Safari Club, Day's Inn, Thermopolis

While the hot springs were fabulous, as was the Dinosaur Museum (which will get a post of its own), finding real food, and a decent drink, posed a challenge and was the big downside to my Fabulous Birthday Adventure.

The Safari Club at the Day’s Inn is pretty much the only place in town, and while the display of taxidermy is, depending on your view of such things, stupendous and/or horrifying, the food and drink possibilities are problematic. We started out at the Safari Club for a drink before trying to figure out where to go for dinner, and it didn’t seem a good sign when the bartender insisted in trying to sell me girly drinks made with “cake-flavored” vodka.

What?! Really? Ick!

I had a beer, as did Himself, and we looked at the bar menu, which was straight off the Sysco truck. Fried things. Burgers. Wings. There is a restaurant at the Day’s Inn, where they were serving more pre-prepped food including a Saturday night special involving a steak and some breaded shrimp. There was a Prime Rib special. There was a salmon. And all of it screamed pre-prepped and shipped frozen.  It reminded me of my childhood in the Midwest,  when the local hotel often had the only “going out” food in town.

After our beers we walked into town in search of a local restaurant, someplace were actual people were cooking actual food from ingredients, not heating up prepared stuff off a truck. There was an empty Mexican restaurant with a terrifying sidewalk display of inflatable Christmas decorations. And there was another restaurant that looked promising from the outside that claimed it had steaks and such. When we walked in, the place was decorated with angels and those little decorative signs bearing exhortations of faith. The music was … well … “inspirational.” By the time I came back from using the ladies room, Himself was looking crestfallen, and so it was up to me to ask the nice older lady waiting on us to confirm that no, she was sorry, they didn’t have a liquor license.

And so, it was back to the Day’s Inn, where we had another drink, and settled on the burgers. The people at the bar were exceedingly nice, but the food, the food it was not so good. Burgers one was glad were overcooked because who knows how many cows had gone into their pre-packaged contents, and those weird battered fries that Sysco sells. But there was a glass of wine, and a nice sulfury hot tub awaiting us, so despite our disappointment that there wasn’t anyplace in that small town where you could get a meal cooked by actual people and a drink, we made do. (Next time, taking a cooler with us…).

But the real kicker was breakfast. Now, Himself hasn’t had to travel for work so he was unfamiliar with the standard free breakfast that most hotels now offer. Ours didn’t have a real kitchen, so we were greeted in the morning by a chafing dish filled with pre-scrambled eggs that had been heated up in the microwave (yum, rubbery), soggy sausage patties (also microwaved) and the make-your-own-waffle whose batter seems to be comprised entirely of sugar. There was also a case filled with sugary muffins, poofy-yet-stale bagels, and a dispiriting array of individually-wrapped slices of white bread. There was some fruit — apples and oranges, and some yogurt (the sweet kind). Cereal, again, sugary … and there was coffee. Not great coffee, but at least freshly-brewed coffee. It all looked like food, and yet, none of it really was, well, food.

Now, I was not as shocked or dismayed by all of this as Himself was, but then again, not only did I live in “normal” suburban California for quite a while, but I’ve also travelled for work. Himself, he was appalled. He kept asking why you couldn’t get a decent burger in Wyoming, of all places — after all, we’d passed plenty of steers on our way down there. They grow a lot of potatoes in Wyoming and Montana too — as for the breakfast, he coudn’t understand why even if they didn’t have a real kitchen, they didn’t just have someone making real eggs? You can do that in an electric skillet. What really upset him was that no one else was upset, that everyone seemed to think the food situation was perfectly fine. That people were happily eating what Michael Pollan has so aptly named “food-like” products.

