Chapter Fifty - Six

Chapter fifty-six

Epilogue

And so, Wilson traveled on, past the airport until he met the intersection of Cemetery Lane and Castle Creek. Red Right Returning… a sailing saying for returning from the sea. But instead of right or left he was traveling round and round remembering. His musings again trapping him in the 1970’s. For most of his early days in Aspen this intersection had been two lanes, three roads, and no light, and like the shock of the airport, and the remembered ABC enterprise’s nevermore, the round about that had replaced the light, that had replaced the no lights at all, The circle that held him momentarily round and round and round, three times, allowed him to view Independence to the east, the mountain to the south, before intersection memories allowed him to escape and exit west where he began to roll as the incline increased… Cemetery Lane onward until he could sense the Roaring Fork vanishing below and behind a subdivision along the river, the lane eventually spewing him onto a dirt drive that led to Jeffrey’s sprawling house, where he would take up studio residence once again.

Cemetery Lane, where houses that were new only fifteen years ago had been torn down and replaced… Where additions had been added, new buildings built, additional stories contrived. It felt odd, he saw it and he did not, because his vision was mitigated by the memories of a place he had wished to live in throughout his childhood.

Without this past, it is likely he would have turned around at the roundabout. Expectant skiing would have not been enough to hold him, but Wilson did not see reality, he saw a combination of the late sixties and the early seventies and the decades after, memories of the past and present shaping his reality… the present shaping his perceived now. For the last thirty months when chaos attacked when life went dismal, the memories of skiing and mountains had equaled hope, there to counter the bizarre events he now filled away as The Steven’s Job.

If you live somewhere long enough it becomes impossible to see it clearly. The past and an anticipated future likely formed his present… For how long? In Beauville too? No doubt decades. Change, change, change… Aspen had gone from a village to a small city… transformed over the decades he had lived there, and again during the three years he had been gone. A resort town suffering from a new mendacity. He knew this already, a town where restaurants came and went… Where buildings rose and were torn down, then were replaced, again, again, and again, with the flow of increasing money, from wealthier and wealthier escapists. He had seen it… he had not… and he now saw and remembered it again on the road to Jeffrey’s.

Things had changed more in the last three years, things were different, the energy was different, an awareness… as if he could smell it like a subtle scent. To his left, a small house he knew from 1978 had vanished, replaced by a rocksy woodsy duplex with log columns.

Taking in the transformation would take a while. For now, he was worn out from the drive and hoping to get out of the car and have a drink, ease his knees, chill out, examine, and touch base with Jeffrey and Noelle. Then chill, and sleep and get up early tomorrow to retrieve his ski equipment from storage, buy a ski pass and get ready for the winter… Maybe even drive to the top of the pass, if the road was open and climb up heartache hill and take a run or two… tomorrow or the next day or the next… there was plenty of time, and… and… and.

Then he was turning on to Jeffrey’s access drive, passing two new houses to his left, both misplaced a top a rock slide, and reaching Jeffreys…where he first climbed the steps and then the stairs. Light glowed through hall windows and he heard laughter… but passed it by, schlepping his packs and necessaries before he planned to return and announce his arrival.

But before he could return to Jeffrey’s entrance there was a slight knock, not needed as the door was open wide, and then Noelle was hugging him, and Jeffrey welcoming, as thoughts of Beauville and his house retreated, fled, then vanished, all in a single second.

He was home, and Beauville was departing with every heartbeat, a vanishing past. He felt it… And also, time’s passage when he gazed into the eyes of his friends who, like him, were no longer in their twenties or thirties. Aspen leaping at him from his mind’s eye, with scenes of skiing with Noelle and Jeffrey, and their sailboat adventure from years before. These and the airport drive shouting at him, his demon now gentle and benign… ‘Your Aspen is a place of mountains still, but primarily it is a place of youth and dreams and memory.’ And this was something he would come to grips with, more and more, as the weeks before ski season unfolded. As he realized he was living three dreams, the vanishing Beauville, the never to return Aspen, and the coming imagined winter and another expanding future in the old mining town, or Has-been, as Jeffrey called it.

