Dear Anita,
Thank you very much for extending your hospitality to Alison and I to spend a night at the Owl Farm, I don’t know if I can think of any other place that has so long held such a fabled position in my imagination.
I first came across Hunter’s writing in the back of the school bus I rode reading a piece he had written for Cycle World about the experience of having been loaned a Ducati 900 to ride, and write about. I can still recall the sunlight streaming in my little capsule of adolescent ennui; shattered by the most energetic, powerful, dynamic, and entertaining writing I had ever come across. No other writer I have ever come across has relayed such shear immediacy of experience as HST. I thought about that article as we drove out today, trying to identify the section of road where leapt the blood red thundering u–turn across the railroad tracks in front of a bus load of children. Maybe it was that meta connection of being on a school bus while reading about dare devilry in front of a school bus that made the story stick out so much in my memory. But mostly I will attribute it to his searing, incandescent prose that captured my imagination.
I binged on his writing quite heavily in my late teens/early 20s as I was navigating my way from the conservative, evangelical culture I had been raised in to becoming my own person. Hunter was a superhero of sorts to me then- the most powerful example of someone being bold, assertive, and sure in their own personhood and interactions with the world.
The anthologies of his letters were some of my favorite readings, for the insight to the fantastic amount of work that he put into developing his craft, and the struggles to make writing a generally viable means of supporting himself. The problem with getting good at anything is that most people will dramatically underestimate the amount of sacrifice it took to create something that might appear effortless at first glance.
Of all the passages he has written, his description of the Owl Farm as his psychic anchor was the one that resonated deepest with me. Cut adrift from my own moorings- six generations of family on my mother’s side that have lived along the same Small creek valley in southeast Kansas, I understood the gravity of the urge to establish a sanctuary of your own choosing, better than anything else that motivated Hunter. Except perhaps the frustrated rage of seeing the nation you love have descend into a willful idiocy and pride of ignorance.
In my mind, Owl Farm was a remote and exotic place; a Xanadu with a pleasure dome of peacocks, and celebratory shot gun blasts, but when we pulled in through the split rail fence, past the quietly oxidizing fuel tanks, through the random collection of pickup trucks, the green small tractor, and hodgepodge collection of buildings and sheds, the place felt amazingly familiar and homey – a variation of hillbilly/literary inclined friends and domiciles I have visited in Appalachia, the Ozarks, and here in the Rockies. The door for a desktop and Boston pencil sharpener were additional touches of the unexpectedly familiar in a place I expected to feel at remove from.
Browsing the walls of the books and scattered memorabilia prompted warm memories of the pre-digital age, when everything was required to have its own distinct physical presence. I feel like I have lost so much of my life in the last decade or so by scrolling through the infinity of ethereal images my phone provides. We have gained all the information in the world at our fingertips, yet lost so much connection and presence in the bargain.
A place like the Owl Farm offers a reminder of the richness of experience of the physical world we have left behind in the Digital Age. Few people have matched the depth to which Hunter experienced the physical/non-digital world.
Owl Farm stands as a monument not only to the person of Hunter S. Thompson, but the whole world of first person experience -> to be engaged in living, and not wish you were living someone else’s life.
I would be honored to help with the stewardship of Owl Farm in any way that I can. Trail building is my specialty and I would be happy to offer 2-3 days of trail construction pro bono. I think we could easily create a loop in the meadow around the labyrinth in that time and perhaps time for another misc. digging/clearing work you may have need of.
Thanks again for sharing the Owl Farm with Alison and me, and we would love to return the hospitality for you here in Rifle when you are so inclined.
Cheers,
AM
RIFLE, COLORADO
02.29.2021
