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Where the Wild Things Bro or Beyond the Valley of the Balls

By Davina Allen-Faust for The Western Spectator

There’s this place I want to tell you about. Mainly, because I’ve been paid to tell you about it. Partly, because my editorial board assigned me to tell you about it. Yes, we drew literal straws. It’s that type of place. It’s exactly where you think it is. Somewhere remote, maybe in Montana, or Idaho. Possibly Wyoming. It’s this place where the well-to-do go trophy hunting. At least the older, outwardly reputable ones who already bagged trophy wives one and two at the coastal country club habitats where such women roam. They come to this place and the few other remoter outposts like it for pre-mounted horns and pictures of experienced anglers laying storybook salmon and flyfished trout into bespoke, handwoven creels. It’s a place where wealthy men run away to when their stock exchange lucre loses all luster. It’s exactly what you think it is- a fantasy land of commodified masculinity. The rugged type. The classically American variety that can only be found on a frontier. Not a natural frontier, or at least not in concert with one, but in man’s purported dominion over nature. That’s where you find this place.

There are other men here. Not Rockefellers or Morgans or tech traders. Smiths, Johnsons, Nelsons, and no shortage of Does. Anonymous, working poor American men who occupy the shadows and keep the fiction alive, one weeklong retreat after another. The job is to convince the super-rich clientele that they aren’t inheriting a tamed , sanitized landscape, but are in fact defying it. The job is to convince them of this right up until their luxury-chartered floatplanes scoop them away over the premises of an umpteen star resort. The view from their portholes as the single malt Scotch and champagne flows is what keeps them coming back year after year with even more well-connected acquaintances. Where you or I see mountains, streams, hills, and fields, the guests see a wilderness laid low by their mastery.

Fortune, Forbes, and plenty of other publications cover those well attended assholes every issue. And even more papers and periodicals put out yearly paeans and lists. The ‘power rankings’ for most consumption or most conspicuous foreskin or whatever it is they presume to report. I came here in a humbler prop plane. The one that brings mail in and out as well as emergency medical supplies. I came to look into the lives of the men who keep these log mansion fever dream factories running. The ones who stay here not only year-round, but simply stay put for good once they’ve arrived.

They are castoffs, runaways, pariahs. They have real, practical skills and abilities because they have to in order to survive. And they exert them upon an indifferent environment each and every day. These are the men you used to see at the hardware store in town, or maybe a local bar watching football and shooting pool until one day they simply disappeared. They are men from Everywhere, America. And now they populate Nowhere, USA. I already told you. It’s exactly the place you think it is. The perfect place to hide.

It’s 3pm at Earl’s River Room. There’s no Earl and there’s no river in sight. I do have to concede that the bar doesn’t take up much more than a room. There’s only one single occupancy restroom at the far end from the single entrance. The bathroom door is labelled ‘Buck’s’ but they let me use it anyway. Where I’m guessing the women’s room would be is instead by some miracle a kitchenette that sends out a constant stream of hotdogs, cheeseburgers, and frozen fries dumped deep in melted fat. You can smell the kitchen stall before you see it. In fact, you’d never see it if the cook didn’t pop in and out like an overwound cuckoo clock to throw orders up on the bar flap and take cold bottles of beer back to his grill station.

The shotgun shaped bar runs end to end. It’s packed. Each seat is full and men are standing in between each one, jockeying elbow to elbow. Behind the bar is another set of barstools facing the long wall. The older men stake out these spots. They spent the opening hours at the bar and now drink whisky neat, so aren’t bothered by the narrow sliver of half countertop that runs the length of the place. They are all men. Almost exclusively white. Almost exclusively over thirty years in age. Most are wearing flannel shirts tucked into jeans. Their construction boots are clean. During the day, which starts before sunrise, they wear waders or large rubber boots caked in mud. These are the men who drive the Land Rovers, fly the prop planes, pilot the motorboats, stalk the deer, and fish the best spots on behalf of their privileged guests.

As the only woman at Earl’s, I make everyone suspicious. Fortunately, the beer and booze are cheap at the River Room. My per diem covers enough shot specials to get everyone talking about the salacious things they swear to me they’ll never talk about. They do so by way of telling me what they’ll never tell me about. My attempts at informal interviews devolve into an odd, alcohol soaked linguistic game. They tell me that they’ll never tell me about the rampant gay sex parties their guests arrange, or all the illegal narcotics that get used during any hunting trip that wanders off property. I am told that’s what the sous chefs and resort staff, whose days start late, get roped into. Those are the situations they fix up. They’d have to tell me about them. There’s also very little judgment in the men who aren’t telling me about these lurid things. It seems that offering sex and drugs to the guests is very lucrative and mutually beneficial. It means, for instance, the hotel staff can afford to fly in female sex workers from time to time for the benefit everyone in town who chooses to or is forced to stay here. But no one Earl’s is going to tell me about these things, no matter how many boilermakers I buy.