And Jeffrey’s name fit, because as Thomas Wolff said ‘you cannot go home again’. It had taken him to middle age to figure this out… but daily walks about Aspen made it obvious… In a way it was like visiting a postcard that you remembered, noticing its changes, but a postcard is in two dimensions, and reality is in at least three… and perhaps many, many, more.

Aspen both was and was not. In some places it was the same, in others not. Restaurants had closed and moved on, buildings had been renamed and others vanished… removed entirely turned into something unsuitable, because not only had the buildings disappeared but with their disappearance, also departed… oh so many, memories.

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It had only been two and a half years, yet standing in a new condo development while mentioning the art studio that had once been there. Those behind the counter, booking condos, did not comprehend that they were hucksters standing on a graveyard. In their eyes they were escapists seeking nature… skiing with helmets. They were tragic and they did not know this either. How could they? They were too young … New buildings with larger units, albeit limited in height and design, zoning appropriate, but structures, to Wilson’s eye that shouted Yikes, and Tragedy. Because one block over he saw this repeated, and two blocks south the same, and one block north too… It had only been two and a half years... so many transformations, so much change.

The new Aspenites did a better job at fitting in, though. They might have been extra’s from an older movie until you spoke with them, until you read the papers, until you examined closely… until, until… ‘You cannot go home again’… and Wilson realized that if he was to survive in Aspen, he would need to live in memory, because if he lived in Aspen, as it now existed, he would depart before the sundown. Aspen had become a cemetery… He needed to remember what was beneath the tombstones to survive.

How odd, but not really… That he had not seen this… Because he wouldn’t have, would he? Because…. Change creeps up on one. Take an old friend that you have not seen in ten years… they are transformed. But if you see them every day… you do not notice… This was Aspen. It had changed long before he'd left, but he had not noticed. Returning, after almost three years absence, the change he had ignored... that transformation was leaping out and shouting, displayed where ever he turned, both in the people and the new construction.

And the people, yes, they too were different. He had returned to a version of the film, Invasion of The Body Snatchers… the Aspenites, appearing similar, but definitely not the same.

Did they know they were pod people? He doubted it. Even as his Demon laughed.

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Greed was greater. The scams were more accepted. The hustle was now part of a hip ambiance… The transformation had been going on for twenty-five years, but now with renewed immediacy it smashed him in the face, a boxer's punch. There was no question: Things that would have made him shudder twenty years ago, were now not only accepted... They were applauded… Helmets without a downhill!

Yet... the town shouted we are liberal. We are Democratic and progressive. A daily stroking filled its newspapers… And this was when it dawned on him, that what he had sensed in America, what now bothered him in Aspen, had been ongoing and in flux, everywhere, for decades. And he was that lobster in the pot, his values about to be coaxed and nudged into imagining there was nothing different… The snow on the peaks would astound as it had always done. But… He kept returning to the helmets. They said it all… and the fools thought that it was safety… Frog in the pot, be careful… he had sensed a bit of this, but not near enough!

The winter of 2000/2001 became enlightening, an enlightenment of change and none of it good.

Except for the skiing, which was as it had always been, magnificent.

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He bought a new pair of Stokeley's, 188 cm, and very short for him, someone who used to ski routinely on 215’s, 210’s and 207’s, and sometimes 205’s. ‘Short skis suck’, that had been the slogan in the early 70’s. Now it was reality, but when he tried the things… they worked.

Yep… They kept changing the skis, making the sport easier and easier. And with these, his middle-aged body with its broken knees, could still fly down the mountain, ski the powder, and negotiate the minimal ice that on occasion appeared on the Aspen mountainside.

He noticed even some of his friends were beginning to wear helmets. Were they now cool, had they been bamboozled had they transformed into shadows of themselves. Never him...Helmets had ruined children’s childhoods, kept the wind out of their hair, separated them from life… He stuck to his old stocking cap, and his skiing was similar, as it had always been, except for the bumps which he negotiated by GS’ing over them, supported by speed and inches of air, instead of through the troughs… this for ease and in order to prevent the pain from ruined knees… and to save them.

