Stumblegate: California wakes up in Wyoming

WAMSUTTER, WYOMING – Residents of this small town in south-central Wyoming, 112 miles from bustling Granger, awoke this morning to the unfamiliar site and smell of tens of thousands of revelers unconscious and strewn about the rugged landscape. “It was eerie,” said Warren Zieglish, publisher of the weekly Wamsutter Bugle. “It was like the Dawn of the Dead or something. We here in Wamsutter have never seen so many people, much less so many passed out people.”

Throughout the early morning hours, reports cascaded into local sheriff’s offices all over Wyoming, countless reports all requesting assistance to deal with hordes of drowsing, drunken outsiders in sheds, barns, garages, some even on rooftops. First responders were at a loss.

“We’re just overwhelmed,” said one paramedic from Casper. “No amount of training can prepare you to deal with a crisis of this magnitude.”

By noon it was apparent that some 30 million yellow-eyed drunks, all with prodigious hangovers, had swelled the population of Wyoming, a state with an erstwhile population of just over 532,000. From his office in Cheyenne, Governor Dave Freudenthal ordered the immediate mobilization of all 43 Wyoming National Guardsmen to ease tension in the state. In a brief official statement the governor told Wyomingites, “We survived the winter. We’ll survive this.”

While Wyoming struggled to deal with the crisis, visitors to California, 1,100 miles away, noted that that state was inexplicably empty. Delta Airlines pilot Captain Jackson Entwhistle landed his Boeing 727 at Los Angeles International Airport with no assistance from the ground. Said Entwhistle, “LAX is a ghost town. There’s nobody there. I mean nobody. My crew and I divided up the stock from the bar in the international terminal.”

By early afternoon it was apparent that during the previous night California had tied one on and somehow made its way to Wyoming, leaving a swath of devastation in its path and inverting the ranks of the country’s most and least populous states. As the day wore on and Californians regained some semblance of sobriety, the after-effects of a hardcore binge began to kick in and the crisis escalated as only a few wayward Californians found themselves anywhere near a Jamba Juice.

“Oh my gawd,” said Jillery Bengston, a sophomore at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. “So like, I’m in this totally awful place with goats and, I don’t know, like gnus or something and I’ve got a screaming hangover and you’re telling me you people don’t have smoothies?! Dónde está el fucking bathroom?”

Across the western portion of the country relief teams were deployed to deal with the wreckage left behind in California’s staggering wake. Boise lay in ruins. Other cities were similarly devastated. President Obama declared at a Town Hall meeting in Boulder, Col., that “with hard work and faith in oratory,” the region would rebuild.

By early evening a few Californians had sobered up sufficiently to begin reconstructing the details of the mass exodus now known as Stumblegate.

According to Mel Gibson, “It all started on St. Patrick’s Day. A bunch of us met at Ürth Café on La Cienega for soy milk lattes. Then we headed over to St. Nick’s Pub on West Third. We were well into a two-day binge and all completely hammered and someone starting talking about how our homes aren’t worth shit anymore and a Jew said we ought to all pack up and head somewhere where we can ski and where what’s left of our money can still buy half a zip code. And then I kind of forget what happened next, but apparently we headed northeast.”

As often happens in the Golden State, blind drunk citizens followed Hollywood’s lead and the trek was underway.

Back in Wyoming, late last night city workers in Laramie hastily erected a tent village and makeshift sauna for the bear community of San Francisco’s Castro district who now reside, at least temporarily, in the town’s center. Although no nefarious activity had been reported as of press time, law enforcement officials expressed concern over potential future conflicts between long-time denizens of Laramie and the recently arrived, hairy man lovers who outnumber the mostly conservative townsfolk 12-to-one.

“What we’re facing,” said mayor Klaus Hanson, “is more than a cultural conflict. We’ve got ourselves a supply issue. Even if I had the manpower, which I don’t, there just aren’t enough tie straps in the whole state to lash this many big, fat homos to a fence.”