If you’ve been at least a bit lucky in life, chances are you’ve traveled some.  Maybe you’ve been very lucky, and ambitious as well, and have been the world over.  You’ve been to other continents and a good share of the world’s iconic places, Paris and the Grand Canyon and Machu Picchu and Angkor Wat and Waikiki Beach and the Kalahari Desert during migration.  Some say if you’ve never seen a wildebeest stampede you haven’t lived, but that might be overstated.  One might make similar claims about viewing aboriginal petroglyphs in the Australian outback, or partying in Rio during Carnival, or witnessing the spectacle of half a billion birds –  you read that right  –  passing through the Holy Land on their annual migration.  How many of us would know?

It’s a bit more likely you’ve celebrated Mardi Gras in New Orleans, or gambled or even been married in Las Vegas, or stood awestruck at Hollywood and Vine or in Times Square, and maybe it was even New Years.  Or if cities and crowds aren’t your thing it is possible you’ve been to a serious number of national parks or hiked trails in the Rockies or the Whites or even that tricky one up Vancouver Island’s west coast, or seen grizzly bears in Alaska or raced pronghorns with your car in Arizona (we have!) or stood atop Mt Cadillac, which happens to be in Maine and not Detroit, and watched the sunrise and/or sunset.  But again such iconic experiences are unfamiliar to a good number of us.  

If you’re from Boston and your luck or ambitions have been modest, chances are you’ve at least made it to “the Cape” (as in Cod) a few times and had a lobster roll, or “the Berkshires” at the other end of the state to view the fall colors from the top of Mt Greylock, or gone at least once to see the Rockettes in the Big Apple just a few hours away, and if you’re smart you took the train.  The point is you know the scale of your own ambitions and the places you’ve been, and in the end travel is all about the experiences and the memories and one can only hope you’ve had some terrific ones and probably a few you’d prefer to forget, because travel is like that, too.

And travel is usually about expectations of a special kind.  Sure, every day of living probably includes one expectation or another, though there may be exceptions among those who’ve found enlightenment or are serving lifetime prison terms.  But for the rest of us, and especially with travel, expectations take on a special and peculiar aspect.  Generating and fulfilling expectations is what the travel industry is all about, what with the shiny brochures and magazines and detailed guides on how to go about visiting a certain place so as to achieve some kind of maximum satisfaction or fulfillment.  One of the joys of travel is the anticipation of the great times one will have, and one of the risks is that some of those expectations are doomed to not be met.  Those who love to travel accept these conditions, and above all know that some of the real joy comes with the inevitable surprises.  Encountering the unexpected can often be where the real treasure is to be found, and those who don’t like surprises don’t travel much, or not at all, or they stick to cruise ships and group trips with strict and specific itineraries, or they just watch a lot of Rick Steves.

Ecotourism, with which we are most familiar, presents its own peculiar variations on all this.  We tend to do group trips because those include the knowledgable local guide and a group of people who tend to have exceptional eyesight and hearing, not to mention passion for the natural world.  We’ve learned that having such partners means one will experience much much more than if one goes it alone, for the natural world can be very tricky and shy and subtle and elusive, and will reveal so much more to those who know how and where to look and listen. 

Ecotrips also tend to come with very specific itineraries, sometimes detailed descriptions of what one might see or hear and specific locations where this is likely to happen.  Experienced ecotourists also know that these itineraries are mostly wish lists, and nature is not inclined to fulfill wishes the way a theme park or cruise ship operator might be capable of delivering on expectations, as outlined in the brochure.  One might see the jaguar or the golden eagle on this trip (they saw it on the last one!) but then again one might not, and there’s always the weather, less predictable than it ever was.  It could rain every day, leaving many of one’s ambitions paradoxically high and dry, so to speak, so don’t get too excited about that species list.  And always be ready to encounter that bird or other creature not even mentioned on the list, which often happens and which provides one of the best memories of the trip.  Nature is about the unexpected, and this can cut both ways, such is its glory.

Above all, eco trips tend to go to nowhere places, where nature has been least disturbed by civilization.  This means that while the small towns and villages and ecolodges might have their own charms, their main function is to provide food and shelter when one is not “in the field’.  It is also a fact that some trips, the kind run by fanatics who obsess about being out in nature from predawn to dusk, can be totally exhausting.  Ask us about this as we’ve been there and can tell you it was a relief to come home, not that it wasn’t a great time had by all and that our species list was, indeed, almost completely checked off, including the black and the yellow-billed magpie, how about that?

