Wild Elk Herd as Lifestyle

On the delights of being a know-nothing in nature and consuming elk-themed merchandise.

Hello. I’d like to acknowledge that it’s weird to send a newsletter from and about a decisive swing state a handful of days after its swing in a terrible direction, which is obviously upsetting. This newsletter isn’t about that, though. Rather, I will discuss:

• how wondrous it is to observe wildlife when you’re a know-nothing for whom the natural environment is a complete and total mystery

• how the existence of a small economy around elk-themed merchandise further underscores the unknowability of our strange, complex world

We pulled up at the Medix Hotel next to a truck with a bumper sticker that read, “I’M NOT ALWAYS A BITCH JUST KIDDING GO FUCK YOURSELF.” This was, like, the third-most aggressive signage we’d see during our visit. A chalkboard by the hotel’s entrance read
”Don’t feed the whores drugs!!” T-shirts for sale by the cash register read “Do I LOOK Like a People Person?!” Our waitress, who was giving owner of the bitch truck vibes, wore a T-Shirt that read FUCK YOUR FEELINGS. She was friendly. “This beer’s so cold it’s basically frozen,” she said, handing my husband a Miller Lite with flakes of ice floating on top of it. 

Medix Hotel is on Route 555, which winds along a branch of Sinnemahoning Creek, tracing the Northern border of the Moshannon State Forest. Theodore Roosevelt once slept here. James Garfield also once slept here but he doesn’t feature as prominently in the advertising. The hotel is between the towns of Weedville (pop. 652) and Benezette (pop. 217), which some might refer to as “the middle of nowhere,” but in early autumn is the center of the universe. It was 2 p.m. and the deck was crowded with dozens of people and one rooster, strutting between the tables. Jake tried to feed him one of our fried green beans but he didn’t bite. I’m assuming he could afford to hold out for something better. People would be coming here to party until sunset, at least, which is when the elk come out.

Elk County, Pennsylvania, is home to the only wild elk herd in the Northeastern U.S., and at dawn and dusk, from mid-September to early October, they emerge from the woods to mate. The elk only live in this stretch of North-Central Pennsylvania forest, and during mating season, known as the “rut,” they put on quite the show. Essentially, male elk (bulls) assemble females (cows) into — and this is the scientific term — “harems.”¹ The bulls then fight other bulls who approach their harems with impressive bouts of antler bonking. All animals involved are desperately horny and do something called “bugling” that, if you haven’t heard it before, is the opposite of whatever sound you’re imagining it to be.

In my opinion, this is the greatest entertainment on Earth. The elk aren’t in a preserve or anything — they’re in the regular meadows and yards of Benezette, and my favorite place to watch them is behind a gas station. But that’s not all. In addition to these naturally occurring delights is a bizarre elk economy, replete with merch that invites us to consider how a wild elk herd can be a lifestyle brand. But we’ll circle back to that later.

First: Elk are native to the Northeastern U.S., but due to the usual slate of dispiriting factors concomitant with the arrival of European settlers, their herds dwindled in the 18th and 19th centuries. By the 1850s, the only place they remained in the state was here, in an area spanning three counties, and by the 1870s, they were gone entirely. In the early 20th century, though, the Pennsylvania Game Commission was founded. And they — as they smugly recount on their website — brought the elk back home. They imported a few train cars of them from Wyoming at a cost of $30 per elk and resettled them here. They seriously would open the doors to the train cars when they got to Pennsylvania and be like, alright guys, you live here now! The Pennsylvania Game Commission admits this shouldn’t have worked as well as it did, but here we are.²

