by James Salter
Morning. From another house, a large one, bursts a yellow Labrador followed by a black one and then a young boy who walks them every morning, hands in pockets, long trailing ski cap on his head. There was a time when all the license plates of town began with ZG, and when the dogs were more or less citizens and everyone knew to whom they belonged.
I remember the day that Tim Howe, at one time in his life a marine biologist but for far longer a veteran figure of the ski patrol, went up the steps of the courthouse in the uncharacteristic outfit of blazer and tie to defend his dog against the charge of running loose. The dog, a handsome old black Labrador wearing a bandanna around his neck, was arthritic and nearly blind. He had to be carried into the courtroom.
He had lived all his life accustomed to freedom, his owner pleaded, it had been his birthright, and it was inhumane to expect him now to be attached to a leash.
The charge sheet read that the police had to chase him for six blocks. Was this correct, the judge asked? Yes, sir. “It doesn’t speak well for the fleetness of the force,” the judge observed. “Mr. Howe,” he then said, “you have to understand that Aspen has changed—it’s no longer a place where dogs can sit in the middle of the street or run free.”
I forget the outcome; perhaps there was a fine. One might claim it was the sale of the Aspen Ski Corporation to non-skiing billionaires, or the advent of Hollywood stars at Christmas, or the construction of the huge Ritz-Carlton Hotel, but in my memory it was the trial of Spade, Tim Howe’s distinguished old dog, that marked the vanishing of the old queen and the coronation of the new.
Rocky Mountain Magazine
1994
They Call It Paradise
From the air, the first view comes after forty minutes of flying over the rugged mountain country west of Denver: forests, snowy peaks, lost blue lakes, and only the rarest glimpse of habitation. Suddenly, there is the town. It lies in an irregular valley and seems quite small, as if it would fit in the palm of one’s hand. In the winter, ski runs plunge down the slopes above the town like broad mountain roads. In the summer, the large ranches seem to speak of plentiful land. As you get closer, you can make out houses clustered on the lower slopes.
The drive from the airport into Aspen leads past grazing horses and lodges set at the edges of meadows. There are buses, pickups, bicycles, people running. A certain giddiness begins to take hold, and it is not attributable to the simple fact of having arrived at your destination after a heroic journey. Aspen is 8,000 feet above sea level, an altitude at which dogs do not have fleas. It is considerably higher than similar resorts in the Alps, and being short of breath, especially for the first few days, is not unusual. The climate is also extremely dry, which contributes to the fine quality of the snow but has an alarming effect on the skin. The effect is the reverse of that in Shangri-La—here one dries out on arrival and suddenly feels like the Grand Lama, 600 years old.
Main Street is long and very wide, with many Victorian houses and a few surviving majestic trees. Toward one end is the downtown area, four or five blocks square. Here, new buildings are mixed with the old; by law, none of them stands more than four stories high. There are restaurants, shops, bars, and bookstores. Some of these businesses are temporary, some well established. Anything ten years old in Aspen is old. Anything twenty years old is a tradition. There’s a pleasant, easygoing feeling everywhere. The crowds on the streets are made up of some people who are obviously tourists, some who seem to know their way around, and others who clearly belong; the dividing line between these last two groups is vague. Galena, Durant, Mill—the names of the streets come from the mining days. Above the town, surrounding it, are mythic forests, mountains, and streams, readily accessible and open to anyone with a pair of hiking boots.
“How long have you been in Aspen?” Saul Bellow, who visited occasionally during the ’70s, once asked a beautiful resident.
“Oh, a long time,” she said. “I couldn’t think of living anywhere else.”
“After five years, you can’t leave,” someone explained.
“It’s like the Magic Mountain without TB,” Bellow said bemusedly. He was never completely taken in by the town; he more or less saw through it. “These young people,” he observed, “you can see it in their faces—the meaning of existence is themselves.”