All of which is to say that these mostly functional food-and-shelter places might have their charms but seldom are they a feature of the trip.  For the true nature fanatic, in fact, it is likely they are always forgettable, for all that truly matters is that species list and the memories of savoring all those hours in the field and the observations made there.  It should be more or less clear at this point that we are not quite of this ilk, being enthusiasts of all aspects of life away from home, even at their most humble.  We tend to walk around the towns and villages and gape and take pictures.  This might have limited rewards, compared to viewing quetzals chasing each other through a forest in Costa Rica or a flock of several thousand snow geese filling the sky in New Mexico or a herd of bison crossing the road in Wyoming, but in the end we are naive novice travelers, fascinated by rural places that don’t resemble Boston MA in the least, of which there are many in this world, in case you didn’t know.

One fact about eco trip itineraries is that little is ever said about these overnight places for reasons that should be abundantly clear, consequently any expectations are minimal, or nonexistent.  So imagine the element of surprise at play when one of these places turns out to be a truly memorable feature of the trip.  Or even better, when this surprise includes a bit of mystery, of questions unanswered and the imagination left to its own devices, for what you’ve got then is the unexpected at its very best.  In this moment I am thinking, of course, of two places:  Cooke City, at the northeastern edge of Yellowstone National Park, a nowhere village of around ninety seven souls (census numbers vary) just across the state line in Montana, and Vardø on the Barents Sea, the easternmost town in Norway and northernmost town in continental Europe, and just what might these disparate places have in common, you might ask?  

(You might already know that Vardø gets treated in a post elsewhere on this site, some material of which is also covered here, though not in the context of this spellbinding comparison)

As has already been excessively reported, they are nowhere places, but one should also note that these towns are more nowhere than usual, even for a nature trip.  As in, they’re the biggest place around where “around” for a good many miles offers nothing in the way of settled humanity.  Cooke City’s claim to fame is that it’s the northeastern “gateway” to Yellowstone National Park, as well as the western end of the Beartooth Highway, somewhat lesser known but with it’s own reputation as one of the most beautiful stretches of road in N America.  It was featured in a Charles Kuralt TV show many years ago when he dubbed it “the most beautiful drive in America”.  It is also known as US 212 and it connects Cooke City with Red Lodge about 60 miles away, and if you’re a flatlander take a Xanax if you’re driving as it twists and turns around precipices and cliffs in a way that is gorgeous and a bit menacing.  It is also closed from September to May, which should tell you something about the elevations and the weather involved, and in winter forget about going to Red Lodge, except by snowmobile.  It’s also a long way to Cody or Billings, and when the plumbing backed up at our motel, the owner lamented it would take a full day to pick up the pieces he needed;  he evidently figured out something else, to our great relief.  In Cooke City one must be resourceful and clever with things like that.

Vardø, like Cooke City, became known to us due to its presence on the edge of the Veranger Peninsula, which happens to be mostly a National Park, just like Yellowstone.   Only this time the nation is Norway and instead of the glories of the Rocky Mountains you get the equally glorious Arctic north, easily as beautiful in its own right, a fact amply illustrated elsewhere on this website in the “Journey to the end” postings.  Vardø, an island in itself, has its own special claim to fame with Hornøya Island just across the harbor and the breathtaking number of breeding seabirds one finds there (PUFFINS among a cast of many species) in summer,  the major reason ecotourists visit the place.  Whereas Cooke City made it to the White Man’s map when it became a gold mining town in the 19th century, Vardø goes back a bit farther, like to the 14th century when it was established as a fishing village.  The tiny island also has stone age and Sami Iron Age sites, suggesting humans have settled there for at least 800 years.  Vardø also has a claim to fame as a site of witch trials in 1621, when 91 women were tried and killed, and a memorial was finally built a bit later  –  would you believe 2011?  –  to acknowledge what happened.  Whether this draws tourists of that kind of history (who’ve also might have Salem MA on their bucket list) is anybody’s guess, as Vardø is a whole lot more off the beaten track.  But then you get that seabird breeding spectacle as a bonus, and quite a bonus it is.

Vardø also has a somewhat bigger population than Cooke City’s, currently down to about two thousand and in serious decline since the fishing played out about ten years ago, but whereas the quaint town in Montana has long survived solely due to the tourist industry, Vardø has this other thing going, and here’s where it all gets a bit weird.  As our arrival in the town was imminent on our trip, the guide casually mentioned how there was an American presence there, due to some NATO radar installation placed there in the ‘90s.  To our group of nature fanatics this comment went mostly unnoticed, but even at a distance this quaint fishing village was visually quite stunning, entirely different from all the other quaint Norwegian fishing villages on the edge of the Veranger Peninsula.  It has these prominent white spheres, for one thing, and this oddly proportioned church steeple, that in its strange aesthetic fits right in with the peculiar Vardø skyline.  Then there’s the narrow but very substantial-looking (and totally unexpected, in our case) tunnel with its sci-fi visuals, that the visitor can only behold and mutter “Oh yeah, NATO” to themselves, as they traverse its claustrophobic two-mile length to enter what visually is just another humble fishing village in decline.  It was memorable.