I come to my senses and realize I’m getting nowhere because I’m already here. When I settle my poisonous tab at the bar register, I realize my lighter is gone. I’d leant it out along with the cigarettes I comped everyone in another vain attempt to loosen lips and never saw it again. I ask the large fortyish man at the corner stool if he had a one I could use. His back is turned, and all I can see of him is a blonde crew cut peeking out of a tattered crewneck sweatshirt, the back of which read The Huntsman in overwrought calligraphy. He’s full of drink and himself. I’d interrupted his fourth or fifth consecutive performance of a monologue no one was paying attention to. It seemed he was fixated on calling everyone he had ever encountered ‘retarded’ without any attempt to justify using the inexcusable slur. Parents, siblings, friends, teachers, coworkers. That guy at the gas station. According to him, they were all ‘retarded’.

‘A letter?’ A, B, E, F, fucking G. What letter do you want bitch?’ He hammered his empty beer bottle into the bar and wheeled round so I could see his snarl. No, I explained calmly and patiently as if to a small child. I wanted to smoke my cigarettes. I wanted to know if he had a lighter. ‘Oh,’ he said more confused than apologetic. ‘No, I ain’t got no lighter. Thought you wanted a letter. I didn’t fucking know what you wanted. How the fuck would I know what you wanted?’ Well, listening is typically the most basic way we figure out what each other might need or prefer. But without a lighter, it was hard to play Prometheus and bring such well hidden wisdom down from the mountaintop to the patrons of Earl’s.

The night before I leave is a late one. I close out Earl’s River Room with the waiters, valets, kitchen crews who work on the resorts. They are all men. Almost exclusively white. Almost exclusively over thirty years in age. Most are wearing flannel shirts tucked into jeans. Their construction boots are clean. They too refuse to tell me about all the lucrative and licentious things their field and stream counterparts get up to. They won’t tell me about all the drug smuggling that goes through the guys who drive the Land Rovers, fly the prop planes, and pilot the motorboats. They won’t tell me about the debauched affairs between men that start and end at the best fishing spots and the most remote hunting blinds. They won’t even begin to tell me about how much money changes hands between their guests and the locals. A small fortune to get the party started. A much larger one to keep any evidence of the fun from escaping into the larger world.

I never found a single line of coke, let alone a brick stashed behind an outhouse. I never stumbled upon a same sex tryst or liaison of any sort. There wasn’t any actual evidence to corroborate the untold stories at Earl’s. Which is not very surprising in a place where names aren’t named. Rarely did anyone I speak to even offer me so much as a nickname for themselves. The thought of dropping someone else’s is unthinkable here. Anonymity is the whole point for the year-rounders. Who knows what they put on their tax returns or if they even file them. It’s a society of Sneaky Petes. (That’s what my son in the second grade would call them. I wonder if they’d still call me a bitch to my face if he’d been with me?) Everyone is from Tallywhacker Flats or Parts Unknown. Their most recent addresses are made irrelevant by the wholesale adoption of PO boxes.

And that’s why the yarns they spun were so far off from my everyday experience of the place. These men chose to talk not about the size of the fish or the points on the stag, but about cash flowing freely from the very wealthy into their hands for staging various lurid encounters. Oddly then, what leant all the scandal and slander credence was how it ran counter to their day to day lives and the images they attempted to uphold in those lives as I observed them.

Away from the gossip at Earl’s, I’d never been to a more chauvinistic, homophobic, and misogynistic stretch of earth. Psychologist Bell Shepherd has used and developed the term ‘toxic masculinity’ since the 1980s.It refers to upholding the behavioral norms our society expects from men and in turn men expect from themselves, whatever the cost. Among those weighty expectations are of course self-sufficiency, physical strength, a stoic unemotional disposition, all with the goal of establishing dominance over one’s environment, other men, and of course women. Competition is prized above cooperation. Violence and the threat of violence saturates the pristine mountain air. It’s all very John Wayne. And like John Wayne, it’s all very implausible and unsustainable. Were the EPA charged with cleaning up social toxicity, this corner of the country would be one superfund site after another.