Aspen is the chief bauble of American resorts, combining luxury and simplicity, the ephemeral and the enduring, in a spectacular way. Like Paris, Aspen is a city of light, gaiety, generally civilized behavior, and agreeable streets. It is thought of as a sexual paradise, and in fact there is a vast array of available partners of both sexes, for the most part with enviable tans. There are beautiful shops and extraordinary apartments and houses tucked away in places one would never expect. There are cinemas, museums, and art galleries.
There is no “society” in Aspen, no old and distinguished families. The rich who arrived early and the large landowners occupy a certain special position, but the rest is pure democracy. Everyone is on a first-name basis. The girl helping at a dinner party is as likely as not to be dating one of the guests.
Good looks and a hint of background can take one far. Aspen isn’t unconquerable; even the clever locals can be fooled. A store owner I know once saw a particularly good-looking couple come in. They were dressed in western clothes—not the kind you buy in Bloomingdale’s but the authentic clothing of people who own a ranch. The man, who was tall, was wearing a magnificent weathered Stetson.
“Where did you get your hat?” the storeowner asked.
“My hat? In New York,” the man replied.
“You’re not from New York, though?”
“Yes.”
“But your hat,” the storeowner protested. “Your hat looks so real. I was sure you were from Montana. That stain . . .”
The man took off his hat and looked at it.
“Oh, that,” he said. “That’s béarnaise.”
Aspen was virtually a ghost town when a Chicago businessman named Walter Paepcke drove by to have a look in 1945. What he saw were the beautiful bones of what had once been a thriving silver-mining town. Everything perishable had wasted away, and only the skeleton remained. All around were mountains and forests of incredible splendor. A river, the Roaring Fork, flowed past scenes of haunting desolation, empty meadows, broken streets. And yet it was, as an Aspen carpenter I knew once said of his old saw, “better wore-out than another was new.”
Paepcke brought Aspen back to life. European in his taste, his ideas leaned toward quality rather than size. He had a vision for the weary town—one in which the unrecognized beauty would be made whole again and preserved. For almost fifteen years, until Paepcke died in 1960, Aspen developed largely according to these ideals. It remained small in scale and aristocratically unstylish. The agreement now is that these were the golden years.
Paepcke encouraged his friends and acquaintances to buy houses and fix them up, and he bought a good deal of property himself—though not for speculative reasons. He then came up with an ingenious idea to put the town back on the map. The two-hundredth anniversary of Goethe’s birth was in 1949, and the authorities in Frankfurt were somehow persuaded by Paepcke (who was of German descent) that the bicentennial celebration should be held in Colorado, in a remote spot that had been Indian wilderness when Goethe was born. Celebrities such as John Marquand, Gary Cooper, and Norman Cousins were already frequent visitors, and now Thornton Wilder, Arthur Rubinstein, Ortega y Gasset, Gregor Piatigorsky, and the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra came to Aspen. Albert Schweitzer—it was his only visit to America—gave the dedication address. A tone was established that somehow endures. Today, for all the town’s swinging dentists and gilded youth, there are still Nobel Prize–winning physicists and great musicians playing tennis, having lunch on the mall and hiking the trails.
In addition to the people Paepcke first brought in, there were others who somehow heard about
Aspen, came, and stayed. Some had been members of the 10th Mountain Division, which had trained in Colorado at Camp Hale during the war. Others were the black sheep of prominent families, forever on the prowl for new haunts. There were young people, eccentrics, and talented unknowns. For a long time, Aspen was a kind of “in” secret, a refuge too perfect to be spoiled, and those who moved there were aware of their good fortune.
“It had everything I was really looking for,” says Andre Ulrych, who came to Aspen in 1968. He had been designing and building houses in the East. “It had a small-town quality without a small-town mentality. An interesting mix of people. Then there was the natural beauty of the place and the climate.”
