Omaha Rainbow : Issue 15

GETTING DOWN IN THE ROCKIES - by Jack Steele

Not having been raised up here, I'm always amazed at how quick it cools off when the sun goes down; and one
evening I was waiting in my car outside of a supermarket in southeast Denver, right around dusk, and I saw some high yellow grass in one of those islands they make for lamp posts; and I suppose it was the combination of a sudden chill in the air and the grass and the real pretty light yellow sky that made me flash on how that land looked before it was developed.  And not only how it looked, but how lonely it was to be there.  There's always been something real sad to me about a cold evening right after sundown.

For supper it seems like we always have beans and cornbread or homemade soup on those nights.  And I can
smell it cooking better than usual.  And if I've been working outside and my nose is cold, a quick shot of
whiskey before supper isn't a bad idea.  I don't necessarily feel bad at those times -- just real sentimental and
lonesome, as if me and my wife and kid were by ourselves in the world.

One of the times in my life I felt the loneliest was near Creede, Colorado, at the site of an abandoned silver camp.  An old girl friend had taken me for a tour of the mines in a jeep and we'd spent all afternoon going up and down rabbit trails in the mountains.  It got dark sooner than we expected, and the girl I was with took me to a place where we would look down on a sloping meadow at Creede.  Since we'd planned on getting back to town before dark, we didn't have the side panels up on the jeep, not heavy enough jackets, and we sat there in the dark shivering.  She happened to mention, like it wasn't important, that the meadow had once been a booming camp full of miners and whores and outlaws, and like happens sometimes, as I sat there chilled to the bone on the side of a mountain I got into those peoples' skins for a moment.  I was back there with them, thousands of miles from home and the bright lights of a city, feeling just as lonely as hell.

About the only picker I know of who has paid a lot of attention to that feeling is Townes Van Zandt, and it's
almost just in the timbre of his voice.  I saw Townes perform down at the Oxford Hotel a little over a year ago,
and before his second set, in his room at the Oxford, he talked about how he wrote his songs.  According to the
story that night, he gets on a horse with his fiddle and rides up into the mountains around Aspen, where he spends most of his summers, and he stays out there writing songs and getting clean and pure and close to nature until he can't stand it anymore, and then he comes back into town for a night and gets drunk.  Then he rides out to get clean and pure again, only he can't stand it quite as long this time and when he goes back to town he stays two or three nights.  This goes on all summer, with the stints in the mountains getting shorter and the drunken nights in town getting longer, until finally he just resigns himself to being decadent and gives up on being sober and writing songs.

Giving up on being sober isn't hard to do in Aspen.  It's partly the altitude -- I got wiped out on three Budweisers
and two Yukon Jacks the first afternoon I was there -- but it's the only place where I've felt comfortable staggering around the streets at one o'clock on a Monday afternoon.  We went up for the first time a weeks ago in order to get some interviews and wound up spending most of the two days we were there in the Jerome Bar.
It was like walking into a witches brew of Christmas and Hollywood.

I spent most of my time in the Jerome at the bar, talking with the proprietor, Michael Solheim.  There were always four or five of us together, all lined up at the bar, and it got to where a certain area along the length of the bar was our territory.  Now and then I'd glance outside and once in a while it would be snowing; but for some reason, maybe because the flakes were so perfectly fat and wet, I suspected that there was someone standing on the roof with a bag of snowflakes.  And people seated behind us -- the tables were always packed, day and night -- looked like movie extras, and sometimes even like a painted backdrop.  That first afternoon I don't remember it getting dark.  I just looked outside one time and the sun had gone down.

I learned from Michael that a new battle is shaping up for the control of Aspen.  Even though Hunter Thompson lost his bid for sheriff in 1970, the old guard native Aspenites have been out of power for quite a while.  The new threat comes from outside land developers who would turn Aspen into an exclusive resort community.  When I asked Michael how serious the struggle might get if the land developers started losing, he answered with a first hand account of an incident that happened in 1970.

Michael was Hunter Thompson's campaign manager and the headquarters were in offices above the Jerome Bar.  At one point during the race they began to get suspicious of a biker type who had volunteered to work in Hunter's organization.  It seems that he was volunteering a little too readily, and for assignments that popped out of his own greasy head.  When he suggests that he "eliminate" somebody, Michael and Hunter smelled a rat, and they immediately went to the city council.  Evidence that the biker had been planted by federal narcs turned up later, but meanwhile the whole Hunter Thompson for Sheriff campaign committee was tipped off by a Colorado Bureau of Investigation agent to expect a visit from armed vigilantes.

They sent the women and children into town, rounded up all the rifles and shotguns they could find, and holed up at Hunter's house.  The first car to come by that night was a false alarm.  Several armed men were crouched in the shadows as directions were given to another house.  Later on the real thing showed up; men in suits, all business and armed.  To blind them, a flashlight was pointed at the faces of two men who walked up to the gate and asked where Hunter Thompson lived.  The reply came, "We don't know, but you've got thirty seconds to get out of here."  The men hesitated for only a second, then got in the car and drove off.

That happened in the same town where a lady wanted to sell me an Eskimo yo-yo for ten dollars.  An Eskimo yo-yo, in case you've never been to Aspen, is a couple of fur balls to twirl around in opposite directions.  It (Aspen?) is also the town where I sat in a bar and listened to a conversation between a friend of mine and a girl he wanted to pick up about how hard divorce is on the dogs in the family.  And where my wife got thrown out of a man's garage for walking in with a cigarette.  All of which makes perfect sense when you realize that Aspen is a town without Twilight, without dusk

I've never seen Hunter Thompson's house, but I assume that it's new with bright AC electric lights and polished wooden floors or carpets.  But when Michael Solheim was telling me the story about holding off the vigilantes, a picture of it came into my head that was more like an old western.  A gate falling off its hinges; then men lying on a cold linoleum floor; a bare light bulb in the kitchen ceiling that dims to yellow now and then because it's powered by a DC generator.  In other words, a place where, unlike the town they were fighting for, the inside hasn't yet totally kicked the outside out.