When An American Tourist Mecca Copes With Two Possible Fates: "Bad" And "Worse"
A young Jackson Hole businessperson carrying on a family tradition fears that for many re-opening Yellowstone and Grand Teton to visitors could come too little too late
A busy beehive of a social hub in Moose, Wyoming, the patio bar at Dornan's would be bustling in spring and brimming over in summer. Moose is the headquarters to Grand Teton National Park. The Covid-19 shutdown has left entrepreneur Huntley Dornan and hundreds of other business people paralyzed by uncertainty. They don't know if they should hire summer help, order supplies or if they can open. Photo courtesy Huntley Dornan
EDITOR'S NOTE: Summer vacations to Yellowstone and Jackson Hole have long been considered a venerable American tradition. For the first time since the end of World War II, uncertainty leaves the multi-billion-dollar tourism economy of Greater Yellowstone in limbo. In this first-person essay, Huntley Dornan notes how a similar kind of life and death issues relating to Covid-19 now represents an existential threat to the survival of "New West" communities.
by Huntley Dornan
Earlier this year when the US began to address the Covid-19 pandemic that was raging across the globe, the choice was literally between human life and death. We did what we had to do, locally and across the world, and I don’t see value in any after-the-fact critique of decisions made in such times.
Nonetheless, many people will judge and assess the failures that led to our late and desperate response and now contribute to our deepening economic disaster. l think, for instance, that it’s entirely appropriate to do so at the ballot box this fall. More urgently, though, we should engage each other and our current elected officials as we ponder our next pivotal moves toward re-establishing a functional society.
We small business owners in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, where nature tourism is the bedrock of our multi-billion-dollar regional economy, are dealing with very real struggles. Never could we have imagined something like this happening. Not here. Not in a place where the thinking was that as long as you take care of the environment people will and everything will be fine.
Not only has spending been brought to a standstill by closures to our crown jewel national parks and it's been accompanied by travel restrictions, 14-day quarantines, and shelter in place guidelines, but many businesses find themselves temporarily closed by law.
Even as some of those restrictions lift, until visitors come to the Greater Yellowstone our communities will struggle. You can’t have jobs without businesses and you can’t have businesses without customers. You can't be expected to exist in a state of suspended animation indefinitely.
Just as reliable precipitation is essential to a healthy river, the flow of customers into our region is essential for the success of local businesses, communities and the ecosystem of commerce. It’s too soon to know how severe the impact has been but it’s already clear that some businesses may never re-open. And it could take years before we are able to measure the negative ripple effects on our communities.
For almost exactly a century, my family has been a mainstay in Moose, Wyoming, the tiny outpost located along the Snake River that serves as headquarters to Grand Teton National Park. Dornan’s, as a business, offers a variety of services, from food and beverage to lodging and canoe rentals. Everything we do involves contact with our customers.
In order to remain viable across generations, we have continuously adapted to change. A society that does not travel and cannot abide social contact is a change we may find impossible to accommodate and persevere through. For us this is a make or break time and the biggest threat to our future since the 1940s.
Backdropped by the Tetons, the restaurant-saloon, chuckwagon, general store and canoe rental complex known as Dornan's is a popular place that most of the millions of visitors to Grand Teton pass by every year. But it's now hauntingly quiet and like the iconic peaks obscured by inclement spring weather the outlook for the Jackson Hole economy is dreary and uncertain. Photo courtesy Huntley Dornan.
As I struggle to decide whether we should hire half as many people as normal for our high season, or none or all of them, I nonetheless look forward to the coming summer and autumn—which are our most important income-generating parts of the year—with cautious optimism. We may be smaller, we may be different, we may be forced to shut down and live on savings, debt, and government assistance, but we think we can survive.
The uncertainty of our time is challenging and stressful but likely surmountable. The same may not be true for millions of people across the US and around the world.
When this started, we didn’t know much. We knew that Covi-19 was highly contagious, perhaps more contagious than anything we had seen in 100 years. We believed it was extremely deadly, perhaps more than 10 times as deadly as seasonal influenza. We rationally chose to fight the pandemic aggressively and with the only tool we had: reduction of human contact in order to dramatically decrease the contagion, also known as social distancing and quarantine. It has worked.
Now we enter another stage. We have considerably more information about Covid-19. Several studies, including one conducted in Jackson, tell us that it is more contagious than we thought but here it's been manifested as less deadly. The point isn’t to minimize the problem but to adjust the response.
If the death rate is as high as we feared we'd need every bed; if it’s substantially lower, we don’t. We know that one or more of several key preexisting conditions are present in a substantial majority of patients who have died. Again, this is serious and risks remain for otherwise healthy people but our expanding knowledge can guide our response in ways it was unguided a few weeks ago.
