6:00 p.m., March 13, 2021
There is an airport in Jackson Hole, Wyoming; an airport which, for a small town of 9,500 inhabitants, still has several direct flights from New York per week, a few more from the usual large urban hubs (Los Angeles, Chicago, Denver), and a considerable traffic of private jets. Because, for the past twenty years, Jackson has turned into one of those havens for the top notch of finance and Hollywood. People magazines regularly report on these wealthy paragons of American success who all have second homes here: Kanye West, Harrison Ford, Sandra Bullock, Brad Pitt, Uma Thurman, Matthew McConaughey and many bigwigs of the finance.
“Celebrity, as the great American writer John Updike said, is a mask that devours the face.” Fame is also, in the modern world, the ally of plutocracy, and many once wild corners of the American pastoral landscape (like the Hamptons in New York State, once a succession of fishing villages, or Ketchum in Idaho, where Hemingway blew his brains out) have lost their original rustic, blue-collar look with the influx of big names and big capital.
Read also episode 1: Journey to post-Trump America, by Douglas Kennedy
A gap between the super-rich and the vast majority of people
At first glance, Jackson is reminiscent of a good old western town. But then you start to notice that there are hotels with rooms at $ 600 [500 euros] at night, fancy restaurants, shops selling handmade cowboy boots or ridiculously expensive luxury knives … and you begin to perceive this crucial disconnect from contemporary America: the divide between the super-rich and the vast majority of people who are just getting by.
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Here nowadays, doctors and lawyers who earn $ 300,000 a year [252.000 euros] are considered the middle class. What madness, do you realize?
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On my third day there, I went cross-country skiing in a place of harsh beauty less than half an hour from downtown Jackson. After 5 kilometers of effort and sliding on a track in the steep shadow of Grand Teton, I stopped for a moment to contemplate the majestic splendor of the landscape. A woman who must have been around 70 – let’s call her Dorothy – then pulled up on the nearby track. Seeing me admiring the panorama, she said, “I came here from Illinois over forty years ago, when I was just married. And since then my husband and I have not moved.”
We began to discuss. And I found out that Dorothy and her husband Ben had worked forty years, until they retired two years earlier, for the National Park Service in Jackson. “This place was just a small, humble town when we arrived in the late 1970s. And even though we worked for national parks, we were able to buy ourselves a house, have a family. Today, if we were still working, we would probably earn around $ 100,000 a year between us [84 000 euros]… Which in Jackson would make us proles. “
When I asked her if she was joking, she replied, “Here nowadays the doctors and lawyers who make $ 300,000 a year [252.000 euros] are considered the middle class. What madness, do you realize? It is truly dismal. Especially since the Tetons range is one of the most beautiful mountains there is. “
The nostalgia of “old Jackson”
I gradually discovered that this nostalgia for “old Jackson” was very common among the people I met – none of whom owned a private jet, Porsches, or mega-ranch out of sight with a helipad. integrated. I was staying in a simple, trendy downtown hotel, and I was talking to people who were struggling to cope in an America where now the middle class was pulling the devil by the tail.
Bob was middle class and on the verge of home ownership. A sound engineer, he worked for two of the city’s major hotels. We met at the Million Dollar Cowboy Bar (yes, that’s his real name), a music pub whose interior looked a bit like a Las Vegas-style western saloon. According to Bob, the customers were all tourists, not locals. “We have way too many people from Florida around here,” he said, also pointing out that the band playing that night was better than average. Most tourists in a bar like this still want to hear the music. same country standards over and over again. This is not where you will find great music. “
Bob’s irreverence immediately appealed to me. Especially since his attitude was the opposite of the classic know-it-all. Bob weighed around 130 kilos. He had a big beard and a serious paunch. The kind of guy you’d see as a roadie for a third grade heavy metal band. But as we were chatting – and I was paying us tour after tour (he was running on XXL gin and tonic, me on shots of local whiskey) – I caught myself thinking: this guy is shrewd.
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Did you know that 60% of homes in Jackson stay empty most of the year? Because their millionaire owners are elsewhere
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“I work as a freelance sound engineer, he told me. And before the Covid, I had a job all over Jackson. Especially for big private events, when a super rich guy is having a party. birthday party and that he brings in a singer or a known group to animate the evening. When things were going well, I was earning in the 70,000 or 80,000 a year. [58.000 à 67.000 euros]. My girlfriend is a legal assistant, and she earns in the 50,000 [42.000 euros]. Anywhere else it’s a good cumulative income, but not in Jackson. Here, we meet the criteria to be able to buy housing at a regulated price. A 110 square meter apartment for $ 440,000 [370.000 euros], it’s considered a regulated price here. “
I told him it was an outrageous amount for an apartment in the middle of Wyoming. “Of course! And it’s all because of the super-rich who own homes here and come and spend a couple of days there every now and then. You know 60% of the residences in Jackson sit empty most of the time. ‘year? Because their millionaire owners are elsewhere. “
Every life is somehow a western
Bob was from Utah. Raised among Mormons. He had begun to doubt his faith as a teenager. “It takes a lot of cognitive dissonance to believe in Mormon theology,” he told me. But then he explained to me that one of the benefits of growing up in Utah was the feeling of space, and the fact that after his training as a cartographer he had spent several years in the service of the state of Utah. Utah to drive through the most palm-fringed corners of this vast land — where the aridity of the desert borders the high mountains — to talk to ranchers and farmers who lived on these isolated lands and identify the small roads their families and they had been borrowing for decades trying to determine which were private neighborhood roads and which belonged to the state.
I listened to him, fascinated. A former Mormon cartographer turned sound engineer in a cowboy bar! Her story reminded me once again that every life is a novel. And here in Wyoming, every life is, in one way or another, a western: individual, singular, riddled with as many twists and turns as these mountain roads I was learning to negotiate. And like anyone who knows how to draw cards and now observes the human comedy that is life in a bar, Bob had a talent as a novelist to observe everyone’s little quirks … not to mention a certain art of the formula. .
“Do you see that guy over there with the very young woman?” He said, pointing with his chin to a man in his fifties who must have weighed around 150 kilos, accompanied by a post. teenage girl in flashy outfit. From the way he groped her ass, it was clear that it wasn’t his daughter… “I bet she’s 18 years old,” Bob continued. “And I have a theory about men dating girls. 18 years old. It’s exactly like the bosses who pay everyone the minimum wage. They do it knowingly: if they could go lower, they would. ” I recommended a tour to us, thinking: this is arguably the best summary of the Trump era I have ever heard.
* The last novel by Douglas Kennedy, “Isabelle, the afternoon”, is published by Belfond.
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