He found that while the bumps hurt and the climbing pained him, the steeps of Highlands Bowl were no more difficult than they'd ever been, still of little consequence, and except for powder days, it became his habit to venture out to the altered Aspen Highlands, destroyed by a developer into another enclave for the very rich.

He missed the old base lodge, the old lodges and hotel… The place now resembled a rock and wood and stone... Plastic, hello Disneyland, contrivance.

But these days one could ride a cat part way, and then climb to the top and ski down with the bowl now patrolled, with slides controlled and much less dangerous than it once had been, when out of bonds. So, with the steeps beckoning, and although it was difficult to climb to the top because his knees were screaming, he found that once he was skiing down, it was little different than how he'd skied the steeps in Chamonix, almost 30 years before. In a way even with his age and body it was too easy, because the danger had produced the joy, like single handling his boat in the storm.

Yet, his Chamonix turn still worked… And the new skis made it easy.

It crossed his mind that it, that he might be like those old farts playing tennis, with their giant rackets… Everyone an athlete. Or those long drive fatties… golfers and their Big Bertha’s… Men who previously would have required a #2 wood, now every year buying the next new driver with the ball and driver shouting slogans you can hit me farther… Examining with the tacit question limping along behind… are you, is it happening… Getting old? That is never good? Don’t worry, we are Nike, all it takes is money… we can fix it... with new equipment to cheapen the sport… Everyman a king.

But the hike to the top of the bowl made it somewhat exclusive. You still had to get there, and you still had to get down.

Occasionally, he would run into some troubled, scared, and frightened woman on the top (deserted by her boyfriend, her man, her husband) and help her down saying “It's easy, you can do it, let me show you. Demonstrating when the woman was trapped on top, and not so much if she was petrified, half way down. But always, “Skis across the fall-line” ... then “It's counterintuitive but lean out, face downward, your buttocks not your back, into the hill. An athletic stance, twist the hips. We will traverse from side to side. It will be no problem for you to get down. Do this.”

Occasionally, these encounters expanded, moving on to a week or two of meetings, of sex and love pretensions. But otherwise, it was a private winter filled with wonderful snow, beautiful light, the wondrous Colorado climate, and middle-aged athleticism.

And all winter long Beauville sat fading, faded, in the background. He missed his house. He missed living in his 'art'. He missed the affirmation, the assurance of his creativity, as he searched for a new source and place to flex his mind...

But for that winter... skiing creativity was enough. Spending time with old friends was enough. Beauville… He missed it. But not that much.

And then in March with his face as tan as it would ever be, his body limber once he’d stretched, with skiing fulfilling-swell until about 2:00 pm when his knees gave out and he limped home gobbling Ibuprophen. And then two fingers of whiskey as soon as he entered the door.

One late afternoon his thoughts moved back to Beauville, because with that first whiskey pour the phone was ringing, a call similar but different from the one he had received from Tim Stevens, three springs earlier.

He had not heard from anyone from Michigan for months. In fact, he had about concluded nothing was going to happen and that someday, if not this year the next, he would need to return and deal with selling his house… It was lawyer Smythe... "A bidding war was underway. Kitty wanted the house and so did Grace's Bond trader... What should he do?" And from the distance of an Aspen Spring, he said... "Sell it, sell it, sell it. Even if you have to take less than a million dollars… Even if you have to take $800,000...sell it!"

It was St Patrick's Day when he got the call. The papers were on their way 950,000 and Grace's bond trader, The Runt, would now be living in his house and apparently so would she. Had he still been in Beauville He might have suffered problematic angst. From a distance he ignored the angst… it was financial freedom and water off his back.

He told Smythe to call Indian Dick. And to pay him well for any assistance required. And also, that he would be generous with Smythe too.

“ I need greater representation… I know, not your thing, but for me Smythe. Booze and bucks Smythe… Just leave me out of it… Deal with everything… Just send a check... And if you can peddle the boat, do that too. My feelings are, I'm never coming back. I don't think it can be Aspen. It's changed too much. And by the way since you did not inquire… I've been having a wonderful winter… Still, you never know, I might change my mind… What’s up with Brown and Camp Hope… those ‘founders’ things… cottages”

Their conversation continued in this vane Smythe even getting a few words in… And for Wilson the song wonder of wonders miracle of miracles was playing in his head. Until he hung up, poured himself a whiskey and sat down, contemplating not so much what he was letting go of, but what he'd opened up, and how this would allow his future to expand.

