The Sandwich: A tale of friendship and a 16. y.o PB&J

Wednesday, April 01, 2009

By Ben Cannon

Jackson Hole, Wyo.-About this time of the season 16 years ago, a group of roommates initiated a childish practical joke that continues to this day. 

Six college friends were living frugally in a house on Nelson Drive in East Jackson. The year was 1993. Theirs were not uncommon experiences for men in their early 20s who come to the valley to taste the ski bum lifestyle. They worked low- paying jobs and skied nearly everyday at the Village. Afterwards, when the resort closed for the season, they headed out to the backcountry, racking up personal if modest mountaineering achievements by trekking and descending what are considered some of the area’s classic ski lines.

On one particular spring day – the full circumstances of which are still debated by some of the men, now mostly in their early 40s – Galen Woelk, a fastidious man, did what he was in the habit of doing with his messier roommates, which was to stay on them about the dirty dishes cluttering the kitchen for days and even weeks on end. A roommate might find dirty dishes he allegedly left unclean, for example, placed in his bedroom, occasionally even on his bed.

The culprit on this particular instance was Chip Marvin, a Middlebury College grad, now married and a real estate agent in the valley. Marvin, the men said recently, had left a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on the kitchen counter for a spell too long for Woelk to let it go unnoticed.

On this occasion however, Woelk did not leave the offending food on top of his roommate’s bed. Instead he tucked it deep under Marvin’s abundant winter sweater collection, where it would not be easily discovered.

The sandwich had already become moldy when uncovered some months later, yet it would experience even ickier transformative states – much ickier – in the coming years. The sandwich is indeed still around.

Marvin returned the favor by hiding the PB&J in the living quarters of Woelk, who passed it forward again. So began an ongoing prank that grew to involve not only the two men, but also other friends, who later in their adult lives would be shocked to discover “the sandwich” had been shipped to them in, say, Canada, Latin America, Africa.

Whoever may be plotting an outrageous coup d’etat with the sandwich has his work cut out for him. It once sat, undiscovered, in a most unexpected place in the home of friend Dirk Murphy and his wife, Sarah, for an entire year. The Murphys wed in Jackson Hole, but have since resettled in Massachusetts. 

This is a story, told by the major players themselves, of the glory days of yore, enudring friendship and, not least of all, the unidentifiable remains of a 16-year-old peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich that has visited more countries than the average American ever will.


Galen Woelk (now an attorney in Laramie)
Six of us were living in the house on Nelson Drive. It was sort of socialism/Marxist living at its best. Chip would constantly leave things lying around; he would leave his dishes in the sink for a week. It was spring of 1993, right after the road opened up to Jackson Peak. Chip and I went to ski the north face of Jackson Peak that day. Before we left that morning, we made a bunch of PB&Js.

Chip Marvin
It would have definitely been Skippy peanut butter, probably on whole wheat. Galen claims I made it to take to Jackson Peak one day – that’s not even true. He’s mixing up his stories. Anyhow, I made it to go skiing one day, and left it on the counter.

Galen was the kind of guy that if you didn’t do your dishes you’d come home and there’d be a Post-It note on the dirty dish with your name. Some months later, I’m cleaning out my room and I find a fossilized cereal dish, then a fossilized sandwich. We eventually developed this culture. It was kind of like Fight Club. You don’t talk about the sandwich, if you found it, you’d get rid of it. There became this level of paranoia in the house about where it is and who has it.


Galen: So one day I take the sandwich and bury it in Chip’s sweater shelf and never said anything. For the next five or six months, I would go in there and check on it. It was getting moldy and nasty. It was there an entire year, if not 15 months. One day I went to look for it and it was gone. I immediately got paranoid, because I figured if Chip found it he would suspect me.

I did find it buried in my closet. I either hid it back or I might’ve even given it to someone else. It went around. Over the next couple of years, this was the beginning of this ridiculous silly joke of the sandwich being put in people’s kayaks and all of this. It became this thing where we had this pact: if you knew where the sandwich was, you couldn’t tell anyone, so no one would know. If you passed it off, you might find it again a year or two later. I don’t know where it is right now, but I have my suspicions.

