A Different Kind of Schadenfreude

Through the magic of Netflix, my wife and I have been watching Northern Exposure, the CBS television series that aired in the 1990s. A hit for the network, and multiple Emmy winner, the series tells the story of Dr. Joel Fleischman, a hyper-civilized New Yorker who, as the series opens, has just finished medical school and residency. His medical education has been paid for by the state of Alaska, and he now owes the state four years' service, which he had thought he would serve in Anchorage. The state dispatches him instead to the town of Cicely, a remote and primitive backwater even by Alaska standards. Joel, who had previously been inclined to think of Brooklyn as a remote and primitive backwater, is horrified.

In the early episodes, Joel is portrayed as an obnoxious, self-dealing egotist; my wife, who is from Long Island, never watched the show when it aired originally because it looked to be full of annoying stereotypes about New Yorkers. But Joel is soon revealed to have a soft side, and the town itself has a kind of magic that ultimately goes to work on his harder edges. The exterior shots of the town were filmed in Roslyn, Washington, which is not exactly remote; Roslyn is right next to Interstate 90 and a fairly easy drive from metropolitan Seattle, which is why they filmed there. And the show was a bit lacking in the realism department. Watching it again, I have just noticed that Canadian characters appear with some regularity, but they always speak in perfect Southern California English. No doot aboot it, that's wrong. (Eh?). But even if its portrait of life in the north was laughably imprecise, plenty of people who saw the show will, when the subject of Alaska comes up, think first of Cicely and Joel and Maggie, Ed Chigliak, Adam and Eve, and Chris in the Morning on KBHR. I wonder how many people in Alaska today can trace their flight from the lower 48 to seeds planted by Northern Exposure, although they may be too shy to admit it.

When I worked in Yellowstone, we watched the show during the off season, when we were usually not in the park (no television in Yellowstone without a dish, of course; to get CBS, you had to descend off the great plateau). We loved it. We wanted to live it, and really were already living it. I thought, at the time, that we wanted to be like the townspeople, but I know now that what we really wanted was to be like Joel. We loved our job--we worked for Yellowstone Park Service Stations--but we knew we could never stay and have careers, too. And here was Joel Fleischman, with his MD finished, living in a place we thought would be perfect. And everyone treats him with such respect! In our experience, we had a stark choice, between an advanced degree and a nice place to live; watching the show, we dreamed of having both. That Joel hates Alaska seemed merely an ironic comment on human perversity.

But recently, I have come to see a side of our desires that is not so pleasant to consider. Watching Northern Exposure again, I can see for the first time something you could hardly miss: Cicely is a chronically poor place, with no local economy worth considering. I also remembered that Cicely always reminded us of some very specific places around Yellowstone.

Gardiner, Montana, for instance, the little town that sits astride the north entrance to the park. I last saw Yellowstone, oh, months and months ago, and wrote about it here and here. At the end of that trip, we moved to Gardiner to be closer to the airport from which we would soon be flying. On our last night, I left our little hotel room at nearly midnight. I was hungry, and wanted to see if I could find something to eat. At this hour, in this place, doing so would require great ingenuity. I also wanted to say goodbye to Gardiner for the year, a place that I have always loved.

I walked into the neon wash in front of the hotel, then stood in the dark space behind the wall of the Town Motel and looked up at the stars. I had stood in this very spot and looked at roughly the same stars just after I first came to the park, when I was training at YPSS headquarters. Home was in Los Angeles back then, and I had never known so many stars existed. It still, at this latter date, amazed me. A rabbit, a handsome little cottontail, sat on the motel walk. They will pop up elsewhere in the middle of town, too. Why do they like Gardiner so?

And why did I? I had especially been thinking about the question today. As I walked, I admired the rock houses (made of cobbles from the river, I think), the rock retaining walls on highway 89, the potholes filled with dirt, the classic Eisenhower-era tourist cabins, the decaying wood, the nineteenth century chimneys, the fact that it never seems to change--it's all old and weathered in a way that I liked instantly when I first saw it long ago. Maybe I like it because it is, in truth, a tourist trap, but one that succeeds in living by its own unkempt Montana rules.

I crossed the raging Yellowstone River on the steel highway bridge. I hoped the Cenex c-store would be open. Of course it was not. The only bill I had was a five, and I needed to break it; my sole hope was to get food out of one of the vending machines in Gardiner's many hotels. I had the idea of using the vending machine at the post office just to get the change, but it only had first class stamps for $7.80. I walked all the way to the Best Western, at the furthest end of town, and discovered the bar to be open, almost the only business open in town, I think (I wanted to avoid the other bar, where a former girlfriend works). I waded through the smoke and got five singles from the bartender, then found the vending machine in the hotel. The machine was dark, and had no bill changer. I talked to the grandmotherly person at the desk. She said it was fine, the light was just out, and gave me quarters. I bought four dollars worth of junk and walked in a leisurely way back to our motel.

I enjoyed the lightning flashing over the mountains to the north, a small storm that I knew would miss us entirely. To the south was a black mass against the starry sky: the mountains of Yellowstone National Park. The town dog strolled up and gave me a sniff. The Park County sheriff slowed down and gave me a look, and drove on when he saw that I was not weaving. His was almost the only car I saw. I heard no other sound but the rush of the Yellowstone River.

I walked past the landmarks of Gardiner: Helen's burger place, the Food Farm, the Flying Pig Camp Store, the K-Bar, and so on, But I also walked past, and down, some of the side streets. These streets are never paved, of course. I saw dingy trailers from the 1950s, houses in an advanced state of decay, dead vehicles up on cinder blocks, dead appliances, a dead cat. I saw all the markers, that is, of rural poverty.

Schadenfreude means, approximately, "joy in harm" in German; we have imported the word into English to describe that feeling we all get when someone we dislike has a run of bad luck. I have come, now, to wonder if I am guilty of another kind of shameful joy.

I like Montana--as a lot of other people do--because it has no cities with 20 million people in them, and not much heavy industry. Looked at another way, then, I like Montana because it is not rich. We liked the imaginary Alaska of Northern Exposure for the same reason. The ramshackle quality of a place like Gardiner is the very source of its appeal; it lacks the glamour and bustle of a wealthy place. Put unkindly, you could say that I like it because it is poor.

I will have to follow up on this topic next time; it is too complex to finish here. The questions it raises are not to be trifled with. For instance: when I first came to Gardiner, I was coming from a wealthy part of the world, and one that I hated because it was wealthy. I was inclined to think that people should want to be poor, given the alternatives. But who can make that decision for another?