It’s several years since I last visited Aspen and my account
of it is somewhere over there in the archives.
My impression hasn’t changed much.
It’s pretty enough and if I was a skier, I’d love to visit. But it isn’t somewhere I’d want to live, even
if I could afford to do so. As a client
once explained it to me. In Aspen you
either clean the hotel rooms, or manage the people who clean the hotel rooms,
or you own the hotel rooms. Yeah, that’s
about it.
In 1971, my favorite author, Hunter S. Thompson ran for
Sheriff on what he called the “Freak Power” platform. Basically this involved mobilizing the
hippies and societal dropouts in an attempt to block the wealthy and powerful from
ruining the small mountain town he loved.
His manifesto included the following:
“To drive the real estate goons out of the valley: to
prevent the State Highway Department from bringing a four-lane highway into the
town and in fact, to ban all auto traffic from every downtown street. Turn them all into grassy malls where
everybody, even freaks, could do whatever’s right. The cops would become trash collectors and
maintenance men for a fleet of municipal bicycles for anybody to use. No more huge, space killing apartment
buildings to block the view from any downtown street, of anybody who might want
to look up and see the mountains. No
more land rapes, no more busts for “flute playing” or “blocking the
sidewalk”…fuck the tourists, dead-end the highway, zone the greedheads out of
existence, and in general create a town where people could live like human
beings, instead of slaves to some bogus sense of Progress that is driving us
all mad.”
Hunter came within a few votes of winning the election,
scaring the crap out of the controlling elite.
But did he really fail? Certainly,
the town has changed dramatically since the early 70’s and the results of a
pursuit for the almighty dollar is evident almost everywhere. It’s depressingly overrun with condos, expensive
boutique shops and tourists like us.
But (most of) the downtown streets are closed to traffic,
there is a grass lined stream running down a central mall, the threatened four-lane
highway stops well short of town and while the cops may not be bicycle
mechanics, they wear pastel colored uniform shorts. And the ones we encountered were friendly in
a warm, fuzzy kind of way. Not only
that, there IS a communal bicycle sharing program. Also, the sidewalks were comfortably blocked
today. Maybe this would have happened
without Hunter’s efforts 40 years ago.
Or maybe not.
Either way, as we drove past the turnoff to Woody Creek,
Hunter’s home for so many years, I downed a beer in his honor. (I had no Wild Turkey). In keeping with the spirit of the thing, I
didn’t even hide it in a closed container.
Yeah, me and Hunter S. Thompson. Outlaws.
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