One more nutty Yellowstone Club story

On Sunday, the New York Times ran the first extensive interview with Edna Blixseth. While I would recommend that anyone interested read the story, I will sum it up here: the story of the Yellowstone Club really is bizarre on a number of levels.

One of the things that did occur to me after reading it was I may have been unduly harsh on members in the piece I wrote for the Montana Standard. Bill Gates may need a place to ski with his kids that doesn’t require security. That says something really sad about the world we live in, but I do see why some individuals may need the privacy. And if the club is as family-friendly as the article states, then maybe the ultra-rich have some problems I glossed over.

Still some things in the story really jumped out at me. Someone out there should really pay me to write a book about this because it has all the makings of a great one:

- The portrait of Edna Blixseth is really interesting. This is essentially a woman scorned story made no less bizarre by the fact that the author points out her current boyfriend is an ex-underwear model who had to sell his Bentley to keep things a float.

- Edna considers gardening a Zen practice, which sounds pretty normal until she adds she does it one hole at a time on her private golf course.

- I really wished I would have had this quote to work with in my piece on the club from a member who wanted to remain unnamed. He said in defending Tim Blixseth, “It’s that aggressiveness that got this thing off the ground, that got the lifts built, that got the forest land away from the government, that got the water rights. As long as it was working in our benefit, everybody thought it was great.” That quote kind of makes my Yellowstone Club as an extractive industry point in a lot fewer words than I used in the Montana Standard.

- The story ends with a description of Edna’s prayer ritual. It is kind of a typical tactic where someone far at the fringe of religious practice is held up as if to say, “See, people that believe in God are the nutty ones.”

Currently there is a song on country music radio that may have one of the great choruses in country music though it is a mediocre song overall. It may be the title of my eventual book about the Yellowstone club, “God is great, beer is good, and people are crazy.”