So, he skied the remainder of the season… The hard corn snow of frozen mornings softening to ease by noon… in late March 11:00, in early April 10:30 when it became almost to hot to ski by midafternoon, negotiating what might have been a snow cone, jagged bearings of ice once softened, wet with easy sliding, fluid beneath the skis… And the entire town as darkly tanned as if it was situated in the tropics. The sun so high and hot and dangerous that a late season vacationer forgetting sun screen would be burned proverbial Lobster Red on day one, and blistered by day two.

Spring skiing in the Colorado mountains (if sun screen prepped, or already tanned) It was a wonder, except for when it snowed and the early powder turned to snowball snow by late morning or early afternoon… Dense like cement, and dangerous on the knees if one was not light and skiing above it all, a technique Wilson had mastered years ago… difficult to teach, but no problem when you got off the edges… Wilson Abernathy flying and fast and light, parallel then oblique to the fall line, as he observed others less skilled, sideways sinking in the heavy white snow, crashing and faceplanting all about him, until the groomers came out that night on the terrain where they could travel, and flattened it all into ice dense corn snow for the next day’s rampage. And if it did not snow again, with the freeze and thaw, in few days the steeps would turn to corn and the cycle would repeat itself, until late April when it was all too wet and all too melting and the tourists left for other places and ski season was over.

In his twenties he remembered climbing up and skiing even after the lifts had stopped if it was one of those off seasons where the sun shown grand, instead of one were everything clouded up for three weeks into gray and wet and drizzle. Then later when it opened running gates at the top of the pass. But by now in middle age, in the new millennium, five months of skiing was enough.

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When ski season ended, he had nothing to do… he could have turned to building, people had asked, small projects had been offered. Humble projects compared to one of his designs… He turned these down and a design job too. With the sale of his house, he had freedom… but freedom to do what.

He thought of composing, trying to write music, unsure that he was suitable, and then examined that this would require more than humming up a tune. Maybe not for simple song form rock n roll, but for a symphony he would need some education. So, he found some books and began reading, and then he thought why not write, so he tried that too, but over six weeks he realized that for either music or writing, he needed work, practice and more education. Pick one… And he decided maybe I will write, and write an Aspen story… but his similes were lousy, and his metaphors contrived, his style ungainly. Everything he wrote… was college essay adequate, but as literature it sucked.

Either he would need to go back to school or teach himself, and he was not going back to school. Self-taught it would be… He compiled a list and this may have been a way of postponing, it might have been a way of legitimizing sloth… or maybe postponing that he had no talent… maybe… all of the above.

But it provided an occupation… He selected and would read one hundred books; study would be the better word. Select from his list and read them all twice first again as literature… and then again as instruction… Maybe after he read them all it would come to him, like osmosis… how to be a writer. And this might fill a year of time, certainly a spring and summer. So, he became a reader searching for a future. Reading first the Grapes of Wrath… how and the hell had Steinbeck done it… so forth and so on. He would need to spend at least a month on Steinbeck, and then there was Kesey, and Updike and Unsworth…Pynchon… TC Boyle… no need to worry about self-worth or value for a long, long, time… and how wonderful… a year of reading.

When people asked him what he did he replied “I read”. And when someone said “Well so, that cannot be an occupation.” He explained what and why and that was that… And when a design job surfaced, he said no and no again.

Once in a while he helped Jeffrey with a project, some finish work, putting in a garage door… a toilet, but mainly he just read books and drank whiskey… Actions justified, self-worth fulfilled and if he did not watch out, drinking too much and headed for trouble.

It was in late June when he began to notice. The pint of whiskey that had been lasting a week was beginning to last two days, the accompanying six pack vanishing in an afternoon. This could have turned into trouble… and who knows it may become a problem someday, but it is not going to in this story, because…

In late June there was a knock on his door, and who do you think this was… It was Grace... no warning no message. Just say Grace!

