Apgar Village – Land of the Ice-Cream Eaters

Original Post Date 7/27/2021

I had to really water down that tag line.  I started with Land of the Buckled-up Obesely Entitled Ugly Unappreciative Americans and Occasional Foreign Traveler.  That creative writing class in the 8^th grade is finally paying some dividends.

It seems like every national park, in my opinion, has at least one main pocket where people don’t even try to pretend they want to get away from civilization and back to nature. A veritable hot spot for all is wrong with the human condition on every level, where everyone just forgot to leave their bullshit baggage at the proverbial door. 

For GNP, it is called Apgar.  Named after the family who originally homesteaded at the foot of LMD, and single-handedly started the entire tourism thing around 1895. Originally catering to miners and other homesteaders arriving on the new nearby rail line of the Great Northern, it is now home to a couple of vintage motels (aka dated and run down), souvenir shops, water equipment rentals, and all of those things that city mice die for and can’t live a day without (especially when relaxing on vacation).

It has everything to remind you of a shopping mall or an overcrowded city park at home. But it just happens to be in the heart of a mountain paradise.   I drive thru this place many times a day and drink in the swill of mankind.  Watch as it churns like a water treatment plant.

Enjoying those family moments I overhear with my window down. “But Dad, there is NOTHING to do here” cry the kids as their electronic devices lose service and connection with the known world. Really? The foot of LMD has one of the most iconic views in the park. Sometime you just need to jump in and and become immersed.

As I pen this, I am taking in something special.  I am here on a coveted off day of mine, on a picnic table all to myself, in the morning sun, observing the activities of the 8am hour in this little enclave of pseudo wilderness. Watching the shadows fade and the truly fantastic views looking up ten mile long LMD that makes this such a special place to watch the day shake off the night’s slumber. 

People watching is so enjoyable.  I literally just saw a guy walking his dog almost poke an eye out on one of those big shade umbrellas at a sidewalk café table. And then listen to the eloquence of the half dozen F bombs he dropped in front of his preschool kids.  That, my friend, is one big sweaty slice of Americana.  

There is a different sort of buzz this time of day.  Reminds me of the time Jaclyn and I got up early in NYC to watch the Times Square AM cleanup crew firehose the garbage off the street and prepare for another day of crazy tourists.  The Apgar Ice Cream Eaters (which clog the streets in the late afternoon and seldom get out of the way of my van) are still napping. 

There are only two lines of people I see now:  those for the only coffee stand in the village, and those in front of the Ranger Station waiting to get backpacking permits (because Fed employees are not going to open one minute early).  I could write pages contrasting the differences between the patrons of each line. There is a whiff of bacon in the air, several sad overworked housekeepers dragging to work (thinking of all the rooms to clean today), and some poor kid with a five-gallon bucket and a trash stabber stick wandering how he got stuck with the job normally saved for a trustee in a deep South low-security prison.

I’ve always disdained this place.  Although I have been coming to the park for 35 years, Nancy just saw Apgar for the first time about seven or eight years ago.  But I’ve realized my jaded perspective is exactly that, just mine. I have come to realize and understand people need this place.  

You cannot just step from a dense urban core into the land of endless mountains and lakes without some kind of transition.  You need to stand in line.  You need to walk down a crowded street.  You need your coffee order to be messed up sans soy milk.   You need to poke your eye out on a stationary umbrella that has been there for two months and swear in front of your kids. 

Hanging onto the familiar allows these families to experience the new. Even if just in small measures. The wilderness is from their distant human hunter and gathering past. Vaguely familiar, marginally appreciated, yet mildly yearned for. But it can only be absorbed slowly in bits and bites, as not to upset their urban reality. Kind of like the Matrix.

So as I listen to the latte crowd complain how their kids are missing the best part of the day. How they will only get one scoop of ice cream with their waffle cone after a dinner of chicken fingers and deep fried snickers tonight. But I can appreciated the they are trying. Stretching out of their respective norms as they immerse their families in this beautiful place. Even if they can only see a fraction of what I appreciate, it is still a real interactive experience, easily on par with any of mine. 

Maybe their kids will remember that really shitty summer where they got stuck walking around some long lake or seeing some waterfall or putting fifty cents in that dumb machine that ruined what was a perfectly good (but obsolete) penny.   And maybe they will long for this childish simplicity, when the screens were begrudgingly turned off, and channel that inner peace to sometime later in their life when things have gotten frightening complex. 

And just maybe the cycle will continue, with these wonderful micro experiences of living beauty eventually outweighing all the meaningless minutia and invisible baggage people carry with them everyday.

So that is how I now see Apgar. A virtual halfway house. A bridge from modern life to that of wilderness simplicity. Slowly but surely cultivating that quiet appreciation of your surroundings, but in a way that make it mean the most to you. Continue on, my brave Ice-Cream Eaters. And what the hell, make it huckleberry.