Don't Save Anything: The Uncollected Writings of James Salter(79)
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-maché 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.
A few years later I was given a pair of Graves skis. I skied on them for four or five seasons. They were made of some indestructible material or put together in a unique way and were guaranteed for life. The company, naturally, went out of business. The skis were a dark maroon with the name in bold white letters. In the lift line people always noticed them. “Graves,” they would say, “who makes them?” I didn’t know. To one persistent questioner I said, “The same company that makes Bayer aspirin.” But I liked the skis. They carved well and I was counting on the guarantee, but they eventually delaminated.
Aspen is now a resort. It wasn’t always; it was a ski town, hard to get to and the best in the country. The streets weren’t even paved. In the fall there was mud, in the spring mud and dust. Eisenhower was president, practicing putting in the Oval Office. I wasn’t impressed by him but I didn’t know what would come later. I don’t remember how we first got here; I think it was by train and someone picked us up in Glenwood.
Aspen Airways was in its infancy, to say the least. There was only one plane, later a few. Early models carried five passengers, one of them in the copilot’s seat. Later models had metal patches that seemed suspiciously like bullet holes, and the “No Smoking” signs were in Spanish.
Back then, traffic was a problem only twice a year when 10,000 sheep walked through town on their way to or from high ground, as it was called, though I never found out where this actually was. The sheep filled Main Street almost from one end to the other, and are probably still talking about how the town was in the old days, if they’re like everyone else.
Aspen Magazine
Winter 1996–97
Once Upon a Time, Literature. Now What?
The first great task in life, by far the most important one, the one on which everything else depends, can be described in three words. Very simply, it is learning to speak. Language—whatever language, English, Swahili, Japanese—is the requisite for the human condition. Without it there is nothing. There is the beauty of the world and the beauty of existence, or the sorrow if you like, but without language they are inexpressible.
Animals are our companions, but they cannot, in any comparable sense, speak. They do not have, even the most majestic or intelligent of them—whales, elephants, lions—a God. In whatever form, our apprehension and worship of God is entirely dependent on language: prayers, sermons, hymns, the Bible or other text. Without language God might exist but could not be described.
In the richness of language, its grace, breadth, dexterity, lies its power. To speak with clarity, brevity, and wit is like holding a lightning rod. We are drawn to people who know things and are able to express them: Dr. Johnson, Shakespeare. Language like theirs sets the tone, the language of poets, of heroes. A certain level of life, an impregnable level, belongs to them.
There is not just one language, however. There are two, the spoken and the written. The spoken is like breath, effortless and at hand. The written is another matter. Learning to read and write is a difficult business, the second portal. Once through it, you are into the open, as it were, the endless vistas. The biblios is there for you. I made up the word. It means library, archive, vast collection. A made-up word here or there is not much. Shakespeare made up nearly one in twelve of the more than 20,000 he used overall; at least no previous use of them is known. The King James Bible by comparison contains only some 8,000 different words.
In the biblios are books, manuscripts, newspapers, printouts of Web sites, letters, all manner of things. The books are the most important. It is from reading them that one gets the urge to be a writer, or so it used to be. The first book that I believe I read in its entirety and on my own was All Quiet on the Western Front. I can’t say that reading it made me want to be a writer, or that I became an avid reader, but the confidence and simplicity of the prose made a deep impression.