If you want to understand why the state you love in changing around you, don’t blame the library for carrying books that describe people diddling. Blame your doctor or dentist for purveying Real Estate Porn.
Look at those glossy yachting magazines on the waiting room table in your urologist’s office. Golfing magazines, too. In fact, pick up any magazine dedicated to what rich people do for recreation.
Then follow your nose to the sagebrush-scented centerfold, featuring the latest offerings of Wyoming ranchland by Christies or Sothebys.
You’ll see a smiling real estate broker dressed to the nines in urban cowboy, Buffalo Bill, ten gallon, bolo-tied finery. The belt buckle he is sporting cost more than I’ve spent on Copenhagen and Pabst Blue Ribbon during my entire lifetime.
He wants to make your life complete – if you are on the Forbes list, that is – and sell you your own piece of heaven in the Cowboy State. He pitches the half dozen or so properties featured in the thumbnail photos.
In each image, the landscape in Wyoming is a lush green, and you can almost see the aspen leaves shimmer. To the knowing eye, each photo was taken during the 72 hour window in June when Wyoming actually looks like this.
The captions all read, “The only thing missing in this picture is YOU.”
His spiel begins with: “You are one of those rare, self-made men, Alpha to the core. You’ve beaten all your competitors, and you deserve to stand on your mountaintop. We have just the mountaintop!”
Thus begins the pornography.
Translated from Real Estate Porn into our local Wyoming vernacular it means, “You have your trophy wife, trophy yacht and trophy helicopter. Come to Wyoming and buy your trophy booger farm!”
The rest of the turgid, purple prose in the ad can likewise be translated.
When the ad says, “Fly-fish a blue-ribbon trout stream mere steps from your front porch.”, it means that you’ll need to stay at a motel in town during runoff because your ground floor will be two feet underwater.
Real Estate Porn says, “There’s a three hundred sixty degree view of mountains anywhere on the ranch. Not a neighbor to be seen.” The real world says that a quarter mile away, tucked down in a valley right across the property line is a very well-concealed meth lab policed by bikers.
When Real Estate Porn says, “Watch the sun come up and go down on your ranch, nothing obstructs your view. The night sky is like a bowl of stars from horizon to horizon.”, everyone in Wyoming knows that means that you are living somewhere in the Red Desert and nothing obstructs the wind, either.
And the moon and stars only look like that when it is twenty degrees below zero and the power is out.
“Your drive home passes through the most beautiful scenery on Earth” means that you’ll need to chain up all four, and you’ll have to walk the last half mile through (fill in the blank).
Real Estate Porn describes how the coyotes will sing you to sleep at night. What the coyotes are really singing is, “Buy more Shih Tzus!! They’re easy to catch and delicious.”
And yet they keep coming, these titans of industry and commerce who want to top off their resumes with the word “cowboy” by owning a ranch in Wyoming. They have swallowed the bodice-ripping descriptions of Wyoming by real estate pornographers hook, line and sinker.
These are the folks we should keep a close eye on, and not our librarians.