Not ten minutes after arriving by plane, I witnessed two men pop out of their respective pickup trucks and nearly come to blows over who had the right of way on the single lane dirt road we’d been traveling. They both appeared drunk, either on their way to or coming from physically taxing jobs. My driver kept an appropriate distance from the impromptu showdown and commented without my prompting that this is why most flights landed directly on the luxurious properties where the better-to-do than myself went and stayed put. It was not very high noon, or pistols at dawn, or anything of the like- even if one of them did have his jeans tucked into mud caked cowboy boots. It was incredibly silly. They looked like enraged chimps in blue collar costume. There was nothing exciting or attractive about their bravado.

I already wanted to return home. I’m no Fossey or Goodall. I had no interest in learning how to talk with these not-so-great apes. While I was sitting in a backseat of regret hemmed in by my luggage, the driver farthest away and facing us locked eyes. He shouted something along the lines of, ‘What the fuck are you looking at bitch?’ or some equally horrible inquiry I didn’t wish to answer. My driver responded in kind with some choice words and then opened his door. The odds now stacked against him, the man who targeted me with slurs retreated. Our southbound travel on the dusty path resumed. He was still yelling, face red and jugulars writhing like snakes trying to push through and shed the skin of his neck, while he backed up out of our way.

We made it to my motel. I went straight to bed. The flights from JFK to Denver to Boseman to wherever I was were long and indirect. I woke up early, ready to tag along on a hunt my editors had arranged. I woke up not only immersed in nature, but in a rather inhumane state of nature. In a twist only Hobbes would love, it seemed all these men running around were so hellbent on asserting their superiority that they were more than willing to prove their equality in the sense that any single one could kill any other one at any given moment. So why not add a ton of guns to the mix? After an incontinental and instant coffee breakfast, we did just that.

We were on a discounted hunt to take out wolves, ostensibly for a rancher whose property was an astonishing distance away- measured in miles by the hundreds. Face to face, our guide was gracious and welcoming towards all, including myself. Given he works in a gratuity business the hustle and beg is expected. But when I wandered around the back of the jeep to load my gear he must have thought I was far enough out of range to become his truest self. ‘Who brought the bitch?’ I heard him ask. Then laughter. That was the group response. I grew up shooting in Pennsylvania. Deer. Targets. For competition. For fun. For killing- time and boredom. It wouldn’t be much of a challenge to ‘accidentally’ put one between their ears or ribs. It would prove a challenge in court to dismiss my entire childhood and adolescence as irrelevant to the situation, even if these alleged men didn’t seem to have any reservations doing so. Besides, an out of joint safety or slipped trigger would only seem to confirm their bleak and limited worldview.

To recap, in fewer than twelve hours I’d heard myself called a ‘bitch’ twice for the simple act of existing. It’s not unlikely that I was called the same and worse more often when not present.

A word on the wolves. They, unlike us and our livestock, are adapted to this environment. They evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to survive and thrive here. They were and again should become an integral part of a living system. That’s the odd thing about this experience. These men project the qualities one popularly associates with wolves onto themselves and their behavior within the strange uncommunity they’ve created. They want to be viewed as strong, independent, and ruthless. They want us, and critically any outsiders, to view them as yes- lone wolves- cliched though it may be.

Like most cliches, the unreality is begging. What they most resemble are the sheep we were sent to ‘protect’. No one here is thinking for himself. How could they? Everyone is out of place in an environment they were introduced to by capitalism’s unwieldy and gloved hand. This land was not made for you and me. None of us belong here. Only when you realize how alien and powerless your situation is do you begin to act out in these proscribed, unmannered ways. Men and sheep alike are baaing and grazing and moving to and fro for the powerful to fleece them. The trick is not to move markets under the cloak of invisibility, but to do it in such an anodyne way that no one notices what turns out to be incredibly ham-fisted through hindsight’s lens.

That’s really who we’re hunting for. The people who put sheep where they don’t belong and then tell us we should be afraid of the wolves and not them. We’re on show for the people who moved stable blue-collar careers overseas. We’re hunting for the nearby luxury hotel guests who over mortgaged America like a five-year-old playing Monopoly and then got bailed out by their friends in Congress. This is how I ended up hunting wolves among sheep. Sheep who lost their jobs and then lost their homes. Sheep who will call any woman a bitch and pull the nearest trigger when told not to out of desperate fear that they’re going to lose again.

