CSotD: Cold hands, warm heart
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Jen Sorensen usually draws "Slowpoke," a cartoon of political and social commentary that tends towards the cynical and the sarcastic. Who knew she had both a warm and somewhat athletic side?
Alan Gardner, for one, whose Daily Cartoonist tipped me to this cartoon-travelogue Jen did for the Oregonian about a recent skiing-and-poking-around trip she took to Whitefish, Montana.
Whitefish, Montana, is a town you will not have heard of without you have perused the Amtrak schedule, because it's the closest you can get to Yellowstone by train. And it's not all that close to Yellowstone, though, as Jen informs us, it is on the edge of Glacier National Park.
The Montana Rockies are spectacular and to a great extent unspoiled, precisely because you can't get there from here, and, once there, you can't get anywhere else, though Jen paints a picture of train travel from Portland to Whitefish that (a) seems manageable and (b) makes me jealous as hell.
Still, that part of the country is more or less where Lewis and Clark abandoned their boats and traded for horses with the Mandan. Even in a day when it was an incredible hassle to get from anywhere to anywhere else, this part of the country stood out in that regard, which is a very good thing for those whose families are there, and for those who don't mind being three or four plane connections or a three-day drive from their kith and kin, because it prevents the hordes from descending on the place and turning it into the Colorado Front Range, where I think you can now go from Boulder to Colorado Springs Spiderman style, by leaping from the roof of one condo to the roof of the next.
(Lewis and Clark actually did their horse trading well south of Whitefish, closer to Missoula, and I'm sure long-time Missoulans would say the place is becoming far too popular with such flatlanders.)
Our guide being Jen-Sorensen-of-Slowpoke, I expected the travelogue to contain a substantial dollop of snark, but she is wide-eyed and affectionate throughout, appreciative of both the wonders of nature and the hospitality of small-town America, and out-pyles Ernie Pyle in naming and praising the people she meets on what appears to have been far too brief a trip.
Certainly, it's far too brief a cartoon series.
Meanwhile, as we struggle through the part of winter where New Englanders begin to wonder why in the hell they live here, I would observe that, while I went on at length about women and thermostats recently, in the past 24 hours I have come across not only Jen Sorensen's rhapsodic travelogue about skiing and snow and ice and winter, but this photograph of that delicate modern-day Belle of Amherst (or thereabouts), Rhymes With Orange cartoonist Hilary Price.
Apparently, not every lady spends the winter huddled over the space heater and complaining.
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