The mountains were the first place I ever felt “myself” — or, more accurately, felt comfortable with myself. I said so throughout my upbringing. Being half-Japanese in white America was difficult, even if a lot of those pressures and stresses and anxieties were self-inflicted. I wasn’t teased and the extent of any true racism brought onto me personally were half-baked jokes about squinty eyes and small penises, the latter of which my last name definitely did not help. But I always felt different, and removed from myself. I often felt like I was going through motions that I had assigned myself to fit in, even though I would have fit in fine as my full self. Yet, for one reason or another, when we arrived to our condo at what seemed like the end of I-70 (it was not), I felt at home. There was this visceral connection I shared with this magnificent physical expanse, at once both ethereal and rugged or raw. Waking up in the morning was easier, and thin air breathed right. In that way I really relate to Raul Guiterrez.
The mountains were also the first place I ever saw cartoonish extravagance and money, the kind you reserve for Scrooge Mcduck or Mr. Burns. It wasn’t gaudy, but it was unnecessary, and for that reason, it was also obnoxious. Whereas the east coast might boast shinier wealth, and the west coast an airier one, the Rockies favored the grandiose.
To spend time in the mountains is a dream for a wide range of people. The disparity in an ability with which to realize this dream is what ultimately separates the vacationers and seasonal folk from the year-rounders and townies. But these towns weren’t found by the one-percenters weekend-ing in their crude McMansion-esque interpretations of log cabins. No… they were found by dreamers and explorers who threw all their belongings onto a wagon or, one day, a truck bed and set course west. This is not to say that the one-percenters are to blame; it is instead the overwhelmingly restricting reaction by developers to these one-percenters that has run the less endowed out of the very towns they work in.
This was only “a 14 minute proposal for a full-length documentary film examining the employee housing crisis that is contributing to homelessness in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.” I hope it gets made — there definitely is a story to be told.