Chip: I do think I was messy, but not unclean. The same could apply now; things haven’t changed too much. Although, I do sleep on sheets.

Galen: He’ll always deny he was slovenly. Before he started hanging out with his wife, Courtney, for two years he slept on a mattress without a sheet. He’ll always deny that. It wasn’t even a new mattress he bought – it was an old skid mattress we found somewhere.

Chip: I started dating this girl who’s now my wife, and we took off to go backpacking in Africa. In Harari, Zimbabwe we stayed in the most heinous backpackers’ hostel with the nastiest sheets I’ve ever seen. While unpacking, I look in the bottom of my sleeping bag and there’s the sandwich, and this thing had already been going on several years now.

I knew Dirk had put it in there, and I started hyperventilating. I?couldn’t travel around Africa for three months with this thing. It took me a whole day to find an envelope and post office in Harari.

Galen: We called it the Nelson Group Home. In those days we didn’t go out that much because there wasn’t much money. We ate a lot of fried potatoes and the like. It was socialism: we didn’t have our own food or beer. Whatever you brought into the house was for everyone to use, including food and beer. The whole point, was you had to try to pull your own weight. We spent a lot of time hanging out at the Nelson Group Home because it was such a cool place to hang out. We didn’t go out to bars, other than to go to the Moose for music once or twice a week. There weren’t that many bars in town back then.

There weren’t any girls. It felt like there were 25 to 30 of them who were between 21 and 25. When I go back now it’s mesmerizing because there are so many people now. The ski bum community was so much smaller then.

Chip: Dirk and Sarah were getting married a little over 12 years ago. Somebody said, “that sandwich should be in their wedding cake.”

Galen: It made trips to Mexico, one or two to Africa, but the ultimate coup was on Chip’s part. Ultimately, it’s all Chip’s responsibility.

Chip: I find out who’s making the cake and call her up, and tell her the whole spiel. It was baked into the anniversary cake – the smaller one on top. The greatest part was after the wedding, when Sarah and her bridesmaids were all over, working the party trying to figure out where it was and bringing it up in conversation. 
We had to spend the next six months making sure they picked up the anniversary cake so we had spies asking about, “Oh, did you get the anniversary cake?” A year later, on their anniversary, they’re cutting into it and…

Sarah Murphy: When our one-year anniversary came around, our friends kept calling and saying happy anniversary. We just thought everybody was so responsible to do that.

It was actually in the top of my wedding cake. It was like this black goop. Dirk is a pretty mellow guy, but he was furious. I just thought it was masterful. We’ve had it many times. You put it in the freezer so it doesn’t smell.

Chip: Later, the sandwich tried to go on my honeymoon to Morocco. I found it on my flight and sent it to our friend Craig Jenkins, who was working on a big mining operation in northern Canada.

Galen: For me, one of the more memorable times was finding it in my garage in Laramie. I know Chip had been through and so had Dirk. I put it in Dirk’s sleeping bag when he was packing. Wait, I can’t tell you that.

Chip: Oh god, the smell is horrible. You feel like if you touch it, your arm would fall off.

Sarah: One time, a guy from NPR actually interviewed everybody and was going to do a story, but his car got broken into and he lost all of the audio files.

Galen: Last time I saw it, it was inside a Ziploc bag inside a little kids’ Tupperware sandwich holder.

Chip: Other coups? We used to joke that when we were having children, it would get wrapped in swaddling clothes at the hospital. I don’t know if I want to be buried with the sandwich. It’s still fun, but we all live so far apart that it moves at a slower pace. But we can’t give it up, because it’s certainly a good memory of those ski bum days. Maybe I should start making seed sandwiches and proliferating them. It’s been 16 years since the sandwich was made. Fortunately, we’re doing better than it is. PJH

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The Sandwich: A tale of friendship and a 16. y.o PB&J | Planet JH News Article: Cover Stories

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