In Defense of a Little Place Called Aspen

“Aspen is a place for people who can’t make it to San Francisco and who have enough money to fail gracefully.” ~Hunter S. Thompson

Give me a Peeber and a porch or give me death.  I think that’s what some famous colonial once said.  Well not really.  But some drunk Ohioan, erroneously citing an old, dead white guy whom he believed to be a famous colonial definitely said that.  That’s PBR by the way – Pabst Blue Ribbon – for those of you who missed the reference.  It might have won a blue ribbon at the 1893 World’s Fair (it’s unclear) and it’s of decent, Midwestern stock.  So it’s got my vote – blue ribbon or not.

I’d gladly get rid of the too-trendy-to-function martini bars for the rest of my life if God would promise me that I could drink cold beer and watch the sun drop over Shadow Mountain forever (Palmer 2009).  And there you go rolling your eyes at me  “Yeah right,” you’re saying, “Look at this poor, little rich girl.  Thinks she’s slummin’ it because she drinks PBR.  She lives in Aspen.  Who’s she kidding?” Or maybe you just think I’m channeling my inner hipster by ironically imbibing with the beer of farmers and steel workers in the town of investment bankers and trophy wives.  But just because I competently play the part of a martini bar whore doesn’t mean I am one. And Aspen allowed me to be me.  Just me.  Jeans and a T-shirt and never a stiletto in sight.

And most people roll their eyes at me and chuckle, “Ohhhhh you live in Aspen.”  Or they pull out dated movie lines circa 1996, “A little place called Asssssssspen.”  And last but not least,  “Where the women flock like the salmon of Capistrano and the beer flows like wine.”  Congratul-fucking-lations, you’ve seen Dumb and Dumber.  And please know that quoting it is the furthest thing from original.  If I had a nickel – well actually a quarter, this is Aspen after all – for every drunk tourist who stumbled down the street quoting Dumb and Dumber at top volume, I’d have a house on Red Mountain.

God bless the tourists for keeping us all in beer and pot.  But unfortunately they show up, go big and go home.  They leave loaded down with fancy and piled high with stories of Aspen as the American Nightmare.  A veritable Sodom and Gomorra – nothing more than a hedonistic playground for Goldman Sachs execs and a fantasyland for their lost and pot-smoking offspring.  My friends in Cleveland, good Midwestern souls that they are, love to inform me that I am delusional in thinking that I live in the real world. And this really pisses me off.  First, it implies that Aspen is populated entirely by rich people swinging from the rafters of their Sotheby’s acquired homes and resting on the laurels of the Italian leather seats of their Gulfstream V.  False.  Second, it implies that people who possess said Gulfstream V, make more than $500,000 a year (lowball) or have more than one home are not, in fact, real people.  False again.

Despite a healthy base of cash money bling-bling in the Land of Milk and Honey, there are normal people.  Now I am not claiming that I live in Hough or Watts or in some backwoods, West Virginia rural ghetto.  I know that we are the lucky ones up here in Aspentown, and that most of us have never worried about feeding our children with food stamps, gun fights in schools or foreclosures in the suburbs.  Nonetheless we work hard to support this life we’ve chosen.  We swig PBR (yes, I’m really hooked on PBR right now.  I’m missing luke-warm PBR’s and softball at the moment.  It’s the withdrawal talking), make thirteen-bucks an hour, wear Carharts, support families and otherwise bust ass to try and “live the dream” as Aspen virgins are so fond of claiming until they realize that the dream is really just life.  And without those people – the bartenders, the maids, the ski patrollers, the APD, the nurses, the firefighters, the waiters, the lifties, the raft guides, the clerks and the baristas – there would be no Aspen.  And those are my friends.  And we drink Peebers.  And watch the sun set.  And play beer league softball.  And get our kids to school.  Just like you there in Des Moines, IA.

It’s a known fact that neither the Franklins in someone’s wallet, nor the cost of their phallus on chrome, matters much to me.  However, neither does it give me right, or reason, to claim that they are less worthy of respect just because they possess these toys of capitalistic gluttony.  Rather, I judge people (harshly) on their ability to treat others with the basic respect and decency that all human beings deserve.   And in my experience, the ability to treat someone like the shit on your toilet paper is by no means directly proportional to the size of one’s stock portfolio.  An upturned nose directed at a man with money simply because he has more green than you not only speaks volumes about your lack of class, but also of your ignorance.  Because without these people to spend the money, and buy the Prada and drink the Veuve Cliquot, Aspen as we know it would be long gone.  We’d all be shit out of luck and shit out of work.  Sent packing on the first plane back to Cleveland.