Ulrych taught skiing for several years, opened a successful restaurant with his wife, and afterward launched the most elegant disco in town. He doesn’t seem like the owner of a gin mill. Born in Warsaw, where his father was a government minister, Ulrych has a degree in architecture from the University of London, good manners, and clear blue Polish eyes.
Andre’s, as Ulrych’s establishment is called, occupies an old restored building in the middle of town and has become the summit of Aspen nightlife. On the first two floors are the restaurant and bar, on the third is the discotheque. In a long room pulsing with strobe lights and roaring with sound, a gala goes on every night. Along the wall are deep sofas and chairs piled with fur coats and parkas; in the morning, packets of white powder are occasionally found between the cushions. There are beards above white turtlenecks, long hair, warm smiles exchanged beneath cowboy hats. In the beginning Ulrych sold memberships, and there was the impression that the club was exclusive, an answer to the desire of some residents for the kind of establishment one finds in St. Moritz—luxurious, private, and a natural resting place for Viva clones and young women who like to travel in private jets. In fact, Andre’s is open to everyone for a small fee. The liveliness increases as the evening wears on, and toward midnight the town’s waiters and sommeliers, finished with work, begin to show up at the bar to see who’s new. At 2:00 am. everything closes, and almost anyone can go home with somebody. This is called the two o’clock shuffle, and last-minute consultations can be seen on every corner when the dance halls and bars empty out.
Strangely, all this success strikes a melancholy note in Ulrych. “I see this town going completely crazy now,” he says. “The people we all knew years ago who were into a certain kind of lifestyle can’t afford to live here anymore. There are so many people coming in, especially in the winter.
“I see an incredible degeneration in the human race in this country,” Ulrych says sadly.
The owner of the Jerome Bar, a popular establishment three blocks away, has a more positive view of things. Michael Solheim, like everyone in town, comes from somewhere else—in this case Chicago. Good-natured, sleek, he was running an espresso house in Sun Valley when he met the then mayor of Aspen, who took a liking to him. “I’m the mayor,” he informed Solheim. “The city has a lease on the Jerome Hotel, and you can run the bar.”
It wasn’t to be quite that easy. Solheim did in fact come to Aspen, but he had to run a paint and wallpaper company for five years before he could convince the new owner of the Jerome, who had bought the hotel in the meantime, that he could turn “a badly lit room full of African spears and winos” into a successful bar. Solheim finally took over in 1972, redecorated the interior in the style of fashionable San Francisco bars he admired, and met with immediate success.
The Jerome Hotel is one of the landmarks of the town. A massive brick structure, it was built in 1889 at the height of the silver boom. Never seriously modernized, it remains one of the most interesting places to stay in Aspen. The food in the bar is nothing exceptional, and the most popular drink is white wine (“We’ll go weeks without making a martini,” Solheim says), but there is the spirit of the place: it is pure Aspen. People have been known to ride through the door on horses. “Of course, there’s no sign saying that’s specifically prohibited,” Solheim allows.
The clientele tends to be young and dazzling, with a few nostalgic men of forty thrown in. It seems as if the casts of several hit movies as well as characters from the pages of Vogue and Interview have been spilled over the tables and chairs of the two rooms. As with all such places, one section is more desirable; at the Jerome it’s the front, where the bar is located. Normally, you can’t get a seat there after five in the afternoon.
The bar’s success is due in part to its reputation as a hangout for Aspen’s most notorious figure, gonzo journalist Hunter Thompson. Thompson lives in a secluded valley about ten miles from town and usually shows up late in the day or in the evening, sometimes during the last quarter of a football game. He was once a sports columnist, and his interest in such matters has not diminished. He usually stations himself near the coffee maker and television at the end of the bar; when irritated by the game or by life in general, he will throw food or drink at the screen. Thompson does leave his mark, but as Solheim comments philosophically, “A high-pressure hose gets rid of most of it.”
