Vital Signs

Earlier this month, a friend and I were discussing some of our holiday season movie fare. We have similar, pagan-leaning approaches to how we welcome in the Winter Solstice, and December has become a natural time to compare notes as we refine our own seasonal rhythms and occasionally dabble in new traditions. Our winter viewing habits are often part of this annual exchange.

Though we grew up over 2,000 miles from one another and didn’t meet until our late teens when we were both in the Shenandoah Valley for college, we were born just days apart. She’s only barely not a Sagittarius and I’m only barely not a Capricorn. Beyond whatever ways the organization of space and matter at the times of our births has predisposed us to get along famously as a couple of kids whose terrestrial birth dates bridge the North American Winter Solstice, we’ve clearly related to each other enough through the years to remain close friends since a time when our brains were still developing. That’s to say I feel like we’ve come by a pretty long and meaningful friendship honestly at this point. We have much in common and the points on which we diverge are fodder for good conversations. To me, that’s the hallmark of a friendship that’s built to last.

Something my friend and I share is a deep reverence for this particular seasonal transition from fall to winter. We also share an equal and opposite disdain for the ways that corporations and institutions have essentially appropriated these days of the year with the longest nights, and put their own brand on them to make a profit or otherwise serve their own agendas. It feels profane when we consider that, for probably 14,000 years or more of human history, winter was the time of year reserved by our ancestors for reflection, taking stock, and making sure important memories and lessons were passed down through storytelling.

Suffice to say, when my friend and I compare and contrast what’s in the rotation for the moments we gather around the hearth of a screen at this time of year, it looks a little different than your garden variety holiday movie lineup. For my part, I started up a tradition of watching the 1974 Canadian slasher movie Black Christmas around my birthday after seeing it in 2017 at an arthouse cinema/bar in DC’s Mount Pleasant neighborhood (for the record, that funky place is still operating and keeping up its traditional December screening of Black Christmas).

More recently, the films that I’ve started revisiting around this time every year are Greta Gerwig’s first two solo writer/director credits: 2017’s Lady Bird and her 2019 adaptation of Little Women. To have special affection for the two films Gerwig directed before she went on to make a veritable summer blockbuster in Barbie is not to take away from the brilliance of anything she’s done since 2019. To be clear, smuggling a thoughtful exploration of gender norms and existential questions to hilarious effect into a feature-length piece of marketing for Mattel is an unbelievable sleight of hand that we should all still be in awe about. It’s also not to take away from anything Gerwig will do next—she’s signaled an ambition and definite facility for directing a big studio movie (which, by the way, did phenomenal business at the box office), and we should all be so lucky to live in a time where so many more people will get to see stories that she’s labored and obsessed over every millimeter of. She’s singular and I’m not possessive; I want more people to have a relationship with her lens of visual storytelling. Even so, I don’t think another movie will be made in my lifetime that will mean as much to me as Lady Bird OR Little Women. Of course, I hope I’m wrong. But I also want to get the point across that these are sacred texts to me. And in the last few years, they’ve both joined Black Christmas in my December rewatch standards.

Besides having personal weight and significance for me, this feels like an appropriate time of year to revisit Lady Bird and Little Women because this was about when they both got their theatrical releases. For those of us who saw these movies in theaters, we had a relationship with Lady Bird by Thanksgiving of 2017 and with Little Women by New Year’s Day of 2020. Revisiting them is like revisiting annual growth rings for me, or checking my vital signs in a way—seeing what I respond to and if it’s any different from what made me weep and laugh the first time and every time after. I suppose Black Christmas is similar, but it was made long before I was born and, despite having my genre movie queen, the late great Margot Kidder, giving an all-time performance as Barb the brassy (and convincingly queer!) drunk, there’s only so many emotions a slasher movie can call up for me.

Lady Bird and Little Women also have the distinction of being convenient time capsules of my respective years as a DC and Port Townsend resident. I’ve had some time, obviously, to think about how my responses to these movies change as I do. But I’ll always be most fascinated by how my connection to the first of these two differed from that of a lot of my peers. Gen X and millennial women seemed to identify most strongly with the messy mother-daughter love story at the center of Lady Bird. That storyline is powerful to be sure. In fact, I believe that the performances of Laurie Metcalf and Tracy Letts as the titular character’s parents are pretty underrated compared to those of the younger actors (not that it’s a competition—they’re all wonderful and brilliantly casted). Nonetheless, the love story that has gripped me and never let go ever since the first viewing is Christine “Lady Bird” McPherson’s budding tenderness for her hometown of Sacramento, catalyzed by her decision to leave it for college in New York City (for the uninitiated, “Lady Bird” is in quotes because it’s the character’s “given” name—as in, given to herself by herself).