And so, the downside of Thermopolis — food, or the lack therof. Next trip, we’re taking a cooler with some real food — perhaps a couple of hard boiled eggs, some sandwich supplies, or my mother’s old standby for picnics — a nice cold roasted chicken. Some fruit. Decent bread. And our own stash of coffee to put in the in-room coffeemaker. Also, a second cooler with some beer for him and a decent bottle of wine for me. We’ll travel like my great-grandparents did, with our own supplies (although I don’t think I’ll need to pack all my own sheets and bedding like they did on their cross-country auto trip in the early 1920s).

World's Largest Hot Mineral Springs

For my birthday last weekend, my sweetie whisked me off to Thermopolis, Wyoming for a little adventure.

As you can see from the hillside sign, Thermopolis bills itself as the world’s largest hot mineral springs, and while it’s smaller in acreage than the Mammoth terraces in Yellowstone, apparently about a million-and-a-half gallons of hot water gush out of the springs every day. The springs themselves, as well as two hotels,  two commercial pools with slides and saunas and other entertainments, and a State Bath House with both an outdoor and indoor pool, are all part of a really lovely state park. There are numerous picnic areas, and a bandshell, and they’d put up just the right amount of holiday lights — enough to be pretty, but not so many that they overwhelmed the place. The whole vibe was just good in the way that well-run public amenities often are. Everything was beautifully kept up, and even in December there were people using the whole place — not just the pools, but we saw a cute family having their Christmas pictures taken, and various dog walkers, and even some fishermen (who were taking themselves far too seriously). Oh, and there’s a lovely retirement home there as well, which seems sort of ideal.

Hotel, Former Sanitarium

We stayed at the Best Western, which is a converted Sanitarium built around a central courtyard where the pool and mineral hot tub are located. It’s a fairly recent conversion and they did a great job. We had a corner room which was enormous, with nice furniture and good views and it was down a little corridor from the outdoor balcony/hallways surrounding the pool area, so it was nice and quiet. The hot pool was wonderful, and when we asked they turned it up a little bit (by increasing the amount of springs water  coming into the pool). We were joined by two other couples from Sheridan, and then a dad with his little girl, and the conversations were wide-ranging, lively, and best of all, friendly. When two die-hard lefties like us can spend a fun evening trading stories about wolf management and wolves-we-have-seen, and discover connections (on my part) among the horse people, and just generally shoot the shit, well, it gives you hope that despite all the yelling on television, actual Americans can still manage to have conversations with one another.

Tepee Fountain

It’s a fair drive from Livingston, so we got there with about an hour of daylight left with which to explore the park. The first “sight” was this big ball-o-mineralization. There’s a tiny burbling fountain on the top and when you get closer, you discover from the useful sign, that under all that mineral accumulation is a stone teepee! 

We went for a nice walk around the park, which was refreshingly devoid of fences and warning signs. They seemed to somehow feel that people were probably going to be bright enough not to burn or drown themselves. We walked up the hill to the source spring, and along the mineral terraces, and out across the swinging bridge (which I didn’t get a photo of, it spans the Big Horn River, which runs alongside the park).

Mineral Terraces

While we were on the bluff overlooking the river and the terraces, a huge flock, thousands of little black birds, starlings perhaps, came swooping up the canyon below us, nearly engulfing us, while below ducks and geese fished the river in those places where the hot springs met the colder river water.

As we turned to head back to the hotel, and begin our quest for dinner (more on that tomorrow) the sun was setting through the steam. We lucked out on weather — two blue sky days in December, and even with the buildings on site, you really got a sense of what the springs must have looked like to the Indians who used them for centuries, and for the first white settlers who stumbled upon them.

Tomorrow: The Food Desert that is Thermopolis

From this morning’s paper, an AP article about Thanksgiving dinner that had both of us apoplectic with …. with … with outrage at the manner in which the corporate media normalizes Corporate Food. Here’s the lede:

No need for a salt shaker on the Thanksgiving table: Unless you really cooked from scratch, there’s lots of sodium already hidden in the menu. … The traditional Thanksgiving fixings show how easy sodium can sneak into the foods you’d least expect.

