Don't Save Anything: The Uncollected Writings of James Salter(73)
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.”