Along with the tension of class consciousness throughout the story (i.e., hyper-vigilance around being dropped off out of view, selectively concealing where one lives from their peers, a parent interviewing for the same job as his son in 2002), the slow burn of affection Christine develops for the familiar—the streets and shops and bridges and houses she’s known all her life—is maybe the most recognizable experience a film has ever evoked for me. And I say that as somebody who’s always gravitated toward literature, film, and music to feel understood, less alone, and like I’m part of conversations that I have no outlet for in my immediate environment or social circles. This is what I mean when I say I don’t expect to discover another film in my lifetime as important to me as Lady Bird. I’ve never felt such an honest confrontation with my own formative aches.

I’ve since read, seen, and heard things that approximate this phenomenon where your love for what you know escalates as you leave it or have to let it go. But as yet, nobody’s reflected it back to me as effectively as Greta Gerwig did in the first feature film she wrote and directed. I know it’s because that wistful fondness for Sacramento is largely lifted from the filmmaker’s own life—she adores her hometown. It’s her North Star and a muse that I think we’ll see her return to in what I hope is a long and illustrious career behind the camera. Even if I didn’t have reason to believe in Gerwig’s devotion to Sacramento from interviews she’s done over the years, we’re able to sense it. I don’t think you can so convincingly manufacture a love story about what some blowhards see as a throwaway place unless it’s your own story.

It’s no secret to anybody who’s had time to learn my convictions and priorities that, like Greta Gerwig, I have very strong feelings about where I grew up—and those feelings are in no way limited to uncomplicated affection. Yes, there is affection there. But I also have a lot of fist-shaking vitriol for the new age of extraction (by way of real estate, recreation, and stifling tourism) that’s overtaken the upper Yellowstone region I hail from. I have a lot of founded and critical concern for the displacement of people as they succumb to not being able to afford to live where they work and have put roots down. I’m not one of those fogeys who thinks all change is bad—change and adaptation are part of all carbon-based life. However, like many other people, I feel a lot of helplessness and defeatism over the breakneck pace of change that does harm to rank and file people while benefiting a few comparatively wealthy individuals who could live comfortably without upending lives in communities they themselves have no intention of participating in, contributing to, or even occupying year-round.

I have no patience or understanding for people who think they can live out some blank-slate, cowboy cosplay fantasy of life in the American West while people who can’t escape difficult realities here have to foot the bill—sometimes with their own undervalued labor, and almost always with uncertainty as they live paycheck to paycheck. I guess what I’m saying is, at this point, I can’t decouple my sense of devotion to where I come from and the concurrent rage and powerlessness I feel over its surging appeal to every type of asshole with money to spend. I know this phenomenon is not new. Extractors have always projected their own fictions and fantasies onto this landscape, and the expectations the dominant culture would like us to believe it can live up to have always been untenable. Still, it all feels like too much nowadays.

I don’t love having to give so much airtime to the extractors in our midst, but until they get their comeuppance for what they’ve taken away, or start disappearing on their own volition, I can’t in good faith discuss where I come from without naming the dire, man-made livability threats plaguing it right now. Plus, I want to relate this back to the idea represented so deftly in Lady Bird that our reverence for the familiar can magnify and shift under different circumstances. My love for the communities across southwest and south central Montana that I grew up around has magnified and changed and changed again as I was leaving, after I left, and once I’d lived in other places through different seasons and stages of life. The most recent shift I can cite now that I’m a Helena resident owes to the appreciation hewn through curiosity and reading for the surprising connections between Montana’s capital city and the communities that formed along tributaries of the Missouri River through the late 19th and early 20th centuries. My hometown is no exception, and there are probably all kinds of sideroads in history worthy of going down to explore the Helena-Gardiner pipeline (or what I will heretofore refer to conversationally as Gardelena to see if anyone notices). Probably the best-known resident of both communities until his death in 1931 was Harry W. Child, the mining magnate-turned-hotelier and concessionaire who, with the collaboration of his extended family and lots of monetary backing from the Northern Pacific Railroad, built a lodging and transportation operation in Yellowstone National Park that’s still largely present to this day.

Another recognizable name in the history of upper Yellowstone that pops up in the early days of Helena is Hugo J. Hoppe. After immigrating from Germany in 1848 at the age of 13, then probably making his way west three years later to follow various mining stampedes to California, Nevada, and Utah, the earliest documentation of his life in Montana shows him prospecting about 20 miles west of Helena in July 1866. Before he ever had his sights on what would become the town of Cinnabar just above the Yellowstone River, Hoppe’s itinerant jobs as a saloon owner, brewmaster, and freighter would take him and his young family for various periods (that we know of) to Helena, Fort Benton, Anaconda, and Virginia City before he sold out his Lincoln Gulch claim in Helena around 1869 to Eastern capitalists for $10,000 (a tidy sum at that time) and moved his family to Bozeman. There, he would start running a freight outfit to what would become Cooke City, not yet a town exactly, but a place where four men with picks and shovels had made a promising gold strike. From his Bozeman home base, freighting, bartending, and prospecting would continue to take Hoppe west to Butte, east to the Judith Basin, and south to communities growing around gold strikes found just north of the young national park that had been established in 1872. Hoppe would start to move his family to a permanent home in the emerging settlement at the terminus of the NPRR Park Branch in 1883. Until his death in 1895, Hoppe was the preeminent booster for the raucous town of Cinnabar. While this original Yellowstone gateway town shuttered and largely migrated to Gardiner when the terminus was extended south in 1903, Hoppes are still legion in the area today.

