Universal & Triumphant wins lottery

Look who won the lottery.
The Church Universal and Triumphant, an apocalyptic cult that calls the Royal Teton Ranch near Gardiner its home, apparently hit the jackpot last week.
The church sold its grazing rights on the ranch which borders Yellowstone National Park for $3.3 million and agreed to allow up to 25 bison from the park to winter there.
CUT, never much of a cow outfit anyway, recently sold the last of its cattle.
The move appears to be little more than an expensive feel-good gesture designed to placate critics of Montana’s bison management plan which resulted in the slaughter of 1,600 bison this winter.
The plan, designed to prevent bison from straying outside the park and potentially spreading a livestock disease, was harshly criticized earlier this month by the Federal Government Accountability Office. Their report said state and federal agencies failed to expand a free-ranging area for bison despite spending tens of millions of dollars on land easements and bison management.
In response, Gov. Brian Schweitzer and Yellowstone National Park Superintendent Suzanne Lewis decided to throw some more money at the problem.
The cash landed in the hands of the followers of K19 of the Cosmic Secret Service, one of a handful of “ascended masters” to which CUT adherents subscribe.
It’s a bit surprising that CUT – never in the running for neighbor-of-the-year -- would be so handsomely rewarded for doing so little. Since CUT’s arrival in Park County in the mid 1980s, church officials have been convicted on gun charges and fined for spilling diesel fuel into Mol Heron Creek. The church even threatened to tap into Yellowstone’s thermal aquifer.
But the cult has a history of dodging bullets and landing on its feet. When wildfires in the park threatened the Royal Teton Ranch in 1988, church members gathered en masse to chant, and lo and behold the flames changed direction.
Now for millions of dollars, the church has agreed to let a handful of bison graze on CUT land until April 15 when they would be hazed back inside the park.
What difference such a paltry gesture will make is hard to imagine. About 2,300 bison remain in the park and they are calving this month. Providing refuge for 25 of them won’t end the slaughter or the perceived threat of brucellosis.
Ten years ago the feds had a chance to buy the church’s grazing rights but didn’t because the $2.7 million price tag was too high.
That was the right decision then and would have been the right decision today.
Instead, the Church Universal and Triumphant won the lottery.
And the bison management plan remains an increasingly expensive mess.
Parker Heinlein is at pman@mtintouch.net

"Adventure Man" not to ride again

I tried to keep the newspaper to myself.
No need for my wife to see the story about a 400-mile foot, bicycle and boat race planned this summer in southwest Montana.
But she saw the story anyway.
“Don’t even think about it Adventure Man” she said.
Ten years ago I took part in such a race. Age, lack of training and short-lived determination dashed my hopes of finishing after only three days, but I did bring home a coveted “Participant” ribbon and earned the now-reviled moniker “Adventure Man.”
It was a race that appealed to me: on foot, bicycle, horseback and kayak across nearly 400 miles of Montana backcountry.
I was invited to participate as a member of what race organizers dubbed “the media team” even though I was the only member of the media on the team.
It offered me a week out of the office and not wanting to exclude my wife from the fun, I volunteered her services as a member of our support team.
Unfortunately, she was the only member.
But all she had to do was wait at various trailheads where we might show up at any hour of the night or day and provide us with hot meals cooked over a Coleman stove in the pouring rain and set up tents so we’d have a dry place to sleep, then re-supply and eventually meet us at another trailhead where we may or may not appear.
We were risking life and limb in the wilderness and simply expected her to wait on us hand and foot on our way to the finish line and personal glory. She hung in there for a couple of days until I suggested she might be more comfortable living in the utility trailer until the race was done.
And for her it was.
“&%@&! you, Adventure Man” she hollered as she drove off into the night.
I held onto the fantasy a bit longer, visions of late night appearances on the Outdoor Channel coursing through my head.
But who was I kidding? The other competitors were young and fit and sponsored by the likes of Rolex. Their multi-member support teams were paid and drove motor homes.
I was an aging, desk-bound newspaperman. I should have known better, but I bought into my own press. Dubbed “Adventure Man” in the local paper, I thought I had something to prove.
My wife told me I had.
She just won’t tell me what it is and I’m not about to ask.
Parker Heinlein is at pman@mtintouch.net

Where have all the hillbillies gone?

Where have all the hillbillies gone?On the final leg of a cross-country road trip that included long days spent traveling through both the Ozark and Smokey mountain ranges, the feeling that something was missing began to gnaw at my gut. Then it hit me: We'd covered more than 6,000 miles without a single roadside reference to those simple mountain folk of the South. I couldn' t remember even one billboard advertising a hillbilly café down the road ora gift shop selling corn cob pipes. Hillbillies, apparently, have gone the way of the passenger pigeon, the dodo and the stay-at-home mom. Portrayed on film and television (think Jed Clampit and Ma and Pa Kettleif you're old enough) as barefoot, opossum-eating mountain dwellers who lived off the land, hillbillies have always seemed a bit more comic-stripcharacter than real. Certainly Snuffy Smith, Lil' Abner and Daisy Mae no longer have any basis in fact. They exist only in the funnies, replaced in American folklore by rappers, gay television stars and video game heroes. Too white and too closely tied to the land, they had less and less incommon with the rest of us. And, my mother would add, being a hillbilly was nothing to aspire to. They were lazy, didn't use proper English, stole chickens, operated moonshine stills and lived in hovels. All aspirations of mine at one time or another, but nothing that anon-line, cell phone-jabbering, bottled water-sipping, politically correct society could relate to in the 21st century. Signs advertising adult superstores, all-nude dancers and Yakov Smirnov's theater in Branson line the highways in Missouri, Georgia and Tennesseewhere hand-lettered advertisements for country cafes used to ask "Have yaet yet?" and offered home-cooked vittles. But while I mourn the absence of a visible hillbilly presence on the American landscape, I suspect there remains some isolated corner of this country where hill folk still reign supreme. Where a feller can still satisfy a hankerin' fer a sip of 'shine and there ain't a cell phone tower in sight. Where the Hatfield and McCoy feud still rages and the chicken is anything but store-bought. Parker Heinlein is at pman@mtintouch.net