None of this was hinted at in the trip brochure  –  this was a nature trip, after all, and does anything else matter?  –  and in the end we viewed the arctic terns breeding in the gravel outside the hotel (which housed a number of people in military uniform) and the black-legged kittiwakes making a total spectacle of themselves nesting in every available nook and cranny and enhancing it all with white splotches of guano, and we had a truly grand finale to our trip walking around the tens of thousands of breeding murres and shags and PUFFINS and the like on Hornøya Island.  Our expectations were more than grandly met, much of it as was suggested in the itinerary we’d been savoring for months.  And there was an unexpected bonus for those of us who had broader travel ambitions than gorging deliriously on the glories of the natural world, as grand as that all was, which was the town itself.

So as you sit there in your Vardø hotel room, put down that guide to Birds of the Arctic for now, and take a walk outside.  C’mon, the town looked a little drab, maybe even down and out on the way in, but hey it’s a fishing village in Norway!  And it has those radomes or whatever they are!  Did you check that out on the web?  Did you see how it mentioned the US Globus II radar system they installed back in 1998?  How the city of Murmansk is the home of the Russian navy’s Northern Fleet that is headquartered there, and that it’s a mere 100 miles away?  Hmmm.  And that, while the US and NATO claim that the radar is there to monitor “space junk” floating around and threatening satellites and such, its presence is controversial in diplomatic and intelligence circles, for the Russians claim its there as part of an anti-missile system?  And now they’re getting Globus 3, about which nobody’s sayin’ anything?  

So forget about PUFFINS and such, at least for now, take a walk and notice what you see!  And watch out for those terns outside the hotel sitting in the gravel.  That’s where they’re nesting and don’t get too close or they’ll let you know to back off!  Gotta protect the next generation.  What you won’t see is the presence of many people on the street.  Or scant few restaurants for a place this size.  Very few businesses of any kind, for that matter, beyond a few gift shops and Asian takeout.  And what about all these cars driving around?  There doesn’t seem to be much in the way of anyplace to go here.  You can see how this 800 year-old fishing village might’ve offered a bit more historic architecture before the Russians bombed the hell out of it during the Nazi occupation.  Now it’s all just sort of non-historic and pretty run down, for the most part, except for those radomes and buildings on the hill and that church, whose steeple suggests the possibility of some massive antenna on the inside.  Just sayin’.  

Note all the antennas, everywhere.  They say the electromagnetic pulses that resulted after NATO moved in make for lousy radio and TV reception, but is that what they’re really for?  Have you heard how some locals have claimed an uptake in miscarriages and cancer diagnoses over the last few years?  Maybe that’s just a rumor.  But what about the graffiti? Down by the docks but also spread around on various building façades?  Some of it quite well done, but who did it and what does it all mean?  And what about that spectacular Viking ship with the whale backbone just outside of downtown?  The official Vardø tourist website doesn’t even mention it, though their video does make the place look etherial and beautiful, especially in winter, and it also mentions the museums and monuments and stuff.  And of course the PUFFINS and all that, there across the harbor.  And oh yes, the website mentions “snowball fights” along with “festivals and street art”.  After walking around we know about the street art, and that PUFFIN effigy in crates down at the docks suggests some kind of festival, for sure.  What they don’t mention about the snowball fights is that Vardø is a site for Yukigassen, an international snowball fighting competition that started in Hokkaido, Japan.  “Kind of like capture the flag”, some say.  They hold the Nordic championships in Vardø!  So the place might be worth a return trip for more than just PUFFINS, who would not be around in the snowy season anyway.  Of course if that’s too far, they say you might try Anchorage or Saskatoon, or Murmansk (though that might not be the best idea right now).  And there’s always Japan, or possibly even a snowy field of valor somewhere near you, because one never knows, do one?