I’m sure there are more examples than I’ll list here, but let’s run down a few more. Perhaps it was the only or just the closest place to do such official business at the time, but Dick Randall and Dora Roseborough—effectively the godparents of dude ranching in Montana by way of the OTO—had to travel to Helena to get hitched on Thanksgiving Day in 1892 (and returned in short order to their house on the Yellowstone River in Gardiner, where they were neighbors with Calamity Jane). Coal and coke production in the upper Yellowstone communities of Aldridge and Horr developed alongside the smelting industry in Montana. A 1902 report had 100 tons of coke leaving Horr every day for the East Helena smelter. Probably many thousands of tons from the same region had supplied the Anaconda smelter in the previous decade because it’s likely that copper baron Marcus Daly had, if not outright ownership, full financial control of the Park Cole and Coke Co. in the early 1890s. Under Daly’s control, product from Horr would’ve almost certainly been directed to his massive copper smelting operation just 26 miles northwest of Butte—the town that would electrify the world.

My point in drawing upon some of these surprising (at least to me) connections between my current home and my hometown is to emphasize that we forget or maybe don’t give full consideration to how historically linked our Yellowstone gateway communities in Park and Gallatin counties were with the growth of Montana as a whole, from its territorial days to its successful bid for statehood in 1889. Resources of both mineral and scenic varieties that were extracted from upper Yellowstone communities fed industries (mining and tourism) that helped define the arbitrary political boundaries of Montana. Communities like Gardiner are still very much mired in a cycle of extraction predicated on the falsehood of inexhaustibility today. It’s no surprise that Yellowstone’s three gateway communities are in two Montana counties with some the highest densities of short-term rentals and luxury real estate developments (as of 2021, Gardiner was 14th and West Yellowstone was 5th on the list of towns with the most short-term rentals in the state—both are outpaced by towns with populations at least 10 times bigger than theirs with only three exceptions in Big Sky, Bigfork, and Red Lodge).

Communities like Gardiner, Cooke City, and West Yellowstone are shouldering an outsized burden in our current livability crisis. Their economies, we’ve seen, are precariously dependent on the very thing that is overrunning these places past their carrying capacities—pushing their scarce local infrastructure, resources, and relative isolation from many services to the absolute limit. Realistically, these communities have probably already been stretched far past the breaking point and asked to fulfill expectations that no small town can deliver on. But I don’t think that means it’s impossible to stop the bleeding and get these ICU patients showing some vital signs of stability. One big resource they have going for themselves is each other.

I don’t know that these communities see each other as comrades being put through a similar wringer, but there’s certainly solidarity in shared challenges, and these gateway towns sure as shit have those in spades. I would love nothing more than to see them create a loose alliance where they can at least troubleshoot what’s working and what’s not—all with the assurance that nobody is better equipped to empathize with their struggles than folks with similar jurisdictional, accessibility, affordability, and infrastructure puzzles at hand that are all nuanced, but similar enough.

In the spirit of starting the final descent on this latest impassioned transmission of my thoughts, here’s something I would venture to guess but don’t know for sure: In addition to some of the niche challenges described above, something I bet these tiny scenery-economy communities all have keeping them afloat is a small but dedicated base of year-round residents who really give a shit about keeping their towns alive. It’s a wonderful thing, obviously, to have people—with full-time jobs and probably some caregiving responsibilities for friends and family in generations above and below them—who make time to volunteer where they see a role they can fill. However, what cannot go unsaid in any recognition of volunteers that keep tiny communities churning is that they are tasked with filling gaps that shouldn’t exist.

When community members are more than a backstop for vital services—when they are the uncompensated essential services—that indicates an abdication on the part of our leadership at all levels of government, but at the state level in particular. This is something I have strong feelings about, and it’s why I get pretty surly when people applaud their statewide elected officials as if they’ve gone above a beyond to do something when, really, we should expect them to do right by their electorate as part of—oh, I don’t know—their fucking job. Of course, it’s not a bad thing to give people good feedback when they’re meeting or exceeding expectations. What’s dangerous is losing sight of the expectations, and not holding those in power accountable for giving our most important needs short shrift. I could not help but think about this as I mailed off a year-end donation to a nonprofit in my hometown that essentially fundraises to subsidize the funding and infrastructure shortfalls of the K-12 school in Gardiner.

