by James Salter
“Let’s go in,” he said.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nature upsets me,” he said.
The last concerts are at the end of August. Unlike the winter, summer drifts slowly to an end. There are still white-clad figures on the tennis courts, and on the bulletin board outside a restaurant called The Shaft flutter slips of paper placed by people urgently seeking housing or selling climbing boots and skis, as well as by those making proposals of a more striking nature:
Two girls heading to Minneapolis end of August. Need ride. Will trade ass for gas.
The leaves begin to turn. The sky is a deeper blue. The tree for which the town is named (Aspen was originally called Ute City) has small, shimmering leaves and a whitish trunk like a birch. In some places it is called the trembling poplar. Chaucer and Pliny wrote of it, and there is a legend that the original Cross was made of it. The bark was once used as medicine. About the first week in October, the vast groves on the mountainsides become gold overnight. In a last sweep of color, the summer is gone.
America’s oldest cities date back only to the seventeenth century, and some of the largest merely to the nineteenth. An entire growth—and in some instances decline—has taken place in the wink of an eye. In less than a century, Aspen already has a buried past: an old town covered by a new one, and beneath that still another layer—there are mining tunnels everywhere under the present city, abandoned vessels of bewildering scale. A little way up Ajax is the entrance to the old Durant mine. You can still enter and walk into the chilly depths of another realm, into absolute darkness where shafts soar toward an unknown surface and tunnel walls have collapsed to reveal galleries large enough for the Jerome Hotel to disappear in. All this, all the lives devoted to it and the wealth it brought forth, is forgotten. Beneath the modern town is a Homeric ruin, and though it is invisible, it has an influence and provides a quality that other places do not have: the sense of having been built on something other than the pursuit of pleasure—on something of consequence. Without this submerged order, Aspen would be like Snowbird or Vail, both of which are pleasant but made-up. They lack the authenticity that Aspen, for all its foolishness, still possesses.
Yet the town seems to have rapidly traveled the path that leads, in the case of resorts, from discovery by an adventurous few to full-fledged ownership by the rich and prosperous. Some of the early people were well-off, but they were part of the jaunty days of an unconventional era. A number of them, not much older-looking, are still around thirty years later, burnished by the sun and preserved by years of fresh air. But just as there are two theaters, the one the audience sees and the one backstage, so there are two Aspens—the one in plain sight and the invisible one withheld from the visitor. What happened over the years was that certain members of the original cast, far from being content with the beauty of an ideal life, started buying up the theater. When the great land boom began in the early ’70s, the ambitious had stockpiled real estate, and the dreamers, tinkerers, and exiles drifted away to Santa Barbara or New Mexico.
From glorious, primitive winters and shared communal joy, Aspen turned into real-estate offices and boutiques. Dogs once sat serenely in the middle of the street. Now they are on leashes, and the hip young cops drive blue Saabs. Not that there is crime here. One can sleep sweetly and in peace. A certain amount of thievery and housebreaking goes on, of course, unlike the days when doors were never locked. But there are virtually no crimes against the person; the last murder occurred five years ago and was attributed to a maniac, Theodore Bundy. Bundy is alleged to have killed a young woman in Snowmass, a satellite resort about ten miles from Aspen, and to have dumped her naked body in the snow along a road. The case was never tried, Bundy having first thrilled the town by jumping from the second-story window of the courthouse—he had been left unguarded to look something up in the legal library—and disappearing on the streets in broad daylight. The radio warned people to lock their doors and windows, but as it turned out, the fugitive had no interest in disturbing anyone and wandered about miserably in the woods for several days before he was recaptured trying to leave the valley in a stolen car. On his second escape attempt, he fled to Florida, where he was tried and convicted for a series of murders he committed there.
The county sheriff, Dick Kienast, was embarrassed by the escapes but regained his dignity among the locals by taking a strong stand against the ways in which drug laws are enforced. His position, reported with zeal by the national press, was that most drug use, at least in Aspen, takes place in homes. He came down on the side of privacy, refusing to cooperate with federal agencies and even facing a grand jury as a result.
There are reasons to believe that a significant amount of cocaine—or Bolivian marching powder, as it is affectionately called in Aspen—is passed around. There is a general understanding within sophisticated circles in cities like New York, Los Angeles, and Dallas that Aspen is a place where good times can be had, in the modern sense of the term.
Jane Smith and Susan Olsen own a shop called Heaven next to the ancient brick building that houses the Isis, Aspen’s oldest movie house. They are right out of an updated Gentlemen Prefer Blondes—sassy, warm-blooded, and wise. In Heaven one can find chic clothes, unusual and expensive: jackets woven from silk and Samoyed hair, suede chaps as erotic as spike-heeled shoes, leather belts for $250, skimpy tops and fur coats of coyote or Japanese raccoon.
They opened their shop two years ago, although Jane has been in Aspen for ten years and has already owned or managed three similar places. Jane is the brunette—beautiful facial bones, dark eyes, and dazzling smile. She was born in Alabama and studied interior design in college. Every year she goes on a six-day juice fast (two hour-long massages a day, an enema, and plenty of juice) under the supervision of “an old lady who comes up from Florida.” “I had a friend who kept saying, ‘You’ll love Aspen,’” she says, “and I did.” She was in her early twenties at the time. She started a clothes shop, ran it for a while, and then started another one, called 20th Century Fox.
