Five thousand miles away in the capital city of Lithuania, there’s a cafe-bar with a TV dedicated to showing the webcam of Jackson’s Town Square. ŠMC kavinė / Vėjai in Vilnius has been watching the comings and goings in front of the antler arches for years.
Jackson Hole News & Guide’s Alex Viveros found out about it and managed to speak to the bar’s owners. They said it’s for an insiders-only game.
Editor’s Note: This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity.
Alex Viveros: Every time a yellow car passes in front of the Jackson Town Square in front of this webcam, the bar gives out free shots to everyone who's in on the game.
It happens, apparently, more often than you might expect. You know, maybe once a night.
Nicky Ouellet: Can you spell out the rules of this game?
AV: There's a couple of rules. It's a yellow car, but there's been some debate about what counts and what doesn't count. So, like a bus. A bus doesn't count.
NO: No?
AV: Yeah. A school bus doesn't count.
There is also one certain yellow car that they know belongs to a local. And they know this because it parks on the street quite often. That one actually does count.
But parked cars don't count.
NO: So moving cars that are not school buses.
AV: Yeah, those count.
There was one day where there weren't a lot of yellow cars, and people were watching the livestream. I think an hour passed. Two hours passed, three hours passed. And eventually – it was a rainy day, I think, and there was someone crossing the street wearing a yellow rain jacket. Someone that was in on the game, they said, ‘Okay, you know, that should count.’ And at that point, I think the bar was like, ‘Yeah, okay. That counts today.”
NO: How did they decide on Jackson? Of all places in the world, why Jackson?
AV: The people I spoke to, I don't think they originated the game, but they said when the bar opened, they were going for this Bohemian theme and it's kind of focused around literature.
They were looking for something that kind of blended in with some American literature and maybe American values in that sense. And they were looking for something to differentiate themselves from what other bars in the capital city of Lithuania play. That might be MTV videos or sports videos. And they were like, we want to be different.
Somehow, that ended up coming to this Jackson livestream. There's some theories about why that might be the case. Around 2016, this livestream was going pretty viral for the red truck craze. So it might've been something to do with that.
They landed on Jackson and kept it, I think because of this idea of Jackson as a representation of maybe American values in a way. That was actually pretty interesting when I was talking to them. They were saying it represents America in a sense.
And Jackson, the Town Square, there's tons of iconic things that happened there.
People always think of the antler arches, and I think that that's something that might have been intriguing to them. They're also keeping in touch with current events through that. Just the other day, I got an email from the bar manager that I interviewed, and he basically just sent me a photo of the ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] protests and a photo of a protestor there. [He] just sent me the photo. So they're keeping tabs on us.
They're there for the celebration, they're there for the unique things that happen in Jackson, and they're also there for the protest.
If you look at the comment section on the site, it's kind of cool to see a little bit of a community build in this virtual space. People saying, ‘Hi, how's it going? Oh, the snow looks cool.’ Or, more realistically this year, ‘Oh, there's not a lot of snow.’
That's what really captures this as an interesting story to me, is that we have these people from 5,000 miles away keeping an eye on Jackson, and they're looking out for cars for this game, but also it's just on, right? So they're seeing our day-to-day here.
NO: As you are reporting this story, you learned that this is kind of a type of virtual tourism. What is that?
AV: There seems to be a lot of definitions actually to what virtual tourism is. Some people would debate whether or not this webcam travel counts as virtual tourism because in their eyes, virtual tourism would be [putting on a] VR [virtual reality] experience or getting a little bit more interactivity.
But people going on these webcams and taking a peek at somewhere they're either interested in visiting, they've visited in the past, [or] they maybe may never visit, but just want to keep an eye on. I think that allows them to keep tabs on a community or a place in a kind of a unique way.
Especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, that really picked up, according to one of the researchers that I talked to.
NO: Whether or not this is virtual tourism, did you get this sense that Jackson has seen an economic impact of this bar portraying the town?
AV: On a small scale, bartenders or people that work at the bar [have] come to Jackson.
NO: Oh, no way!
AV: Yeah. They've gone in front of the webcam. They've said hi. They've known that people are watching, so they describe, ‘We'll have people wave Lithuanian flags or we'll have people wave on the camera for us, too.’
So I'm not sure about the massive economic impact of it sending a bunch of people from Lithuania to Jackson, but does that matter? It's sending a few people and they're getting like this really cool experience. I think that's pretty special.
Whenever I am walking on the Town Square, I always make sure [to] wave to the Lithuanians.
NO: It's like virtual sister cities.
AV: Exactly, exactly.
NO: Alex, how did you even find this story?
AV: I'm kind of chronically online, so when I moved to Jackson nine months ago, one of the first things I did was jump on Reddit. R/JacksonHole is the subreddit for Jackson.
I get notifications all the time, tourists asking for advice, stuff that's happening locally. And I remember one time seeing this one notification, I actually have it pulled up here. It said, “Help us get some shots!”
Kind of uncommon compared to other stuff you see on Reddit.
I'm just reading the description here. It said, “Anybody has a yellow car and nothing to do right now in Jackson Hole? We're at a bar in Vilnius, Lithuania, and if a yellow car drives by, everyone gets a free shot.” It got like 81 up votes, it got 14 comments and it got my interest.
So I messaged the person. I'm like, ‘Okay, what's the deal?’
They got back to me with the name of the bar. I was like, that's awesome. I think I emailed the general inquiries and I don't know much about Lithuania, admittedly, so I'm like, I don't know if these people speak English. I emailed them both in English and then I did a Google translate in Lithuanian. And I think it was a few weeks after I sent that, I got a reply and I was like, ‘Oh, this is so exciting.’
NO: Are we expecting to see Jackson sell out of yellow trucks?
AV: No, we're not. They gave me a very stark warning. They were like, ‘If locals read this and all of a sudden we see a lot more yellow cars, we can always change the game.’