I’m not sure what they have to lose. I was the only person in my party to take down an animal that day. I shot and killed a mature female gray wolf. I’m not sure why. It damaged my ego when I needed repair. There is nothing to gain from this sort of existence. Whatever it is we think we’re holding onto, we need to stop.

In my guilt, I started looking up facts about the gray wolf using my sat link on the ride back into town. What I learned I already knew. There are no lone wolves. It’s a myth. When pups are born, they’re born deaf, blind, and dumb. They are incapable of regulating their own body temperature. They nurse greedily every few hours and rely upon their mothers for everything. The most alpha male running wild and free never has the chance to reach maturity without the sacrifice of others. Why is it that wolves are less bothered by gratitude than men?

One of the more outwardly representative clients in our party, decked head to toe in unscathed boutique outdoor gear, started the hunt by barreling his eye socket down the scope of his rented rifle. Worried about the recoil if he fired down into the dead yellow valley we perched above, I gently corrected his sighting. When I asked our guides about why they didn’t intervene they laughed. Out loud. Check the lobbies at any of the majors they said. You’re sure to find your fair share of shiners. That’s what they’re looking for. The experience. The stories that come with those experiences. Why would they thank me when I’d robbed them of that?

The next day, I stayed in and found plenty of physical evidence to confirm such experiences. When I returned from the wolf hunt, I went straight to the general gas station convenience store that feeds high octane fuel to luxury SUVs and dirt diesel to pickups with tailgates that have rusted through. My only purchase was a carton of cigarettes. The stress of this place made me want to smoke for the first time in years. Despite the stress, I was still expected to talk to people for my job and inviting the year-rounders to bum cigarettes off me was the most socially acceptable form of introduction I’d observed.

That evening, after a few unproductive authorial rounds at Earl’s that have already been documented, I wandered up and down the access streets that the resorts use to handle all things logistic. I found the only female/male couple I would lay eyes on during my stay. They were in dull gray flannels with greasy aprons over their tucked shirts and dark blue denim. The man had a paper chef hat you only ever see at diners with nostalgia surcharges tacked on to every order of fries. The woman, rail thin and oddly tan, had a black hairnet that kept her bun, dyed pitch black, pressed against her scalp. They were standing next to a dumpster, clear plastic trash bags yet to be heaved were stacked both between them and flanking them on each side.

I offered both cigarettes when I saw her stamping out what little flame remained attached to a filter against the cracked pavement. They didn’t hesitate or question my generosity, probably because smoking another was so much preferred to the chore of hoisting bag after leaky garbage bag up into the dumpster. They’d been working the buffet service at this hotel for almost a decade although neither one could pinpoint when they’d actually started. I learned that they were from the East Coast and had relocated here years ago. First him, then she joined shortly after like they’d planned. They’d been married, but now they weren’t because they were different people from who they used to be. Confusing the situation was the odd fact that they’d always remained a romantic couple- married or otherwise.

I learned it wasn’t important what they were escaping from. I learned that when she got comfortable and rolled up her sleeves my eyes lingered far too long on the scar tissue above her wrists. I learned from the unceremonious way she turned her back and began shot-putting the trash bags, lit cigarette dangling from her lips, that I’d never get the chance to ask about his black eye. It was healing into that strange purplish green you could see on the scrapped potatoes she was hurtling up and over the dumpster’s large metal lip. He didn’t bother to help and instead thanked me for the cigarette. He didn’t bother to let me know they needed to get back to work either. He did, however, make it clear that I needed to move on with a hand gesture that started as a wave and ended with him pointing to far the fuck away from here while he looked back at her.

I’d gone to the middle of nowhere and found myself exactly there, in the middle of nowhere. I’d failed as a journalist but felt surprisingly upbeat about my own humanity. I was more alone than the people I tried to meet, but far less lonely. Better put, far less committed to becoming and remaining lonely. I could not relate well to this place or its people. And I don’t recommend anyone visit either. God forbid you might find out that you do fit in to the charmless scheme they’ve established here. There are plenty of destinations in America and abroad that bother to smatter in some grace or the illusion of grace for visitors to gawk at and photograph. The here that is nowhere is not much more than a fortress built upon the guile that’s been dragging us all down since the modern separated our minds form our bodies. There is simply no way to provide an honest, illuminating account for a place located in the darkness of self-deception. I’m afraid this is all you get because this is all I saw.