There are only two seasons in Aspen—winter and summer. The winter is bigger; more money is spent then. Skiing begins in early December, depending on the amount of snow and the number of tourists expected. It is great skiing, as good as any in the world. Aspen doesn’t get huge amounts of snow, but it always seems to get enough—and the snow is wonderful, often so squeaky and cold that skiing on it is like gliding on velvet. There are at least 300 miles of trails on four principal mountains: Ajax (as the locals call Aspen Mountain), Highlands, Buttermilk, and Snowmass. There are some difficult runs, but most of the skiing is exciting, not frightening. The views alone, the vast panoramas of blue peaks in brilliant sunlight, are worth the price of a too-expensive room or condominium and the long waits in restaurants and supermarkets.
The winter ends in Aspen on the day the lifts close. There is often still plenty of snow and—because spring storms are frequent—sometimes some of the coldest, purest skiing of the season. But around Easter Sunday, on a date that the lift owners have decided on long in advance, everything stops. The curtain descends. It is as if the town breathes a sigh and collapses. For weeks afterward, it is like a beautiful house the morning after an unforgettable party.
There is a vast exodus of all those who have worked feverishly since November—ski instructors, restaurant help, maids. They trade one paradise for another, heading for Hawaii or the beaches of Mexico.
One of the last of the ski bums, his thirties drawing to a close, sits in the sauna after the final day. On his face is the imprint of nothing but pleasurable years. His knees are gone, he says. They can only take so much, so many bumps, no matter how strong they are. When they’re gone, the veterans agree, that’s it. He’s heading for California, the fading champion says. He’s going to Esalen. He wants to find his true center before it’s too late.
For a few months in spring, Aspen is virtually closed. In the old days, in the ’60s, it was a time of never-ending mud, as the spring thaw turned the unpaved streets into quagmires. Now, it is merely a mournful time of watching the snow vanish week by week from runs whose very names recently had the icy feel of terror: Corkscrew, Lower Stein, Franklin Dump. They are slowly becoming naked and harmless, covered in the end, like battlefields, with green.
The other season, summer, begins in June with the International Design Conference. The restaurants reopen; there is a feeling of awakening. Although nights can still be very cold at this time of year, the real crowds have not yet arrived, and there is a certain sense of privilege—something of the feeling that existed in the ’50s and ’60s, the feeling that made people fall in love with the town. The huge cottonwoods are smudged with green. Independence Pass, over which the original settlers came, is white with snow in the distance. The pass is 12,000 feet high; there are snowfields almost year-round, and the air is so thin it seems metallic. A narrow, breathtaking road crosses the pass and is usually op
en from June through October, depending on the weather.
The real activity of the summer, beginning in late June, is music. Since 1949, the Aspen Music Festival has featured some of the world’s greatest artists—Penderecki, Britten, Perlman, Zuckerman, Milhaud. The concerts take place in a large tent in a meadow surrounded by beautiful views and million-dollar houses. There is a music school with 900 students, master classes, operas, and string quartets. Students perform at outside restaurants and on the mall, and for two months Aspen comes close to the dream that was Paepcke’s.
In addition to the music there is ballet—Ballet West comes from its Salt Lake City home every year—the Physics Center (a serious convocation of physicists that goes on throughout the summer), and various activities of the Aspen Institute. The Institute was created by Paepcke as the intellectual arm of his spa, aimed at exposing successful men to great ideas. Executives who have read little of importance since college days undertake two weeks of Aristotle, Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, and the like, discussing what they read in seminars. After Paepcke’s death the Institute drifted, if not exactly to the right at least into the arms of the establishment, where it is now virtually indistinguishable from other foundations closely connected with government and business. Its present offices are in New York, and Aspen is only its bohemian grove—one of the places where the many problems facing us in these chaotic times are discussed and predictable reports are written up afterward.
I once sat on a terrace overlooking Hallam Lake, a small nature preserve near the Institute, with one of the visitors who had risen high in the world. It was late in the afternoon. The lake was silvery. Swallows darted in the air. Over the leafy town fell a perfect, clear light.