And I’m not ready to see Aspen kick the bucket.  When I found this odd little snow globe, I quit my big-girl job three days later, packed a duffel bag and never looked back.  Now I understand that my falling-down, former meth lab of a ski bum mansion is valued at $2.5 million.  Not just expensive for what it is, but stupid expensive.  And I understand that life in Aspen is costly (Well really only real estate.  Groceries for example, are cheaper in Aspen than in Cleveland.  But that’s an argument for a different day). I also understand that by employing my frontal lobe capacity – made strong through four Ranger Rovers worth of education – I’ll figure out how to make it rain…er…snow.  I’ll keep life small enough to fit into the back of my Subaru.  I’ll crash in a ramshackle ski bum pad with five roommates to cut down on rent.  I’ll give up on the house in the burbs with the manicured lawn (not that I ever had that Steppfordian hallucination, but anyway you get the point).  I’ll get rid of the TV.  I won’t have kids.  And then I’ll maintain my freedom to head of the Kathmandu or Quito at a moment’s notice.  So call me naïve and delusional, most people do, but this is where I want to grow old and die.

If I had another quarter for every time someone bemoaned the crippling boredom and unending uniformity of their paltry existence in cubical hell, I’d have a surfing compound in Fiji too.  They say, “Man I wish I could live your life,” or, “I would totally live your life if only I didn’t have [Insert Half-Assed Excuse Here] holding me back.”  And I think, “Well, maybe you should have thought of that before you attached that ball and chain to your ankle.  Or maybe, the ball and chain isn’t as onerous as you think it is.  Cut it off.  Head on out there into that too vast world and get you one of them lives you’ve always dreamed about.”  Why not?

And that’s why Aspen is magical.  It’s a sociological study in what happens when you put a bunch of death-sport seeking, adrenaline junkies in one mountain town and cut them loose.  My guess is that Aspen is really the psychological study of some vast and secretive government agency, funded entirely by Paepke investment and tasked with studying human behavior in a post-consumer, post-capitalist world.  Put simply, we’re a study in what happens to the most risk-taking people when they are given everything they want.  What happens is one degree from total anarchy – in the best possible sense of the word.  We always ask, “Why not?” instead of, “Why would you do something that crazy?”  We will climb any mountain, ski any run, raft and river, visit any country, drink any whiskey and huck any cliff.  And we will change the world someday because we’re bold enough to think outside the box.  The people inhabiting this little place called Aspen are genuine, certified, grade-A real people.  Sorry to disappoint.  I know it would have made ye-of-outside-the-snow globe feel better about your lives to think that Aspenites weren’t actually real, or were at least a bunch of rich assholes who spent their days counting and recounting their pile of money.

Come out a see for yourself.  Just go ahead and quit your job, pack your bag and never look back.  It’s not as crazy as it sounds.  Would you rather the unknown possibility of a chance or unchanging security of destined certainty?  

Ski Co is always hiring lifties.

A little place called Aspen

Our $2.5 million ski bum palace

The view from said palace

My Roommate Is A 400-Pound Fat Bitch...And She's Hungry

Bears suck as roommates.  They eat all the food.  Especially the really yummy junk food.  They leave the refrigerator door open.  And they never pay rent. 

The first time it happened I blamed it on the dog.  I thought Maverick had gotten into the trash. Hamburger buns were awry.  Peaches were akimbo.  Sugar was askew. 

“I think there was a bear in the house last night.”  Trent is from Texas.  And nothing against Texans, but they tend to exaggerate.  Everything’s bigger in Texas.  Including the stories.  I decided leave the mess for Maverick’s mom Sarah.

The next night I woke up to Sarah pounding on our connecting wall.  Rolling over to check my phone – it was just past 3 AM - I did the I’m-drunk-from-sleep stumble over to her room. 

“Are you crazy?  Shut the door.  The bear is upstairs.”

Maverick, guard dog that he is, seemed oblivious to the fact that a 400-pound bear was making short work of our food upstairs in the kitchen.

“I called the police.  They are sending a game warden.”