The name Heaven was inspired by a girl friend who always said, talking about Aspen, “Here in heaven . . .” The clientele includes Cher, Anjelica Huston, and Tatum O’Neal—as well as a lot of wealthy Mexicans and South Americans. The shop has been doing well. “But I think it’s a tough town for a girl,” Susan Olsen says. She is a stunning Californian with a contemptuous mouth, the sort of woman men would give anything to possess. You see her on the street, long-legged and golden, and think she cannot have a care in the world. “It’s tough to make ends meet,” she says. “It’s hard to find a niche in this town and make some money. It’s very unstable. A lot of people go through a lot of problems. They get caught up in the fast life. It’s too casual. Guys take advantage of women here.”
The myth dies hard. There are those haunting visions of a unique happiness. Meanwhile they drive, they fly, they come over the mountains in blizzards and storms. The drive from Denver is four to five hours long—but it can take days. Getting to Aspen is part of the legend.
Still, it is there: the steep blue mountains, the wood fires, the trees bearing fresh snow—like a mistress, in Browning’s words, with great, smooth, marbly limbs. Morning comes. The river is covered with ice. There are occasional breaks in it, fissures that run in the direction of the current like wounds. The water is black, but the trout are surviving the cold. Not half a mile from town are animal tracks in the snow leading down to the bank. A few miles farther and you are in the wilderness, in a world without men. Here you can breathe, see the country as it was, as it will be forever. Here in heaven.
Geo
November 1981
Snowy Nights in Aspen
In those days we got dining room chairs, as well as other items, from the dump. This was in Aspen. The grocery store was in the basement of the opera house and ran charge accounts. Houses, most of them from the mining days, were selling for five figures.
It seems, looking back, to have been the dinners. They were countless. Friends, and sometimes their friends, people from out of town, people met skiing. There were dinners when the candlesticks fell over on the sideboard and the frame of the mirror caught fire. Nobody noticed until flames were running up the wall. There were triumphant dinners and dinners that were simply disasters, when the meat was like cardboard and Gordon Forbes’s passionate daughter threw it on the floor—by unfortunate coincidence the potatoes were underdone that night.
There were dinners when marvelous things were said, confessions and opinions that would never have come forth but for the company and the wine, and dinners when guests, in need of a little fresh air, went out and were discovered, after an hour, sleeping on the woodpile.
Somewhere along the way we began to jot down a few lines as a reminder of who had been there and what was served, mainly to avoid repeating the menu, and over time there crept in brief comments, a record, like notes one might make in the margin of a book.
Thus were created The Annals, Robin Fox dramatically reciting Swinburne, Lorenzo unexpectedly appearing, as if at the opera, in a fur-collared coat—that was the night when the exotic-looking wife of a painter was the sexual star of the evening. She had high cheekbones and arched eyebrows. She had been to France, she said—it seemed to have a special meaning.
Leafing through the notebook in which all this was written, one comes across loose pages and others that are water- or wine-stained, difficult to make out. But there is also a strange feeling, almost of accomplishment, in thinking of bygone evenings—no matter what else, life has been lived. Names I have forgotten are there, and others I simply don’t recognize. “Four bottles of Bordeaux,” is one succinct entry and beneath it, “Spaghetti carbonara like glue.” There were five at the table that night, and the couple later got divorced. It happened in an odd way. The husband had had a long affair which he knew his wife was aware of and was causing her unhappiness. He was very fond of his mistress but decided the marriage came first and one day announced to his wife that it was over.
“What’s over?” she said.
“Me and Maya.”
“You and who?” his wife said.
Many nights, apparently, there was poker, not the grown-up kind but congenial games, the value of hands sometimes written out for women who had never played or who had forgotten. “The Judge was losing and left early,” is an entry. He eventually left town as well, but the memory of him is vivid. He was squire-like and cordial, but could be abrupt and unyielding. In younger days he’d once jumped from a window to end it all, in love and rejected, but the window was only on the second floor.
On another evening advances of more chips from the bank were being written for convenience on the label of a bottle of wine. Tom Hubbard had been losing and several times he, as well as other players, had replenished their chips. Weary and having lost yet another pot, he inquired plaintively, “Is there any room left on the wine bottle?”
There is someone’s unattributed description of the sensuous life in Cuba before Fidel. Perhaps we were smoking cigars. “In Havana,” it reads, “the woman takes the cigar in her palms and warms it over a lamp. Then she dips it in a decanter of dark rum and rolls it again. Then she puts the end in the flame of the lamp. The man takes two puffs . . .” I try to imagine who was delivering this alluring account. Was it Abigail, Portia, Krista-all—names I cannot attach a person to—or the orchestra conductor or former lieutenant governor? Nor can I identify the minister on the evening when there was written only, “Man of God got drunk.” Irene was there that night. She was young and from the South, attractive to both sexes and with the most knowing smile imaginable. She’d been married once briefly, to a man named Thorndike. The reception, she liked to say, lasted longer than the marriage.
