For four years in the 1980s, I
lived in Vermont, and then left for the West after tiring of its
busybody politics. But I certainly admired one aspect of life in
the bucolic yet politically correct Green Mountain State: No
billboards.
Back in 1968, the Vermont Legislature passed
a law banning billboards, and since then they aren’t found
even along the state’s two busy interstates, much less along
those picture-postcard back roads.
I live happily in
Cody, Wyo., nowadays, for the most part having escaped the torments
of liberalism. But unfortunately, the Cowboy State — while
being in line with my political tastes — sprouts billboards
like skin cancer on the epidermis of its service economy. You see
them wherever you go, 10 feet tall and 20 feet or 30 feet wide,
and, paradoxically, many times they’re selling
Wyoming’s natural wonders, from Devils Tower to Yellowstone
National Park. There are probably a hundred or more within
Cody’s city limits.
No matter how a visitor enters
Cody — even on the scenic highway to Yellowstone — they
will run a gantlet of as many as 30 billboards. They proselytize
the virtues of our motels, fast-food restaurants and rubber
tomahawk and T-shirt emporiums, not to mention the pleasures to be
enjoyed in touring the Buffalo Bill Historical Center, or in
attending the summertime Cody Rodeo. To me, billboards are the bane
of all of Yellowstone Park’s “Gateway communities.”
One would think that the average tourist finds all this commercial
stimuli garish and ugly. One wonders if these folks — after a
day spent admiring the splendors of Yellowstone — really want
to be reminded of their lives in sprawling strip-mall suburbia.
The Cody boostocracy seems to think so. They’ll go
to embarrassingly faux-Western lengths to separate tourists from
their money with food, drink, lodging and cowboy-culture
entertainment, barraging drivers’ eyeballs with billboard ads
as they drive into town.
Check in to the Holiday Inn, the
Comfort Inn, the Super 8, Buffalo Bill’s own Irma Hotel. Swim
in the pool for free, use the luxurious spa for free, bring the
kids for free. There’s HBO and 24-hour high-speed Internet
access. Who needs all those dusty Remingtons and Russells hanging
on the walls of the historical center when there’s cable TV
and video games?
Come to think about it, who needs
Yellowstone National Park? You can log onto the Old Faithful cam at
nps.gov/yell/Oldfaithful.htm and watch the geyser erupt more or
less on schedule from the comfort of your home.
Since we
live in a high-tech world, have billboards finally outlived their
commercial usefulness? They are a throwback to a time —
the1950s — when Western tourist towns like Cody hosted the
classic American family on summer vacation. One can imagine Ward
and June Cleaver insisting that they stop at the museum because it
was “educational,” while Wally and Beaver, clad in their coonskin
caps and Davy Crockett T-shirts, were anxious to get on to Old
Faithful and feed the bears.
But these days, says
multi-media publisher Shelli Johnson in Lander, Wyo., travelers
increasingly expect the Internet to tell them what they want to
know. She says her Web site, Yellowstonepark.com, brings in 20
million hits a year. According to the Casper
Star-Tribune, Johnson is an innovator who tries to
contact tourists traveling across Wyoming via both cell phones and
laptops, so she can provide up-to-date information about road
conditions, weather and recreational opportunities.
The
writer Edward Abbey said billboards deserved to be burned, cut down
or shot full of holes. Johnson seems to believe that while Gateway
communities to Yellowstone will always need to attract tourists in
multiple ways, the mechanisms will tend more and more to
individualized high-tech.
That means billboards may go
the way of the buggy whip in a benign, 21st century form of
monkey-wrenching, and Wyoming might never need the heavy hand of
government to ban billboards. That time can’t come soon
enough for me: I say good riddance to bad billboards. Maybe I have
more in common with those Vermonters than I know.
Bill Croke is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a
service of High Country News (hcn.org). He lives
and writes in Cody, Wyoming.
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