Sneak into your food?!? The salt doesn’t “sneak into” your food — the Big Ag corporations and the Big Food companies put it there. Processed food is just that — processed. That means it’s had salt and sugar and all sorts of creepy chemicals added to it so that the Big Food companies can then sell it to you for too much money while trying to pull a fast one by convincing you it’s a) easier and b) “better” for you. And the idea that “really cooking from scratch” is the exception, not the norm, and an exception so rare that the AP feels they have to warn you about the salt, sneaking into your food, all by itself, while you’re not looking — well, now we’re back to outrage square one again.

I’m not the only one pointing this out, not by a long shot — here’s Michael Ruhlman’s original rant about Salt, and here’s a later one with a lot of links to scientific studies. Basically, we both agree — if you’re worried about salt, or have high blood pressure, then cook your own food from whole, unprocessed ingredients (and buy good meat, from reputable producers who don’t shoot it full of brine) and watch how you season it. Otherwise, the salt you add at the table, or while cooking wholesome real food for yourself and your family poses no danger. The piles of salt that food processors add to all that junk they’re selling in the frozen case and the middle aisles of the supermarket — well yeah, that shit will kill you. So why eat it?

This is exactly the sort of crappy article I was complaining about yesterday. Thanksgiving is not rocket science. Green beans are better without gloppy cream-of-mushroom soup on them. Stuffing is just stale bread, onions, garlic, herbs, butter and some broth or wine to moisten it. Gravy is pan juices with flour to thicken. Turkey is just a big bird. Mashed potatoes are exactly that — potatoes cooked in water until tender, then mashed. Pumpkin pie is something better left off the table, if you’re asking me — perhaps a nice French Yogurt Cake instead.

It’s not rocket science and the people in factories, or in big chain restaurants do not know how to do it better than you do.

Sigh. Every year. The endless parade of newspaper and magazine articles, the FoodTV episodes, the endless parade of drek from the media implying that cooking Thanksgiving dinner is on par with neurosurgery, wing walking, base jumping.

It’s just a turkey. Thaw it and roast it — make a few side dishes, call the people you love and gather them around your table. That’s it. Doesn’t have to be good china, doesn’t have to be 14 dishes, doesn’t even have to be 14 people — just cook something and invite people to share it with you.

Now granted, I learned to cook a turkey when I was about 10, and we had no money after my parents’ divorce and my mother fed us on turkey for a couple of winters. A turkey will keep a family of three, even with two ravenous pre-teens, afloat for a week, easy. Roast turkey, turkey sandwiches, turkey-noodle-casserole, and finally, the dreaded turkey soup. As a result, I am not always a big fan of the turkey, unlike my Beloved, who loves turkey above all other meats.

I guess my main point is the thing that bugs me is the way the Food Industry uses the annual holiday to reinforce the idea that Cooking Is Hard, and that Cooking Is Drudgery and that You Can Do It Wrong if you aren’t led by the nose by the authorities.

Go to town people. Have some fun. Cook stuff you like this year instead of the stuff you think you’re supposed to love. If you like to experiment, try a new recipe — we still laugh at the year my dad and my stepmother tried this baroque recipe where the turkey was coated in a thick paste of spices and a flour slurry — the paste coating burned — black black black. And then it wouldn’t come off — we wound up chipping it off in teeny little pieces, with most of the skin still attached, which was okay because the skin was all flabby and icky under the paste. It was hilarious. It was sort of horrible, but it was hilarious …

So readers — cough it up — what’s your best Thanksgiving cooking story? Either triumph or tragedy –

One reason I’ve hardly been blogging at all these past few months is that I’ve had a series of interesting, and fairly lucrative, freelance gigs on the side that have taken up what writing time I had. I like these. They’re interesting, and provide me a tiny bit of financial cushion, and keep me from being entirely dependent on my day job at the Big High Tech Company Who Keeps Laying People Off. The downside to this has been that I’ve been working too much. My weekends are pencilled out for the Freelance Gig, and there’s always that low-level deadline panic. I finish one, and then it’s off to research the next one. My last one is due the end of this month, and I feel myself limping toward the deadline like a marathon runner who is way at the back of the pack.

