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real West, the land of beaver trappers and mountain men, that a dollop of romance and col-
or was brought to the business of giving names. And here I was about to enter one of the
most beautiful and understatedly romantic of them all: Jackson Hole.
Jackson Hole isn't really a hole at all; it's just the name for a scenic valley that runs
from north to south through the Grand Tetons, very probably the most majestic range in
the Rockies. With their high white peaks and bluish-gray bases they look like some kind
of exotic confection, like blueberry frappes. At the southern edge of Jackson Hole is the
small town of Jackson, where I stopped now for lunch. It was a strange place, with an odd
combination of bow-legged Yosemite Sams and upmarket stores like Benetton and Ralph
Lauren, which are there for the benefit of the many well-heeled tenderfeet who come for
theskiinginthewinterandtoduderanchesinthesummer.Everyplace intownhadaWild
West motif-the Antler Motel, the Silver Dollar Saloon, the Hitching Post Lodge. Even the
Bank of Jackson, where I went to cash a traveler's check, had a stuffed buffalo head on
the wall. Yet it all seemed quite natural. Wyoming is the most fiercely Western of all the
Western states. It's still a land of cowboys and horses and wide open spaces, a place where
aman'sgottadowhataman'sgottado,whichonthefaceofitprimarilyconsistsofdriving
around in a pickup truck and being kind of slow. I had never seen so many people in cow-
boy apparel, and almost everybody owns a gun. Only a couple of weeks before, the state
legislature in Cheyenne had introduced a rule that all legislators would henceforth have to
check their handguns at the front desk before being allowed into the statehouse. That's the
sort of state Wyoming is.
I drove on to Grand Teton National Park. And there's another arresting name for you.
Tetons means tits in French. That's an interesting fact-a topographical tit-bit, so to speak-
that Miss Mucous, my junior-high-school geography teacher, failed to share with us in the
eighth grade. Why do they always keep the most interesting stuff from you in school? If
I'd known in high school that Thomas Jefferson kept a black slave to help him deal with
sexual tension or that Ulysses S. Grant was a hopeless drunk who couldn't button his own
fly without falling over, I would have shown a livelier interest in my lessons, I can assure
you.
Atanyrate,thefirstFrenchexplorerswhopassedthroughnorthwesternWyomingtookone
lookatthemountainsandsaid,“Zutalors!Hey,Jacques,clockthosemountains.Theylook
just like my wife's tetons.” Isn't it typical of the French to reduce everything to a level of
sexual vulgarity? Thank goodness they didn't discover the Grand Canyon, that's all I can
say. And the remarkable thing is that the Tetons look about as much like tits as … well,
as a frying pan or a pair of hiking boots. In a word, they don't look like tits at all, except
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