EPIC CONUNDRUMS
Mammoth Mountain President and COO Eric Clark weighed in on the Park City ski patrol strike which we cover on page four.
Clark said Mammoth prides itself on open communication and when the unionization movement picked up steam last year, it prompted the company to stop and assess. “The point being, we’ve been looking at these things,” he said, in an effort to be responsive.
Obviously, patrol has been highlighted because of the union focus, but as Clark said, Mammoth is trying to take a broad view towards supporting the entire organization. One thing the company did this year was offer medical insurance to seasonal employees. Another was to boost equipment stipends for a larger group of eligible employees.
I also listened to a Colorado Sun podcast this week where reporter Jason Blevins was interviewed about the Park City strike.
He said Vail has largely collected pass revenue from its customers, so the gamble is in whether or not the strike will influence people not to renew their Epic ski passes.
“At some point,” he said, “the bad P.R. may outweight the wage ask.”
He noted that Vail has spent $700 million over the past four years in stock buybacks and currently has $1 billion in cash on hand.
An Epic Pass for the 2024-2025 season would have set you back $982.
In the November 23 issue (page eight), the Sheet published an article about an anti-camping ordinance which was unanimously approved by the Bishop City Council on November 12. The ordinance allows police to limit camping on city property. It states that public areas should remain accessible to everyone and that camping interferes with others’ rights to use these spaces. The ordinance was slated to take effect in mid-December.
Since that article’s publication, Lauren DeLaunay Miller, an independent journalist based in Bishop who reports for the California Health Report (calhealthreport.org) on rural health equity, spoke to Anna Scott, Inyo County’s Human Services Director, about the difficulty of tracking down precise numbers on homelessness, and the implications those numbers could have on community action.
According to the Eastern Sierra Continuum of Care’s 2024 Point-In-Time Count, there are 71 individuals experiencing homelessness in Inyo County and 35 in Mono County. Of those, 65% are unsheltered, while 34% are sheltered or living in transitional housing.
The point-in-time account, Scott explained, occurs in January every year (as mandated by federal guidelines). But much of the Eastern Sierra CoC’s geographic region, which also includes Alpine County, faces harsh winter conditions, making it likely that the winter count of those experiencing homelessness is less than the area experiences in the summer months.
“It probably underrepresents what we see particularly from Mono and Alpine, but it at least gives us a feel for those who truly don’t have anywhere else to go,” said Scott.
Counting individuals experiencing sheltered homelessness or who lack housing security is a struggle as well, she says, as the definitions they use for the count don’t always include people staying temporarily with friends or family.
And yet, Scott says it’s crucial to reach those residents before they have nowhere else to go.
“The primary goal is to prevent homelessness because it is really, really difficult to go backwards and get someone back into housing,” Scott said. “Where the gaps really lie are in emergency shelter.”
Without an emergency shelter, there are few options for those experiencing unsheltered homelessness. Inyo County has struggled in years past to establish a permanent safe parking lot, and according to the Continuum of Care, those needs are often left to local churches and organizations to fill. Still, many residents feel frustrated by the lack of progress.
Inyo Supervisors rejected approval of a safe parking area which would have been located at the Bishop Nazarene Church. Then-Supervisor Pucci, Supervisor Jen Roeser and recently retired Supervisor Matt Kingsley voted against.
Whereas Mono County recently regained possession of its Sheriff’s Substation, located about a mile south of the Mammoth exit on 395, for the purpose of developing a safe parking area for use as a housing site.
Hanging with Andre
Don’t ask me why, but I found myself watching the 1981 arthouse film, “My Dinner With Andre” last weekend. And the film unfolds just as the title suggests – two guys (playwrite & actor Wallace Shawn and director Andre Gregory) – sitting in a restaurant for 100 minutes talking about all manner of stuff, but really, it’s Andre Gregory talking at Shawn for most of the time. About two-thirds into the film, Gregory, who’s described his personal spiritual quest over the past several years, finally gets to the crux of it, which is presented as a life-and-death struggle for the preservation of humanity itself:
I mean, things don’t affect people the way they used to. I mean, it may very well be that 10 years from now … people will pay $10,000 in cash to be castrated, just in order to be affected by something. Well, why do you think that is? I mean, is it just because people are lazy today, or they’re bored? I mean, are we just like bored, spoiled children who’ve just been lying in the bathtub all day just playing with their plastic duck and now they’re just thinking, “Well, what can I do?”
Okay. Yes. We’re bored. We’re all bored now. But has it every occurred to you, Wally, that the process that creates this boredom that we see in the world now may very well be a self-perpetuating, unconscious form of brainwashing created by a world totalitarian government based on money and that all of this is much more dangerous than one thinks … and it’s not just a question of individual survival, Wally, but that somebody who’s bored is asleep, and somebody who’s asleep will not say no?
A few days ago, I met this man whom I greatly admire. He’s a Swedish physicist. Gustav Bjrnstrand. And he told me that he no longer watches television, he doesn’t read newspapers, and he doesn’t read magazines. He’s completely cut them out of his life because he really does feel that we’re living in some kind of Orwellian nightmare now and that everything that you hear now contributes to turning you into a robot.