She had found his old phone records in his house while helping the Runt take up residence… Before she joined him, and then left him lonely, returning to her church to call Noelle asking for Wilson’s address while asking her not to tell him she was on her way. And though these women had never met, they had spoken many times before on the phone, Wilson this and Wilson that, and both had the same opinion when it came to Wilson. He needed a woman to save him.

The sale of his house: It had been her plan all along, and now accomplished, with Wilson back in the mountains, the burden of his residence gone, with money in his pocket, she was heading off to find him. She felt bad about the bondsman, but not that bad. The Runt had been necessary, his ego would save him… how else could she have managed it… and Kity too, unwittingly, had also played her part… and because of Kitty the house had sold, Kitty and the bidding war, and thanks to the bidding war Wilson had an extra one hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

And that was how it happened… And don’t imagine this was sideshow happenstance. Did you think that bidding war was organic? How do you think that bidding war on Wilson house happened in the first place? Did you think that Kitty meeting Feely was an accident? It wasn’t… that Grace advising her that she was paying too much was whimsey? Is the light bulb going off yet… It had all been planned. Think about it. There have been hints as you’ve read the story… Just say Grace.

And amazing… It had worked. But not exactly, because while Wilson skiing and ignoring, knew beneath it all, that Aspen had changed too much. She had sent him back to a place where he could no longer belong. While Grace, no skier, had never been enticed by Aspen in the first place... long ago perceiving Aspen for what it was, and sensing what it would become years later, years before she had ever met Wilson… Just another hippie escapist enclave, but this one in a ski town… Never experiencing Aspen as a child, she had ignored it, passed it by, and moved on to California (again another story)

So, With Wilson’s footing shaky, and Grace’s not at all, they decided they would move on, not sure where but somewhere not so ruined, not a Beauville or an Aspen. They had the time. She had her small trust and Wilson, his already dwindling Million. Deciding first on some reconnaissance they spent two weeks in Glenwood… Arriving at a resounding never. they moved on… First to southern Colorado, and then New Mexico, and then North to rolling gray peaked green and cold Montana, deciding not a chance for Wyoming, in passing. Finally, aware that California was already lost, they decided to explore Alaska.

Returning to Aspen to say goodbye and reconnoiter, their plan became adventure… Fill Wilson’s tool trailer to the top with extras, vacate Jeffrey’s studio, leave Wilson’s Jeep and trailer at Jeffrey’s until who knows when, then go explore Alaska with Grace’s gas efficient Subaru Outback - all roader.

Grace, Ivy and Wilson, in search of America… departing as had Simon and Garfunkle leaving Saginaw in the 1960’s. If… When… they found a new permanence, they would need to return once again to Beauville to rescue Barney and Beezle. Otherwise, if Alaska did not attract, there was the possibility they might again return to Beauville, sell Grace’s property, and journey to the unspoiled tips of Lake Superior… Find a way to out distance man.

And gradual became suddenly. By the third week of July, packed and processed, with the sunset western clouds before them, reds and roses, scattered across the horizon, magnificent against the peaks, they followed the Roaring Fork and Hwy 82 to Glenwood, as Wilson memories shook him, remembering that first time in 1962 when 82 was a two lane road meander, picnic tables at its edge, instead of the four lane speed trap filled with speedster servants heading up to work in luxury land... Aspen lost and gone and history.

Wilson suspected his memories would fade. There was no question that he would miss the pink-red rock, the aged crumbling mountains. The smell of the air, the scenery…Scenery… the one thing that man could not destroy without extreme development or extreme industrialization. And they both realized that they would miss the best of Beauville, for Wilson, his sculptured residence and sailing, for Grace the lakes and land where she’d been young… But another chance another place… The USA was large, the beauty from new England to California varied and overwhelming. Aaron Copland’s America … Woody Guthrie’s America… scents and sounds and scenery.

Perhaps they would come up with other ideas, maybe they would try a place and find it wanting. For now, they were off to Alaska… in search of nature and an athletic out of doors America, without mendacity… A place without the Billionaires, like Aspen once had been after the silver boom and before the private jet… They hoped to find that doorstep… A non-rapacious sanity. It had to be out there somewhere.

The End.

For now.