We now know better who most needs protection and care.
Meanwhile, we are also learning about the risks and dangers of our response. UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres has said that the economic meltdown caused by widespread quarantine orders will be devastating to children around the world and could well cause several hundred thousand childhood deaths worldwide in 2020. That’s a stunning estimate.
Additionally, the ranks of people who face imminent food shortage has nearly doubled, from 135 million to 265 million. Arif Husain, the chief economist of the UN World Food Program, recently said, “The scenario in poor countries is too gruesome to comprehend…people are losing their livelihoods and their incomes and, at the same time, supply chains are disrupted. This translates into a double whammy which has both the breadth and the depth of hunger increasing around the world.”
The choice is no longer between life and death, but between some lives and other lives. It’s a choice between, in many cases, bad and worse.
None of us want to act impetuously or minimize the risks of the Covid19 pandemic. In defense of quarantine orders many have said that you can’t put a price on a life. I myself believe that.
That said, as a society we do it all the time. We do it in lawsuits for those killed by the negligence of others. We do it when we send young people to war. We do it when we spend trillions of dollars to slow the spread of Covid-19. And we do it when we choose a path that costs jobs that would otherwise help poor and disadvantaged people buy food and care for their families.
Lives and livelihoods are on the line as we ponder the fate of the economy just as much as they are when we ponder the public health crisis. What we do next has implications for the physical and mental health of families and the fabric of communities.
From the vantage of our little mountain towns, what’s happening in cities across the US and in the poorest nations in the world seems far away. But it is not.
It’s true that most people who read Mountain Journal—the locals and travelers eager to revisit Yellowstone, Grand Teton and our other public lands— may not face the worst of this crisis personally as in nations with fewer advantages.
Few of us are seriously at risk of starving to death. But many of us have already lost or may soon lose jobs. Some of us will lose businesses and homes that are the result of years and generations of hard work.
Sunrise comes to Jackson Hole in spring 2020 but as businesspeople and workers around the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem know, you can't eat the scenery. The region's nature-based tourist economy is now facing the biggest test of survival in modern times. Photo courtesy Huntley Dornan
As of late April, at least 26 million Americans have filed for unemployment.
Unemployment, particularly temporary unemployment, is not necessarily a non-stop bus to permanent poverty. It’s reasonable to hope that most of the millions of us who have lost jobs will work again—and relatively soon. It’s also reasonable to assume that, as the depth of our current recession grows, millions of us may not. Sure, it would be great if income didn't matter.
Persistent poverty would very well rise as a consequence. And persistent poverty kills. Rarely in the US does it kill directly, as it does in other parts of the world, but it kills nonetheless. It kills by deepening despair and increasing hopelessness.
It kills with rises in drug addiction, alcohol abuse, domestic violence and neglect, suicide and murder.
Again, in our small mountain towns it’s easy to ignore these problems. Some of the worst impacted by our local economy collapsing may leave our towns because most of the poor in our service-job economies are migrants. The ski bums will go home to Connecticut. The Hispanic laborers and housekeepers will follow the jobs wherever they can be found and if they can’t find work there either, they will nonetheless be miles from our idyllic bergs and out of our sight.
It may seem easy for us in Bozeman or Jackson or Big Sky to pretend this is not our crisis and to lean toward protecting people from Covid-19 at the expense of the people who will suffer from the resultant economic collapse. Yet the human backbone of our communities to which those with means can escape remains working-class folk.
Travis Riddell, the public health officer in Teton County, Wyoming recently said that we will make our decisions about reopening the economy based entirely on public health data but that there is no role for political pressure. I have deep sympathy for Dr. Riddell who is in a difficult and likely thankless position. Personally, he is my son’s pediatrician and I happen to respect and like him.
I couldn’t disagree more, however, with this statement. I absolutely agree with Dr. Riddell that there’s no role for political ugliness and insults but this is absolutely and inherently a political question.
When this started in winter 2020, our political leaders failed to listen to the technical experts which deepened the crisis. We should not make the opposite mistake now.
Technical expertise should always inform decisions that have complex data points, such as public health decisions, and for that matter, economic decisions. Again, this decision is a political one in that elected officials must weigh the dangers of opening too soon or late for two different important metrics.
In a democracy politics is (for better or worse) the place we address the difficult moral dilemmas we encounter as a society. This is just such a moment. The decision must be made on the balance of two awful data sets: many may die of Covid19 on one hand, and many may perish of the consequences of our strategy to contain it on the other hand.