Even writing that I’m wearing out, that I’m running out of gas, scares me in this economy. I’m freelance now, which feels to me like a steady drumbeat of Take All the Work. There might not be more. It might be the last job I ever get. In this economy, Take All the Work, an be grateful you have it, even if you feel a little like you’re a car that’s been going down a long long grade, and your brake pads are heating up, and starting to smell, and you’re just not sure how long you can keep up the pace.

The Occupy Wall Street protests feel to me like a large-scale eruption of this same panic and exhaustion. It’s not just me. We’re all worn out. We went through the appropriate channels. We got the degrees and went to the cubicles and bought the houses and paid the mortgages until one day, the corporate overlords decided that the Big Corporations no longer needed, for example,  tech writers (or newspaper writers, or magazine writers, or programmers, or web designers or fill-in-the-blank). That what had been a real profession, with salaries and bonuses and which was considered an integral part of product development didn’t matter anymore. Gone. Don’t need you all anymore. Here’s a parting gift, have a nice life, and if you want your job back you can take it on an hourly basis as a contractor, with no benefits. Because workers bring down the stock price, and our Big Corporation, like all the other Big Corporations no longer really cares about the actual product, the actual product is just an excuse to sell stock, which is where the real money is. Especially for the executives. Who are not being outsourced to China and India. Who still have bonuses, and stock options, and health insurance.

I came down with a sinus infection this week. It started as laryngitis, which I figured I picked up at my 30th high school reunion by being short, and having to shout to be heard in noisy rooms. It felt like a virus, and seemed to be running its course when it took a left turn on about Wednesday, and lodged itself in my sinuses. Then I felt sick. Sick sick. I have fairly crappy health insurance, but I have some, so I went to our local clinic, saw a doctor and got some antibiotics. They’re starting to kick in, which is good, but I can’t help but feel that it’s in part a symptom of living the way we’re forced to live these days. I only really ever get sick when I’m forcing myself down a path that isn’t working (like the Victorian Illness that plagued me through my PhD program).

And I have it pretty good. I actually got what I’d always wanted out of the Big Corporation — a part time job. I’m also grateful to have the Interesting Freelance Gigs. But I’m tired. I’m tired and I havent’ done anything creative in months, and we only even managed to get out and go camping once this summer. We’re both Taking All the Work, because it’s there, and we’re grateful to have it, and in this economy, there might very well not be any more work tomorrow.

Which is, I think, part of the thrumming background panic that’s wearing me out. That’s wearing us all out. Having no job security is why people are taking to the streets. Because this is not unforseen — this is the result of systemic financial decisions that prioritize short-term gain at the expense of all else. At the expense of teachers and schools and fire departments and plowing the streets. At the expense of our communities. It’s the result of 30 years of systematically pitting Americans against one another, rather than calling on us to band together, which is the only way we’ve ever accomplished anything. That people seem to have remembered this and are gathering, in groups all over the nation is giving me great hope.

On the small scale, I’m going to try to be a little brave as well. I think I’m going to take a few months off from the Interesting Freelance Gigs and put my energy into finishing the novel I started last year. I let myself get discouraged by the publishing situation for too long, let myself believe that writing another book was futile because no one is buying anything and even if they do, who can make a living that way (and the darker, more subterranean idea that because my first book was only a very modest success it must mean I really have no talent after all and who do I think I’m kidding)? I bought the cynicism and despair and let it be my excuse for derailment.

And so, just as I’m going to dare to hope that a real movement for economic and social justice can grow from one public space to another, I’m also going to dare to believe that putting my own energy back into my own creative work might not just be a fool’s errand. Here’s to hope, something we’ve all been bereft of for far too long.

