a lot of.

The hostess in the morning is some sort of Slav.  The tiny pretty girl has an accent so thick (she apologized for it) that I can hardly understand her.  The Arab boy who served coffee can hardly understand what I'm saying.  The local Catholic Church serves a large population of Hispanic immigrants who sit right alongside the very wealthy.  What happens to all these displaced people?  What happens to a girl who lives the Ukraine (or wherever) and ends up in a really expensive tourist town? Can the Mexican families find a decent place to live in this super expensive region in which they are employed in construction and the service industry?  Do their lives work out?

Stuff like that bothers me.

Maybe it shouldn't.  The immigrants have always struck out in hope.  Jackson has been fakey as long ago as the 1940s, as The Cocktail Hour in Jackson Hole illustrates.  Maybe the Ukrainian girls' fate isn't really that much different from any other young persons' at that age, certainly her looks are in her favor anyhow.

So maybe I just think about it too much.