WEST OF EDEN

OUT OF THE FRINGE RIGHT, A NEW VISION OF THE OLD FRONTIER IS RISING OFF THE GRID, BACK TO THE LAND, "PROTECTING" AN AMERICAN DREAM THAT THEY BELIEVE TO BE THEIR OWN

- JAMES POGUE

THE BUFFALO WERE GRAZING BY THE HIGHWAY ON THE OUTSKIRTS OF THE RICHEST COUNTY IN THE RICHEST COUNTRY IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD.

It was a clear morning in the Tetons, and with binoculars it was possible to see all the way across the valley known, since prehistory, as one of the most secure and comfortable little basins in all of the Mountain West—named, for one of the first white trappers to winter there, Jackson’s Hole. The landscape may have looked like wilderness to the caravanning tourists in $200,000 Sprinter vans and thousands more in athleisure who now flood Teton County year-round. But it is also a kind of hyperreality of money—tens of thousands of acres and hundreds of millions of dollars worth of conservation easements—in what may be the world’s most unequal political jurisdiction. Above the ospreys and eagles, there was a constant traffic of small jets and private aircraft, humming into and out of a town that has become a modern refuge for people with remote jobs and portfolios fattened by one of history’s great asset bubbles, many of them driven to the Northern Rockies by a worry or wariness that the rest of America is on its way toward environmental, political, or economic breakdown. Or some combination of the above.

A couple hours outside Jackson, I met Catharine O’Neill, whose family once owned these mountains. Her great-great-grandfather was John D. Rockefeller, and she worked in Trump’s State Department. Now, she was living in a modest little house outside of Casper, Wyoming, and was about to have her first child with a home appraiser she’d met after moving there. She isn’t hiding out exactly, but, like many Americans these days, she has a sense that things are cracking up.