In a democracy politics is (for better or worse) the place we address the difficult moral dilemmas we encounter as a society. This is just such a moment. The decision must be made on the balance of two awful data sets: many may die of Covid19 on one hand, and many may perish of the consequences of our strategy to contain it on the other hand.
To give all the power to the experts on public health without listening to the experts on the economy would be its own tragedy.
Again, it may seem that what we do here in this small corner or the world is insignificant relative to the big economic issues and that we should forget that and focus on Covid-19.
Let me suggest a few reasons to question that idea.
First of all, it simply isn’t true. The suicide rates in Wyoming and Montana are among the highest in the nation. Those rates nearly doubled after the financial crisis. People in our communities have died because of poverty in the past and will die because of poverty in the future, just as they will across the country and the world. Job loss is a public health issue.
Second, we are in this region, like it or not, leaders and we've attracted some of the most enlightened thinkers in the world. Teton County Wyoming is the wealthiest community in the wealthiest nation on the planet and Bozeman has been the fastest-growing micropolitan-sized city in all of the US.
People look to us. They look at us from far away and from within our home states. What we do in Teton County or Bozeman gives or takes away jobs across our region. We bear an outsized responsibility in our little towns to choose wisely in this time. When our neighbors and visitors from around the world look to us they could look to us and judge us or they could look to us and be inspired by our creativity.
Fifteen or so years ago, I was present at the Telluride Film Festival when someone asked Doug Peacock, after a screening of Grizzly Years, if his experience in Vietnam had influenced his politics. Doug blinked, as Doug does, and said, “My politics are simple. I’m against anything that hurts a kid.”
Fifteen or so years ago, I was present at the Telluride Film Festival when someone asked Doug Peacock, after a screening of Grizzly Years, if his experience in Vietnam had influenced his politics. Doug blinked, as Doug does, and said, “My politics are simple. I’m against anything that hurts a kid.”
It has stuck with me ever since. As a young parent myself I find it resonates now even more than it did then. The fact that our collective global response may result in hundreds of thousands of childhood deaths is simply too costly and I find it heartbreaking. No matter how near or far those deaths are from the Greater Yellowstone.
It’s true that what we do here will have little impact on children in Syria and Bangladesh. But it’s also true that when a parent in Bozeman or Jackson loses a job her children most likely lose health insurance and other kinds of security. Children without health insurance in families without incomes are vulnerable. That vulnerability is exacerbated when children are isolated from teachers and friends who might have helped in normal times.
Beyond the danger of Covid-19, Dornan says the fears many parents face of not being able to provide for their families imposes another kind of dread.
Today, erring on the side of being over-cautious may be the absolute safest course from a public health standpoint, but every day that passes, every horizon line for re-opening that gets further extended, raises the possibility of more businesses never coming back and more people out of work in our communities. Globally, it raises far more severe possibilities.
I’m not advocating for an overcorrection the other way. It’s important to remember there is often a middle path. Being overly-cautious, on the one hand, or doing away with all of the restrictions that helped flatten the curve, on the other, are fortunately not the only options before us.
The choice we make, I hope, is one that seeks a middle path. It’s a course of action where we focus our public health efforts on protecting and treating the highest risk people while allowing the economy to reopen swiftly enough to protect the thousands of recently unemployed regionally, and hundreds of millions of unemployed worldwide, from slipping into poverty and falling victim to all of poverty’s attendant risks.
Clearly all of this comes down to calculated risk. I do agree with Dr. Riddell that these decisions should be data based, which is the calculated part of taking a risk. The reason I also believe that these are absolutely political questions is that as toxic as our politics have become, open democratic process is still the best form of community action.
These issues should be debated openly and then addressed swiftly by our elected officials and community leaders, with all the gravity big moral questions demand. We must consider both the public health data and the data on economic costs. To fail to see all sides risks lives in the form of a further public health crisis stemming from rapidly increasing poverty.
Whatever we do, we need to move forward quickly. Just as the consequences of delaying our response to Covid19 were devastating, so too the consequences of doing too little, too late, or nothing at all. The wrong move in this "new abnormal" could be equally as devastating and even more long lasting.
About Huntley Dornan
Businessperson and writer Huntley Dornan grew up in Moose, Wyoming where his family has lived for 100 years. Huntley graduated from Haverford College with a degree in Philosophy. He spent 15 years in the action sports industry, including management roles at Patagonia and Quiksilver and as President and CEO of Surftech. Along the way he received an MBA from Pepperdine University. He returned to Moose in 2014 where he manages his family’s business, Dornan's.
