Drowning

The tourists and the rain and my dying cat ...

The rain has been fabulous for the garden

It is a rainy Sunday afternoon and it seems that Betty Boop, the wizened elder-kitty of indeterminate age, is probably dying of kidney failure. It happens with old cats. She spent yesterday having a series of small seizures all day long, including one where she lost control of her bladder while sitting next to me on the couch. While we had guests. Which wasn’t a big deal, but was totally uncharacteristic. I tucked her into her cozy lair in the greenhouse room overnight, where she snoozed on her kitty heating pad, and where she’s been hanging out pretty much all day. She’s not seizing anymore, so that’s good. Maybe it’s just an infection? But my hunch is, it’s her time. We have no idea how old she is but I’ve had her for at least 12 years, and she was not a young cat when she came to us. She’s somewhere in her upper teens. Her teeth are all broken, and she’s missing an ear and the tip of her tail, and she hasn’t made her characteristic chirping sound at me for a few days now. I am very sad, but I do not want her to suffer. We’re off to the vet first thing in the morning.

It’s been raining steadily all day, and I even fired up the woodstove a little bit, although we don’t really need it. Harriet, the other kitty, is stretched out on the hearth and Hank-dog is hiding in the basement from the thunder.

It’s lovely and peaceful, which is good, because I’ve been all worked up the past week or so by the frenetic pace of change that’s befallen our little town. I fell in love with Livingston in large part because it was a real place, where people actually lived. It wasn’t just a tourist town like Telluride, or Bozeman (of Big Sky we shall not speak). When I moved here, everyone socialized together — the writers and the contractors and the actors and the painters and the plumbers and the fishing guides. Sure, there were tourists — mostly groups of guys on fishing trips in the summer, all dressed in the same outfit, hanging out in the Murray Bar after a day on the river. They were fine. We made fun of them a little, but they were fine. There were just enough of them to keep our one or two restaurants going.

But the past few years it’s all gone turbocharged. The Paradise Valley between here and Chuck’s cabin has filled up with ugly log homes with pointy “great room” windows and green metal roofs, each perched in the middle of fenced five-to-20 acre lots that impede the wildlife but give the illusion that those people from Texas and the red parts of California, and Missouri and Minnesota have bought their little piece of the Yellowstone dream. Each one, a tiny Dutton on his manifest destiny ranch. That they live in for only part of the year, but that is still a fully-built-out home, one that’s heated all winter, cooled all summer, even when people aren’t living there. These aren’t the “summer cottages” of my childhood in Wisconsin, nice little uninsulated cabins with screen porches, where you’d drain the pipes before you left for the winter. These are second and third homes. These aren’t even the stupendously wealthy people who have bought up all the big ranches, fenced them off, posted them and put up webcams to keep out the public. These are just that 10% who have, as wealth inequality has risen, eaten up a bigger and bigger chunk of the economic pie.

Meanwhile no one under 50 can afford a home at all.

And the town of Livingston has apparently decided that our salvation lies becoming the entertainment satellite for Bozeman. Summer is an endless series of outdoor concerts and festivals and the weekly Farmer’s Market (which has very few farmers but a lot of food trucks, and more amplified music, and people selling beaded bracelets). Those of us who miss the quiet, who go to city council meetings to ask where you’re planning to park the 500-900 people you’re building a pavillion to host at more summer events, well, we’re told all this is “good for Livingston” and that we must be terrible people if we “don’t even enjoy outdoor music.”

I think we have a problem, not just in America, but on our heating planet. Tourism as we currently practice it is just not sustainable. People are frantic. Is it some strange mania to go everywhere while one still can? National Parks, Paris, Prague, Thailand, Australia, poor Hawaii where the locals have been begging people to please stop, there’s no more water. Nepal where Mt. Everest, the Mother Goddess of the world has been turned in 30 years into a giant, high-altitude garbage dump. There’s a kind of denial lodged in this frenetic tourism, in the urge to see everything, travel everywhere, tick all the destinations off all the boxes, as if travel itself is an unimpeachable good.

I drove down valley the other day and in the northbound lane, coming out of Yellowstone, I passed line after line of rental RVs. Then there are the privately owned ones, which are bigger, and usually towing a full-sized SUV. All I can think any time I see them is all the fossil fuels, burning, and for what?

The funky little town I loved is being Brooklyn-ified. We have a new store that sells handcrafted western hats that cost $700 -1500 dollars. I’d say that’s a month’s rent for most people, but now that the Airbnbs have littered up the town, you can’t even find a place to rent for that. Who is the market? It’s not people who live here. It’s rich people. Tourists. People who think buying a very expensive hat is a way to buy the experience of being in the west. People who will pose in their fancy hat for Instagram, and move on to the next place, where they’ll pose against another backdrop. We have a fancy little trattoria that gets written up in places like Food and Wine, where the journalist quotes the chefs wondering whether the locals were “ready for food like this.” The locals I know have been cooking “food like this” for decades. My ex, the hunting guide, a guy who grew up here, a guy who is definitely rough around the edges, is also an excellent cook who wooed me decades ago with first-class haute cuisine out of cookbooks by Jean-Georges, and Charlie Trotter, and with perfectly grilled quail. We were hardly rubes.

Why don’t you just sell then? They say, the people who are angry that I think Earth Wind and Fire covers are noise pollution. “Revitalization is good for the town,” someone replied on Twitter. But is relying on tourism to the extent that we are a sustainable way to build a town? And how much disruption are those of us who don’t make our living in tourism supposed to withstand?

I’m not selling. I’ve written before about how even if I wanted to move, there’s no place to move to. I’m dug in. I just put solar panels on the house so I’ll have affordable heat for my old age. I’ve planted fruit trees that are starting to bear. I have a recently-rebuilt raised bed vegetable garden (that’s mostly herbs and flowers this year) that’s in place for when I need it. And I have Chuck, who I love, and who also isn’t going anywhere. But who misses his old neighbors, the ones who worked for the railroad, or the city, or pounded nails like he did for all those decades.

I feel increasingly alienated in my own town. I’m wandering around muttering about $700 hats, and getting in spats with the cranky bakery lady when they’re out of baguettes an hour after they come out of the oven. I’m wearing noise-cancelling earbuds in my backyard while I pull weeds because it’s gotten so loud I can’t think. I’m walking around quoting Gary Snyder under my breath, that the “most radical thing. you can do is stay home.”

There’s no solution. There’s just the solace of a rainy Sunday, and a small fire in the woodstove, and my dying cat beside me on the sofa, and the books I’m reading, and the next chunk of my book I need to get back to while waiting for Chuck to come over at dinner time. There’s just staying home, and trying to keep my head down for the next three months until the summer mania passes. There’s just staying home and shoring up my resources against the collapse that’s coming, and mourning as my real town becomes a simulacrum of itself, an imitation that bears as much relation to reality as a $700 western hat has to the ballcaps that most ranchers wear to keep the sun off.

And there’s gratitude for the rain, which we haven’t seen in these quantities in years. Rain which keeps falling, rain which is feeding the roses and mock orange and nepeta and daisies and bright yellow yarrows I’ve planted along that one sunny fenceline. It’s glorious, my border. I keep trying to cling to that beauty, even if I have to wear noise-cancelling earbuds to do so.