Shotgun-toting Kevin the game warden showed up. He was everything I’d ever hoped a game warden would be.  He looked like the Brawny man before he got old and started wearing flannel.  He was all broad shoulders, rippling pecs and mountain man swagger. Bear season was probably the most exciting part of working for the Aspen Police Department.  Unless Charlie Sheen shows up for a good, old-fashioned domestic dispute, things are pretty quiet. Kevin seemed stoked to be dealing with something besides drunk Argentineans at Eric’s stealing bottles of vodka from behind the bar.

“Damn bear got away.”  He seemed genuinely disappointed not to have gotten a round of rubber bullets off.  “It was a mom and two cubs though.”  Bear 1.  Kevin 0.

This is bad shit.  Never fuck with a mother bear and her cubs.  The world knows no fury like a pissed of mom.  Kevin gave us his card and told us to lock our doors.  This would be great advice if our doors had locks. Unfortunately, our pad was a refurbed meth house that was built by a bunch of stoned out ski patrollers from Aspen Mountain.  It was straight out of How To Be A Ski Bum 101.  Step 1: procure ramshackle house of questionable structural stability with no locks.  If the Big Bad Wolf huffed and puffed our house would be toast.   Besides, no in Aspen locks their doors.

And so the next night rolled around.  I heard some shuffling upstairs and decided that the cooking of drunk food had commenced.  And then there was the crash.  Knives this time I think.  Bolt upright and very alert now I started shaking the boyfriend in the bed next to me.

“Get up.  Get up.  Get up.  Get up.  There’s a bear in the house.”

I had explained the previous night already but I’m not sure he really believed me.  He believed me now.  We set off the car alarms, set the dog to barking and started shouting at the bear to go away.  Get the fuck out. 

We stacked the porch furniture, living room furniture, old furniture we found in the storage space and the terracotta planters in the front of the door is discourage further bear entry.  Or at least, we hoped, the crashing of said furniture would alert us to the bear’s impending entry and allow us ample time to remove the bear from the kitchen before she and her greedy, fat-kid cubs ate the rest of our Ben and Jerrys Cherry Garcia. 

It didn’t work.  How a 400-pound, hungry, fat bitch had the patience or dexterity to maneuver around the furniture maze without knocking down a single item continues to baffle me to this day. 

The casualties continued to mount in this war against Hungry Fat Bitch.  She and her snot-faced cubs visited twice a night for four nights. That’s eight times, five hundred dollars worth of food, one destroyed dog door, and a gnarly scratch on the wall. It was cute for awhile.  Then it stopped being cute.  To this day we find souvenirs.  While icing an ACL injury with a bag of frozen corn, my roommate picked bear drool and black hairs off of the bag six months later.  There is a muddy bear print that hangs out on the back of our sofa.  Grocery store exchanges for the next four months went something like this.

“Do we have hamburger buns?”

“Well we did.  But I think the bear ate ‘em.”  

Next summer Trent is bringing his big guns back from Texas.  Loaded down with rubber bullets to, “Fuck some bear’s shit up.”  Watch out bear.  The world knows no fury like a pissed off Texan with big guns.

Words of wisdom living on our refrigerator...

Too Many Hands Under The Table

The Beastie Boys are on the radio.  Aaron is slumped over at the table drooling on himself – he’s been drinking whiskey since 2:00 and insisted on playing King’s Cup with whiskey even though we warned him.  Whitebread and Billy are engaged in a heated debate about the superiority of Chris Cornell over Eddie Vedder.  And I have too many hands on my legs.

I’ve got one hand on each leg to be exact.  And they each belong to a different person.  Don’t they know what assholes they look like?  Hand One belongs to a scraggly-haired, tattooed, MBA student who is trying to start his own energy consultancy.  Hand Two belongs to a clean-cut, mild-mannered, drummer in a band who has lived in Aspen for four years now.  Seems like the circuits got crossed somewhere when God created this two walking contradictions.

Damn shame that Mr. Tattooed-MBA had to show up tonight.  Where has he been hiding for the last three months?  My style is completely being cramped.

I raise my eyebrows at Summer across the table.  She’s watching whole thing.  She shrugs as if to say, “Looks like you’re SOL.”  My horoscope the other day said, and I quote, "Stop being such a whore.  People are starting to ask questions."  Thanks astrology.  Either way, I’ve got too many hands on my legs and their owners don’t seem to notice, or care.