One thing I can’t stress enough about the sole wild elk herd in the Northeastern U.S. is how many people use it as an excuse to drink. At the Medix Hotel, people were fucking pounding lite beers. After we finished our fried green beans, Jake and I left to set up our campsite about a mile down the road. We lolled in our hammocks until the shadows grew long. Then we drove to the meadow behind Benezett Store, which we’ve been doing for four years now. If I were being generous, I’d call the meadow “our spot.” This year, though, there were more people than usual, and a crowd had gathered by the creek, which runs between the store and the meadow. The thing you usually see right before seeing an elk is 10 to 20 dads with cameras, and there they were. Bullseye. We approached, and in a thicket of trees, past a few layers of human Pennsylvanians, was a seemingly impossible animal — too big to be real, too large to be so close, just there. It was the closest I had ever been to a bull. It was the closest anyone is supposed to be, in fact — there are signs around Benezette asking visitors to keep a football field distance between them and the animals, but these folks were closer to the 30-yard line. The beautiful bull had fearsome antlers and an admirable nonchalance to the whole ordeal. There were people with $5,000 cameras pointing big ass lenses at him like he was a galaxy away. I found myself wondering if he could sense how gauche people were being.

Jake told me recently that in all the time scientists have spent communicating with apes, no ape has asked a question, or even implied having curiosity, because apes don’t have theory of mind. They don’t know that they’re thinking, and the idea that another being could have thoughts is beyond their comprehension. I bring this up for two reasons: One, it’s somewhat reassuring to reconsider the elk paparazzi in this light. Elk are thousand-pound animals who neither fear humans and nor possess the capability for embarrassment. And two, I relate to apes in that I sometimes feel like a rather essential part of my brain is missing. I’m a generally well-read person, but when it comes to knowledge about the environment, I’m a near-total blank. It wasn’t until I got a Nature Guy for a boyfriend that it even occurred to me that I lacked knowledge; I didn’t know what I didn’t know; we’d be on a walk and he’d be like “look at that [plant name]” and I’d stare at him blankly as if to say, who do you think I am, a scientist? Things are different know, but I’ll always look back fondly on the time when I knew absolutely nothing, because everything I learned was such a mind-blowing discovery. Middle school is usually when people learn things like how bees pollinate plants and where birds go in the winter, but I recommend being 29 years old. The shock hits harder at that age. (E.g. You’re telling me tics carry a DEADLY DISEASE?! Wait, does Pennsylvania HAVE BEARS?! etc.)

Anyway, that’s the age I was when I saw my first wild elk: a time in my life when it had never occurred to me that non-giraffe animals could also be tall. The awe still lingers. By the creek, I took my pictures of the bull and then walked to the edge of the meadow to wait for the harems to arrive. Everyone at the meadow was whispering about how they figured the bull must be on his way there, because that’s where the real action ;) takes place. But he was in no rush to do so, and so I crouched, waiting.

Waiting is also an experience of not-knowing, and in the case of elk-watching, it’s half the fun. If you could plan when you’d see the elk this place wouldn’t be any good. Choosing a spot to watch is like gambling, and some years you have bad luck. 2023 was rough. We drove here and stood at the edge of this meadow, saw a deer and drove home. But dusk is a narrow window and you can’t spend all of it driving around from spot to spot, and the gambling, actually, intensifies the experience. Slowly the sky darkens, and you’re squinting to see, and suddenly you’re crouched in a field, clutching a White Claw, whispering “holy fuck that shrub just moved.” (It’s a squirrel.)

After a handful of false alarms, I ran back to the car to grab a sweatshirt, nearly running into a guy peeing in a bush. “One too many beers at dinner, sorry,” he said. It was Saturday night, so the elk-watching crowd was feeling festive. I’m charmed by this; the party atmosphere creates a low-barrier-to-entry nature experience centered in equal parts around wild elk and Busch Lite. It’s a lovely safe space for morons. For example one time I overheard a woman ask a ranger what “they” do with elk when the season’s over, implying the people of Benezette conduct a mass slaughter annually and import a fresh batch every year, so the cycle of taking pictures for a few weeks before ritual death can begin anew. Jake was horrified that someone would think this but I was kind of in awe of the lady’s richly imagined dystopian worldview. Wildlife education is obviously important but sometimes nature is best experienced as an unknowable, mystical thing.³

The sun slipped below the horizon, the sky purpling. We figured the bull in the thicket was the best we’d get that night, so we headed back to our camp site to eat potato chips and poke at a fire until it was time to go to sleep. At night, thunder echoed across the valley and big bright flashes lit up the woods, so Jake and I slept in the car. We woke up like you do when camping — too early, and with a start. We drove right back to the meadow.