It’s absurd that we’ve put the onus on small groups of individuals with the passion and wherewithal to pass the hat in order to create adequate housing capacity with affordable rent prices to attract and retain teachers. In my mind, this is ludicrous because having the infrastructure for a healthy public school should be an essential public good prioritized in our state budget allocations—not something that’s “nice to have” if communities can find funding for it on their own. To call that spade a spade is not to understate what the incredible folks at North Yellowstone Education Foundation (NYEF) have accomplished in less than a decade against perilous odds. What they’ve done is nothing short of astounding, and I encourage anyone with the cash and inclination to support them before the year is out. In fact, take a break from reading right now and drop NYEF a few bucks if you can. After you have, please join me in reciting these three cathartic words: What the fuck?! How could those with the power to make the allocations for public education that could’ve prevented a lot of these problems in the first place dropped the ball this hard? How dare our state officials be so careless with our youth.

That we’ve left a community of ~800 year-round residents and its smaller neighboring towns to ante up the volunteer muscle to preserve a school that’s a husk of what it was when I was a K-12 student is a shame to say the least. Fortunately, I believe in the evolutionary function of shame and regret as powerful motivators—so long as we learn from them. I hope we demand more accountability from the people we vote for and the budgets they negotiate and approve, if only for our young people who are without dispute our most precious resource. But, for the time being, I support and cheer on the people fighting the good fight. I try to be every fascist’s worst nightmare. I try to reduce harm. I compost and recycle more than I cast off into landfills. Instead of acting out maniacally, I write indulgent shit like this. And I call out the blowhards who’ve enabled, if not sanctioned, the exploitation of what they probably think of as throwaway places or just playgrounds to live out their fantasies (I’m looking mostly at the soiled bedpans that include Montana’s current class of statewide elected officials and Taylor Sheridan when I say this—there’s room on my shit list for all of them!).

This brings me to one notable development in the past year, and the main reason I used Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird as a kind of Trojan Horse for talking about my home area. Besides cheering on and supporting the salvagers and diehards who are keeping the lights on in Gardiner, I’ve finally been able to help supplement the volunteer firepower a little bit myself as a newly repatriated Montanan.

For several years now, folks involved with Greater Gardiner Community Council (GGCC) have been chipping away at several community projects—some small, others very aspirational and long-term, all of them meaningful in my book. Most recently, they’ve taken on the Sisyphean task of slowly stabilizing and restoring the Gardiner Community Center—formerly Eagles Hall, and the 1910 Gardiner Opera House before that. The project has been and will continue to be a long haul, but they are hoping to start putting $600,000+ in grant funding to work soon for the project that will at least stabilize the building to where it can hang in there for another 100 years. Earlier this month, I coaxed the GGCC folks into putting together an annual appeal mailing to help raise some more funds for the long (and probably expensive) road ahead. So now, I’m extending that appeal to all of you out in reader land.

If you dig anything I’ve ever had to say about my hometown and want to show some love for the folks who’ve held it down through literal plague, fire, and flooding, consider chipping in a few bucks to aid GGCC’s efforts with the community center. Donations of any amount are significant, but if you want my suggestion, donate $31 or more—one buck for what will be every year of my life as of 3:13 p.m. MST this December 19. By my accounting, if about 18 people can pitch in $31 or more, the goods and time I’ve donated to help get GGCC’s year-end appeal out the door will basically be offset. I would love nothing more for my birthday than for folks in my hometown to feel a modicum of the appreciation I have for them and that complicated, beleaguered, but still breathing ICU patient of a spot straddling the upper Yellowstone.

Featured image: Looking at Electric Peak from Park Street in Gardiner, November 23, 2012.

Further reading if you vibed with this:

• Horses, Hotels, and Hospitality, an excellent book by the wonderful Ruth Quinn and Nan Sigrist about the Harry W. Child extended universe and their role in shaping Yellowstone’s built landscape and national park concessions as we know them today. There are lots of great Easter eggs in here about Dr. Maria Dean’s legacy that’s still very much alive in Helena today.
• Selling Yellowstone, a more critical look at something that Harry W. Child was unarguably great at: making money. This is brilliantly written by Mark Daniel Barringer and it’s the kind of indictment on capitalism that I’ll read all day long. I think it makes a terrific double feature with Ruth and Nan’s newer book that’s a little bit more flattering toward Harry Child and his ilk.
• Gateway to Yellowstone, an essential read from Lee Whittlesey if you want to learn about the town that served as Yellowstone’s north entrance for a generation, what remains of it today, and the German-American guy at the heart of the Cinnabar story.