When Patrick died, my manager at work said to me “Welcome to the club no one wants to be in.” Her first husband had dropped dead one day after carrying the groceries into the house. “I knew he was gone before he hit the floor,” she told me the time we talked about it, late at night, stuck in a bar in the Denver airport after a missed flight. She had a two year old at the time.

One reason I grow impatient every year with the 9/11 coverage, is that it’s predicated on the idea that Americans had never suffered before, that we’d been living in some prelapsarian paradise that was violated out of the blue and now everything has changed. It’s just bullshit. Like a lot of people I know, like most of the people I know, I’ve always been in the club. My youngest brother died of cancer when I was eight, the same year my parents divorced, we moved off our farm into town, and I was thrown mid year in to a mean class of 4th graders. I was an easy target, half a year younger than the other kids, tiny and heartbroken, so making me cry was a cinch. So it’s not that I don’t feel bad for people who go on about how terrified they were on that day, about how their whole world changed, about how they’d always felt safe until that morning, and now they feel violated and unsafe and frightened — it’s that I don’t know who those people are.

Really? You felt safe? Existentially safe? You thought your life was supposed to work out the way you planned? Who the hell are you people?

When I was in college my mother ran a swimming and tennis club, and she hired a lot of people I’d gone to high school with. My mother likes young people a lot, and one thing you learn once you’re in the club, is that other members show up, sort of like feral cats. She had one guy working there who was just out of college, and his mother was dying of cancer. His father had already died, so he was looking at being an orphan. My mother decided Tom needed to learn to cook and so that fall, she invited three or four of those kids who weren’t going away to college to come over once a week for cooking lessons. Once a week she’d teach them all how to make something easy — a roast chicken, a stew or some pasta plus a salad and, because Tom had a sweet tooth, a dessert. They got together once a week and made something together, taught Tommy some life skills he was going to need (I think they had to teach him how to do laundry too), checked in on him, and most important, had some laughs during a dark time. It kept everyone’s head above water.

My mother and I have often had a fraught relationship, but I have to say, one important thing she taught us was to gather the members of the club, the broken toys, together and to feed them. We always cooked together. She taught me to cook and taught Patrick to cook and taught Tommy to cook. She took in orphans, and taught us to do the same. It was as much about being together, as much about having a common activity in the kitchen as it was about learning how to find a place where you could make the world feel a little bit safe again. When you’re all hanging around together, conversations happen, you wind up talking about things you might not have if you didn’t have something to occupy your hands. The first Christmas after Patrick died, I went to my friend Hope’s house. Hope lost her sisters and father in a plane crash when she was a teenager, she’s a card-carrying member of the club, but she’s also someone I’ve always cooked with. That year, we did an elaborate, multi-course Austrian Christmas dinner out of Saveur magazine for her mom, who is Swiss German. We cooked all weekend together, which mostly kept me from weeping, and we played with her kids, and her mother was happy to have a Christmas dinner from her childhood. And we got past that first Christmas.

So perhaps that’s my wish as 9/11 rolls around again, and the big powers use the event to gin up all sorts of unsettling feelings in the population. Go home. Cook a chicken with your family. Teach a kid to chop an onion or let them play with the mixer and make a cake. There are so many things we can’t control in the world, but with a little practice, we can control dinner. Maybe it’s the lapsed Catholic in me, but I do believe in the sacrament of dinner, of feeding one another, of standing around the kitchen chatting and making jokes and catching up on the day. So there’s my 9/11 wish. Go home. Cook dinner. Be together. Turn off the TV.

This month at Bookslut, I review three terrific books about making your own. Click here to read my review:

• D.I.Y. Delicious: Recipes and Ideas for Simple Food from Scratch
• Home Made
• Tart and Sweet: 101 Canning and Pickling Recipes for the Modern Kitchen