One thing that always amazes me about living in a mountain town is this “work hard, play hard” mentality.
It’s a paradoxical concept that endorses two lifestyles and value systems, often in the course of one day. It means you spend the day outdoors pushing yourself at some relatively demanding sport that probably requires going uphill. It means you have strength, stamina or most likely a combination of both. It means you are probably a pretty accomplished athlete.
As soon as that’s over, you start drinking heavily – sometimes without even bothering to go home and take a shower. It is not at all uncommon, especially during ski season, to see people at the bars late into the night still in ski boots, goggles twisted over the matted hair. I never understood how people could spend the day being healthy, only to go out and negate whatever positive effects their bodies gained by dumping alcohol down their throats and standing around smoky bars, like watering a healthy lawn with gasoline. The really crazy thing is it doesn’t seem to slow them down a bit.
I was thinking about this as my friends Andrew and Tom left my house at about 6 p.m. last Thursday to see Widespread Panic play in Snowmass at the Jazz Aspen Snowmass Labor Day Festival. They’d spent the past two days hiking 20 miles and climbing more than 8,000 feet. Still, they didn’t seem tired at all, their sunburned faces lit up with ear-to-ear grins as they headed straight to the liquor store, dust from the trail still caked in their ears, the smell of old sweat wafting in their wake.
Don’t get me wrong, I love to cut loose and have a good time as much as anyone. In fact, I’ve spent the past decade doing just that while my well-adjusted friends went on with their lives. Most settled down in cities where salaries are comparable to the cost of living and men do grown-up things like work and commit. The mountains are a great place to go if the real world is something you’re trying to avoid. Sometimes it feels like no one is in charge around here, like we’re all a bunch of kids whose parents are out of town.
Where I have trouble is being good and bad simultaneously. I can be bad, all right. I’ve had a lot of practice doing that. But after a hard day of exercise, all I want to do is eat a healthy dinner, crawl into the tub to soak my bones and go to bed so I can wake up early and do it the next day. That’s what I chose to do last night, giving Tom my extra ticket after a 90-minute yoga class put me in too healthy a mood to consider the concert scene. A big salad and a DVD sounded a lot better than fighting the crowds over at Snowmass.
What I’ve found is I’m the exception to the norm. Most mountain-town folk can stay out late and still manage to make the first gondola for fresh tracks on a powder day or hit the trail at the crack of dawn to summit before first lightning strikes. I thought maybe I was just getting old. Then I realized a lot of these guys are a lot older than me and have been living like this a lot longer. So what’s my excuse?
It’s like that in every mountain town I’ve lived in. In Jackson Hole, these photographers I knew used to say, “Let’s drink it blue,” which meant the more drunk they got, the more likely it’d be a sunny morning – perfect for getting up early and shooting photos. The season I spent in Jackson nearly killed me – if not from snowboarding through terrain beyond my ability, then from drinking to the point of destroying my liver. I was what they call a “90-Day Wonder.” I made it through the ski season, but that’s about it. The rough and tumble Wyoming winter had me running for Southern California with my tail between my legs, hoping there was a shred left of my career to go back to before it was too late.
I sat alone in my apartment over a big plate of veggies after Andrew and Tom went skipping off into the sunset and couldn’t help but notice how quiet it was in my building. Not one car was in the parking lot, not one light was on in any of the other units. Everyone was at the party but me.
I turned out my lights long before anyone would return home. I realized I might not be able to stay up, but it’s the only way I know how to keep up.
Freelance columnist Alison Berkley can be reached at alison@berkleymedia.com.