Driving I-70 (Also: Running The Colorado Winter Road Gauntlet)

For the second (or is it third) time this week I hucked my pack into my Red Rocket, an ’05 Subaru, and joined the jihad of Weekend Warriors to the ski resorts of central Colorado in their descent to Denver on the dreaded I-70 corridor.  I-70 is a daily battle between overly confident Coloradans, overly paranoid tourists and long haul truckers who could give a shit about anyone because they’re the biggest thing on 18 wheels.  The Coloradans, thinking nothing of doing 85 in a snowstorm, over 10,000-foot Vail Pass around the bends and twists of I-70, terrify the white-knuckle tourists whose license plates are routinely from Arizona, South Carolina or Texas (sorry T$, not you).  Woe is he who is caught in a swarm of Texans in a snowstorm.  A black Escalade in front, an 18-wheeler to the right and a Tahoe behind.   All bearing the blue star and cowboy on a horse that brand the loud-voiced, boot-wearing, big-haired virgins to snow driving.  Rather than maintain a logical distance between cars and pursue a consistent speed, the Texan muscles through in their outsize SUV and then slams on the brakes when they near the unsuspecting car in front of them.  For this reason, 30-car pileups are not uncommon along the I-70 gauntlet.

Despite being a Midwestern transplant to Colorado I crank up my Credence on my iPod and ignore the pending disaster around me.  After all, I learned to drive in Cleveland.  And the Cleveland driver thinks nothing of scraping a 4 by 4 holes in the ice on their windshield and hoping behind the wheel with the defrost cracked all the way up.  Who needs to actually see the road?  It’s all drive by feel in Cleveland.  The idiot factor on I-70 is the highest I’ve seen it all season.  There is no snow.  Literally, no snow.  Not a dusting.  Not the remnants of a snowstorm.  No snow.  Dry roads.  Yet, in preparation for the promised upslope storm (comes from the east), CDOT already has chain laws in effect for Vail Pass and truckers are diligently slinging 20 pound chains around their drive wheels.  Of course the Texans have to slow to a crawl to observe (or oversee perhaps) this activity.  Somehow one such driver finds a way to smash his SUV into a parked semi chaining up.  Like I said, the idiot factor is at an all-season high today thanks to increased Easter traffic.

Since it’s Colorado in the springtime, we think nothing of the fact that it was 72-degrees and sunny at 9 AM and that now, at 6 PM, husky snowflakes have begun to drip down on the city of Denver like Cinnabon frosting.  I have a smattering of friends, both old and new, to grab drinks with.  Crashing on one of these couches won’t be a problem.  I call Lauren.  We’ve been great friends since we were five years old and are supposed to grab dinner and drinks. 

“I’m stuck on the highway.” She’s pissed.

“36 hasn’t moved in the last 40 minutes.  I actually put my car in park and started reading my book.” 

“No worries.  Just call me when you make it back.”

I call Amber, my friend from the mountains.  She’s in the wine business and regularly runs the I-70 gauntlet.

“They closed I-70 at Eisenhower Tunnel.  I can’t stand this road.  And the moron factor is out of control today.  I think I might just die.  Right here.”  Amber tends to be theatrical.  That’s why I love her.  It keeps life interesting.

“No worries.  Just call me when you make it back.”  Déjà vu?

Lauren texts me.  I’m running out of gas.  My light came on 30 minutes ago.  Help?!  I tell here to drive in the emergency lane.  Sounds like an emergency to me right?  CDOT would be ticked if her dead car blocked a lane of the Boulder Highway.

I try Whitney.  She and Lauren and I are all native Clevelanders.  Transplants to Colorado.   We drove west on I-80 until we hit the mountains and decided to stop there.  Her phone’s off.  “Shit.”  She is still on the plane and the prospects for DIA actually staying open are not looking good.  The Frosty Flakes have laid down about 8 inches in two hours.

My phone beeps again.  Lauren.  I am in some random girl’s car.  Will probably sleep at B’s tonight.  So sorry.  Highway closed.

I’m not surprised.  Rather than deal with the idiot factor, CDOT usually elects to shut down entire highways to deal with snow removal.  Eisenhower Tunnel usually shuts down because of avalanche risk.  The roads around Denver and Boulder usually shut down because of idiot risk.