After so much Cold War bafflement and mystery, layered upon an epic avian spectacle and street art that at times might seem a bit ominous  –  what’s with those ravens, and don’t you see images on that wall crowded with graffiti that strongly suggest the covid virus?  –  the questions lingering in one’s consciousness after a stroll up and down Cooke City’s main (and only) street are almost pleasant to contemplate.  Like Vardø, the frontier Montana architecture presents the same mild decay and seen-a-better-day vibe that befits the least-visited Yellowstone “gateway” city, especially one that sees no through traffic for much of the year.  Yes you can get to Cody in a roundabout fashion in the winter  –  if the road is open  –  but you can’t make it to Billings, with its interstate and major airport.  As it is, most Yellowstone-bound people fly to Jackson Hole, the glittering winter playground of the rich and famous and southern gateway city, or the upstart city of Bozeman, a short way from the northern gateway city of Gardiner and the western gateway city of W Yellowstone.

A ten minute walk up and down the half-a-mile stretch of the Beartooth Highway that encompasses the entire business district gives the immediate and undeniable impression that this place exists to service the national park and whatever small numbers of “outdoor” enthusiasts show up in the winter months and that’s it.  Food, lodging, bars, a drugstore and a gas station, and a few spots with dual identities:  a lunch stop/bookstore and a gift shop/natural history museum with utterly charming wildlife dioramas.  Oh, and the Cooke City Montana Museum, where one can learn the story and view many artifacts from the gold mining days which was the town’s original raison d’être until Yellowstone became a thing and the gold came by way of wilderness-loving tourists.  And as one website comment mentions, it is often the only place in town one can get an internet connection.  The restrooms there are always clean, as well.  But recent history is about how it was and remains a tough row to hoe competing with the gateway cities at the other entrances.  No airport, no nearby interstate, barely much in the way of roads at all, in fact, in the winter.  A great place to settle down and write a novel if you’re not into snowmobiling, no doubt.

That last comment was hardly made in jest, and it might help if you’re sitting down right now, for it is a fact that last year one of Cooke City’s major events was its Ernest Hemingway Festival, the 19th annual.  For it turns out Papa did, in fact, find the glorious and remote local environs a place conducive to getting his literary work done, back in the 1930s.  I am speaking of the completion of Death in the Afternoon and the final drafting of To Have and Have Not at the L-T Ranch just outside of town.  Why this escaped the attention or interest of the Museum is just one of the many tantalizing mysteries that the downtown scene offers.  Mysteries, by the way, that are even more of a visual kind than those offered up by the scene in Vardø, where knowing some of the history and geopolitics of it all helps a lot.  In Cooke City, what you see is what you get, and what does it all suggest?  So let us go then, you and I, when the evening is spread out against the sky – or maybe tomorrow morning as well, if we’ve the time before tomorrow’s birding/bison/moose outing – and take a gander at main street, aka Beartooth Highway, also US 212.

So what to make of it all?  Not so much What to make of Life (for that I suggest you read The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by Thomas Stearns Eliot, but then again it might not make much sense to you as it didn’t for me) but what do the visual cues in Cooke City suggest, if anything?  At one end of town you’ve got your Montana for Trump flag, while just down the street we get the lunch place/bookstore with its Cooke City against racism message outside.  Are the 97 (or however many) citizens of this place fiercely politically divided?  Who decided it’s the Coolest Small Town in America, Conde Nast or US News and World Report, or the chamber of commerce members themselves?  Of course, Cooke City, presents as “cool” by some measures, no doubt about it, but face it, the term is used all too casually nowadays as some kind of vague affirmation.  We’ve come a long ways since Miles Davis and his Birth of the Cool album, when the word might have meant something specific and useful, though unfortunately Miles is no longer around to explain what he meant.  

This line of questioning could go on forever.  Is Hoosier’s bar really owned by somebody who can quote James Whitcomb Reilly?  Is the Bistro a takeoff from the Brick, the restaurant in Northern Exposure?  Is that promise of a future Cooke City Tuxedo Rental and Formal Wear to be believed, or is it some insider’s joke?  One must admit that a shitbox Ford Maverick outside the door of somebody’s rundown storefront apartment is the perfect choice of vehicle for some kind of art installation, if that’s what it is.  One assumes they can still get parts for it in wilderness Montana.

One leaves Cooke City with the distinct impression that it might all be some insider’s joke, but who are they, and what’s the joke?  If it’s meant to be humorous, it is humor of the subtlest and gentlest kind, if that is even the intent.  If some of it’s about poverty, it may not be funny at all, though poverty in a small community in a gorgeous setting might contradict some of our urban assumptions. In the end the joke’s on us, and the mystery remains a sweet one.  Maybe Ernest Hemingway was enchanted with it all in his day, but that’s a mystery too.  It’s not clear the guy had much of a sense of humor, but you never know.

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