And when I was at Findhorn (a retreat in Scotland), I met this extraordinary English tree expert who had devoted his life to saving trees. Just got back from Washington, lobbying to save the redwoods. He’s 84 years old, and he always travels with a backpack cause he never knows where he’s gonna be tomorrow. And when I met him at Findhorn, he said to me, “ Where are you from?” I said, “ New York. “ He said, “ Ah, New York. Yes, that’s a very interesting place. Do you know a lot of New Yorkers who keep talking about the fact that they want to leave, but never do?”
And I said, “ Oh, yes. “ And he said, “Why do you think they don’t leave?”
I gave him different banal theories.
He said, “ Oh, I don’t think it’s that way at all.” He said, “ I think that New York is the new model for the new concentration camp, where the camp has been built by the inmates themselves, and the inmates are the guards, and they have this pride in this thing they’ve built. They’ve built their own prison. And so they exist in a state of schizophrenia where they are both guards and prisoners. And as a result, they no longer, having been lobotomized, the capacity to leave the prison they’ve made or to even see it as a prison. And then he went into his pocket, and he took out a seed for a tree and he said, ‘This is a pine tree.’ He put it in my hand and he said, ‘Escape before it’s too late. “
Of course, the problem is where to go. ‘Cause it seems quite obvious that the whole world is going in the same direction.
See, I think it’s quite possible that the 1960s represented the last burst of the human being before he was extinguished and that this is the beginning of the rest of the future, and that from now on there’ll simply be all these robots walking around feeling nothing, thinking nothing. And there’ll be nobody left almost to remind them that there once was a species called a human being with feelings and thoughts and that history and memory are right now being erased and soon nobody will really remember that life existed on the planet.
Now, of course, Bjrnstrand feels that there’s really almost no hope and that we’re probably going back to a very savage, lawless, terrifying period.
Findhorn people see it a little differently. They’re feeling that there’ll be these pockets of light springing up in different parts of the world and that these will be, in a way, invisible planets on this planet and that as we, or the world, grow colder we can take invisible space journeys to these different planets, refuel for what it is we need to do on the planet itself, and come back.
And it’s their feeling that there have to be centers now where people can come and reconstruct a new future for the world … In other words, we’re talking about an underground which did exist in a different way during the Dark Ages among the mystical orders of the church. And the purpose of this underground is to find out how to preserve the light, life, the culture… how to keep things living.”
So Wallace Shawn hears all this and he says to Gregory, “Do you want to hear my actual response?” And that response is not expansive and global with life in the balance, but very personal.
I’m just trying to survive, you know?
I mean I’m just trying to earn a living, just trying to pay my rent and my bills.
I mean, I live my life. I enjoy staying home with Debby I’m reading Charlton Heston’s autobiography. And that’s that.
Occasionally, maybe Debby and I will step outside, we’ll go to a party or something. And if I can occasionally get my little talent together and write a little play, well, then that’s just wonderful.
… I have a list of errands and responsibilities that I keep in a notebook.
I enjoy going through the notebook, carrying out the responsibilities, doing the errands and crossing them off the list.
And, I mean, I just don’t know how anybody could enjoy anything more than I enjoy, uh, reading Charlton Heston’s autobiography or, uh, you know, getting up in the morning and having the cup of cold coffee that’s been waiting for me all night still there for me to drink in the morning and no cockroach or fly has died in it overnight.
I mean, I’m just so thrilled when I get up and I see that coffee there, just the way I wanted it.
I mean, obviously, if there is a dead cockroach in it well, then I just have a feeling of disappointment, and I’m sad.
But … I just don’t think I feel the need for anything more than all this.
Whereas, you know, you seem to be saying that it’s inconceivable that anybody could be having a meaningful life today and, you know, everyone is totally destroyed and we all need to live in these outposts. But I just can’t believe … Even for you, I mean, don’t you find … Isn’t it pleasant just to get up in the morning and there’s Chiquita (Andre’s wife), there are the children and The Times is delivered, you can read it. Maybe you’ll direct a play, maybe you won’t direct a play. But forget about the play that you may or may not direct. Why not lean back and just enjoy these details?
And there’d be a delicious cup of coffee and a piece of coffeecake. Why is it necessary to have more than this or to even think about having more than this?
Even if I were to totally agree with you, and even if I were to accept the idea that there’s just no way for anybody to have personal happiness now, well, you know, I still couldn’t accept the idea that the way to make life wonderful would be to just totally reject Western civilization and fall back into some kind of belief …
And so here I sit, torn between Andre and Wally.
I think I’m an Andre in my professional life and a Wally in my personal life.
And I am definitely in a bit of mourning this week for those folks in L.A. whose joyful routines have been upended.
Just as I mourned Swall Meadows ten years ago and the death of the home and the place I thought I would die in.
I can’t help but cynically think that every time there’s a high wind warning in SoCal they may as well be calling a meeting of the local Arsonist/Terrorist Assn.
Why go through the hassle of hijacking planes when you can just find a few guys to toss some matches into the brush?