The dawn crowd was more subdued but still bigger than you’d expect. We walked silently through the brush, to the same spot at the meadow’s edge, and there we had a view of three bulls the appropriate football field length away. They were bugling over and over, seemingly communicating with one another via machine-like alien screech. (I promise you are not prepared for the sound they make.) We watched and listened, and it was joyful and weird. But when the sun rose higher and the bulls started to walk back into the woods, we knew our chances of seeing a harem fight in Elk Season ‘24 were over.

That’s okay, because truthfully, elk watching is about one-half of the fun in Benezette this time of year. One important stop is a store called Elk Life, which we first discovered in 2020 thanks to a sign that read “hot mini donuts.” We pulled in and were greeted by a yard full of people playing cornhole, like a tailgate for a game where everyone is rooting for the same team and that team is elk. This year, there was a new banner that read VOTED ELK COUNTY’S NUMBER ONE CLOTHING STORE and a selfie backdrop that invited visitors to take a photo beneath the Elk Life logo.

Do you know about Salt Life? It’s a popular bumper-sticker-turned-lifestyle brand. People put stickers on their cars that read “Salt Life” to express their unique personality, which is Liking The Beach. Anyway, Elk Life has fully ripped Salt Life off, except its logo adds the confusing line AN ELK STATE OF MIND. Elk Life sells Salt Life-inspired bumper stickers and apparel with its logo.

As was considered earlier in this essay, it’s hard to ascertain what “an elk state of mind” would be. What we can readily discern from the merchandise, though, is that the elk economy is strong. Outside of Elk Life, which is open year-round, there are merchants who set up tents during the rut, including a guy from New Jersey who deals in pelts and belt buckles. (This year he was also selling a leather keychain that just read, in all caps, “DEER.”) The official Elk County Visitor Center has much to offer as well. For instance, did you know you can purchase Volumes I, II and III of James T. Baumgratz’s “Elk County Murders & Mysterious Deaths”? That’s in addition, of course, to classics such as poop-shaped chocolates labeled “Elk Droppings.” I didn’t buy much this year because already I own a T-shirt that says “Elkaholic,” which is hard to top, but I got my brother an “Elk State of Mind” water bottle. Outside of novelties for tourists, the fact that we’re in Elk County means every business has “elk” in the name, thus giving the impression that there are Elk dentists and Elk florists and Elk nursing homes.

Ah, life’s rich pageant! In this little crevasse of Pennsylvania is a robust annual tradition, a diverting small-scale economy and a wild elk herd that gives no fucks. But while the town itself is full of people intimately aware of elk mating schedules, few beyond this region know the wild elk herd exists. I, for one, grew up an hour and a half away and didn’t know about Pennsylvania elk existing, let alone them mating in front of hundreds of Busch Lite-swilling tailgaters, until 2020. That’s fine; I’m not exactly worried for the small business owners of Benezette. But given that the Medix Hotel clearly has a unique culture and lore, I looked it up online when I got back home. Its Facebook About page reads only: “HOTEL MEDIX/HOTEL CALIFORNIA,” thus implying you can check out of Benezette, but you can never truly leave.

1. I assume this is what “don’t feed the whores drugs” was referring to

2. There’s more to the story here. Elk were introduced in some more agricultural areas too, and farmers were mad, and the Game Commission considered culling some herds, but before they even reached a decision, Pennsylvanians just fucking shot them

3. Jake tells me there’s a William Blake essay about this exact topic but given the subject I feel fine about not looking it up