Did we ski the next day? There is no telling. In my memory it is more often after a day of skiing, filled with that matchless, almost lightheaded exhaustion, that we sat down to dinner. The talk was of runs and gear, of the snow on Powderhorn that was more perfect than it had ever been. The temperature was just right, cold, about twenty degrees, and no one had been down it; the tracks we made were a declaration of happiness.
I wonder why, unrelated to anything else, I find Joe Fox’s six rules for being the ideal weekend guest. Fox was a senior editor at Random House. He had been the editor for a book of mine but more notably had edited Truman Capote, Philip Roth, and Peter Matthiessen as well as others. A Philadelphian through many generations, he had certainly been to great houses. From that February evening, there are these unexplained but most likely unimpeachable rules: 1) Never arrive too early 2) Bring a gift the hostess will love 3) Stay to yourself for at least three hours a day 4) Play all their games 5) Don’t sleep in the wrong bed 6) Leave on time.
The days of winter and skiing are perfect days. If asked to explain why, I can only say, somewhat helplessly, because one loves them. The fire in the evening, the fatigue and ease, the lack of guilt at having spent the day in no more than pursuit of pleasure, and finally the warm, convivial dinner. Abbodanza. If leaders of enemy peoples could ski together, much hardship could be avoided.
One night just after Christmas someone brought a houseguest, a young Japanese. He was probably perplexed by the customs but being, as it turned out, the son of a former prime minister of Japan, he was both socially adept and polite. He sent a thank-you letter which still hangs, framed, on the wall in the kitchen. Somewhat faded, it reads, “It was very nice to know you. Thank you very much for inviting me for a great dinner. I enjoyed your cocking very much.” The slight misspelling which makes the letter a classic is the writer’s. Courtie Barnes, who read it a few weeks later, remarked admiringly, “Incredible we could have gone to war against such a charming people.”
In the beautiful winter, on snowy nights, the people are all like that.
Colorado Ski Country USA
1997–98
Notes from Another Aspen
Well, it all depends what you mean by the old days. For people like Tom Sardy and Judge Shaw, who were prominent figures in town when I came for the first time in 1959, the old days were when you could buy a house and lot in the West End for $25, including all the furnishings. Judge Shaw used to buy them for even less, for unpaid back taxes which were pennies. When I arrived houses were selling for $10,000 to $20,000. Now they’re probably even more.
Judge Shaw was a chain-smoker and breathed with a wheeze. He persisted in calling Tam Scott, who is now a judge, “Cam,” despite respectful correction, and lived with his wife in a large house at the east end of Triangle Park, which has since passed into more-renowned hands. Land Rovers, in fact, were not even invented when the judge was around. Sushi was unknown. My lasting image of the Shaw house was after his widow’s death. The mattresses were pushed out of the window and slit open in a search for gold coins thought to be in abundance, I suppose.
One of the early magnates of the present, or skiing, era was Ed Brennan, who paved the way for Gerald Hines and Mohamed What’s-his-name who built the Ritz. The Ritz back then, of course, was the Jerome. Except for the post office and a café or two it was the center of everything. The fire siren was mounted on the roof and I believe the hotel had the only switchboard in town. Wh
en the siren went off the firemen had to drive by the hotel and ask where the fire was. The Jerome bar was the bar. Everyone skied all the way down to it at the end of the day and not infrequently made arrangements for the evening. Later at night there might be an invitation to go upstairs, which was like going to a badly maintained fraternity house room, but drunk with love, who cared?
The great days of the Jerome bar, most of them under the reign of Mike Solheim, seem now to have been the heart of a long democratic period, the 1960s and ’70s, when the rich and poor of town, so to speak, rubbed shoulders and were on cordial terms. The bar even served as campaign headquarters when Aspen politics were, unfathomably, of national interest, and Steve Wishart, at one time a Jerome bartender though barely tall enough to see the customers, once ran for the city council more or less from the bar. The night of the election it was packed, and when the returns came over the radio, Wishart had won! He was standing on the bar with a bottle in each hand, and with a shout of triumph dove off into the crowd. Fortunately, they caught him, and as he was set upon his feet he said, “I just wanted to see who my real supporters were.”
To return to Ed Brennan, however, when I first came to Aspen he blanketed the town. Whichever way things went, he was prepared. There was Ed’s Beds, his low-end lodge; Ed’s Express, which inspired FedEx; and Trader Ed’s, which exists in a haze of memory as being where the Hyman Avenue Mall is now, with papier-mâché palm trees and local wahines in grass skirts, very authentic. There were no moral guardians in those days, and the annual wet T-shirt contest, perhaps one should say pageant, at the Red Onion was more popular than the Super Bowl.
My first memory of skiing in Aspen is lying on my back at the bottom of Spar Gulch, due to some faulty snow, and averting my face as a glamorous couple I knew slightly came past with an instructor. I didn’t want to be recognized and they probably would have taken pains not to recognize me, and one of us had to do something. I had a broken arm, though not as a result of the fall—I’d broken it on Main Street the night before and it had been set and put in a cast by one of the town’s two doctors. The bill must have been $25 or so.