BY DANIEL A. SHAW
It seems only fitting in this inaugural issue to document my inaugural visit to Woody Creek. It didn’t start well. My then girlfriend lived in New York City but owned a little cabin in Woody Creek. When she asked me to join her out there for a week in March of 1999 I couldn’t say yes fast enough. I was a reporter trapped in the cesspool of Washington, D.C, covering Capitol Hill (I thought it was had then …), and about due for some renewal of spirit and soul and of my bruised faith in our species. I would have jumped at a trip to Hoboken at that point, but the Colorado high country sounded a little more promising.
Six years ago, I didn’t know Woody Creek from Woody Guthrie. I’d once seen “Woody Creek Tavern” emblazoned across the hat of a crewman on a fishing boat I worked on in Alaska (he got stabbed in a bar fight the night we got back into Kodiak; I don’t know what happened to his hat), and I knew Hunter S. Thompson wrote from there. But I wasn’t sure Woody Creek really existed-the name indicated an impossible idyll, like some kind of Hobbit Shire or a Disney film full of singing animals. I’d traveled and lived all over the West and the world, but my time in Colorado had been limited to a string of unrelated events in the mid-to-late eighties: numerous Grateful Dead shows at Red Rocks Amphitheater, a sketchy trip to Denver with the corrupt Navajo Nation chairman I worked for, and a cross-country jaunt with my decidedly uncorrupt dad.
I couldn’t get a flight into Aspen, so I booked one into Eagle Vail, about 90 more minutes away but a safer bet in bad weather. But there’s bad and then there’s bad. A blizzard hit mid-flight. We couldn’t go back to Denver and , we couldn’t make it into Eagle. So we landed in Salt Lake City. Snowed in. My vision of holing up in front of the fire with a beautiful woman and some really good bourbon 180’d into a nightmare of touring the Mormon Tabernacle- sober- with a bunch of really nice folks who looked like Orrin Hatch. Good news via the airport P.A. snapped the darkening spell: the weather was breaking and we were going to make a run for it.
We made it to Eagle at about l :00 a.m., seven hours late, and I crammed into an unheated van with a bunch of other tired but resigned folks headed for Aspen. The driver looked to be around 17 and at least a part-time stoner, but I was too anxious to get to increasingly mythical Woody Creek to explore options. At some point I saw a sign that we were in Glenwood Canyon, and a flashback made me close my eyes and smile: there I was, sitting on the hood of my car with my dad one summer 12 years earlier, waiting next to the Colorado River for a round of blasting that would help build the road I was hoping to survive now. I put him through endless hours of the Dead, Creedence, and Skynard on that trip, but he has those tapes now and still wears them out on his sojourns around L.A.
I bailed out at the Aspen airport around 3:00 a.m. I still couldn’t see a thing. the snow was so thick, and a hangover was descending from drinks at the Denver airport eight hours earlier. The van motored off, and I waived good-bye like an idiot 10 people I’d never see again and who were already back snoring. My cell phone didn’t work. I had no change to call my girlfriend, Isa, from the pay phone, and it was fucking cold. I’d forgotten how demeaning making a collect call can be.
Fifteen minutes later, Isa pulled up in a beat-up Ford Explorer. In her nightgown, I wondered, “How cool can Woody Creek be if it’s this close to the airport?”. We disappeared into the night. A little bit of highway, then off on a country road. Then a smaller country road, then a dirt road that went up a box canyom. I bad no idea where we were, hut I knew it was the farthest from anywhere I’d ever gotten in 15 minutes. This could be pretty cool.
I woke up early with that buzz of being in new place. gazed across the bedroom, through the living room. and out the front windows. “Holy shit,” I said loud enough for Isa to stir as I bolted out of bed. A line of freshly bleached, 14,000-foot peaks sliced the bluest sky I’d ever seen clean in half. I freaked out. If this was out front, what the hell was out back? I whirled around. About 50 elk were either grazing in the draw or staring al me . A lot of people deem love at first sight a myth, but I felt it then and there when I saw Woody Creek. I kept looking at the mountains and the elk and the sky and wondered how Isa could be sleeping so soundly. She had to see this! Then, it dawned on me: she was at such peace because she knew exactly what was out there, and it was the ultimate comfort.
The fresh snow melt one thing, snowshoeing. I was sucking wind. Going from a swamp to 8,500 feet over night will do that to you, unless you’re actually in some semblance of shape. I wasn’t about to keel over or even relinquish the lead. It was a stupid macho thing, sure, but it was something else I had never experienced. I didn’t want to let this place get the better of me. I wanted desperately to be an organic part of it, not a struggling stranger to it. That night, it didn’t matter that I was meeting her family for the first time. They’d had a place in Woody Creek for 30 years. and they were all there: parents. three siblings and their spouses, eight nieces and nephews, and assorted cousins. As long as it was in this place. I was fine.
Two years and change after that trip, Isa and I got married in Woody Creek. Last year we moved here permanently . And almost six years after I woke up where I never wanted to leave, our little cabin overflows with daughter Fiona, son Duncan, and dog Mojo, a mix assembled by a perverse commit-tee charged with both a great sense of cuteness and some sort of weird axe to grind against our possessions. The elk still stare at me, hopefully, now as a kindred Woody Creature.
I drive up our box canyon every day and still get butterflies. Because I know what’s waiting for me, yet I don’t. I’ll I see a bobcat or a fox or a bear or that bald eagle that’s been hovering around lately? A surprise out our window New York was almost always had one a fight on the street, trash trucks grinding away at 3:00 a.m., someone screaming back at voices only they hear. A surprise here is waking up to a foot of snow, finding a family of ducks located in our pond, or discovering yet another extraordinary member of this community at the bar at the Tavern or in the Post Office.
I’ll take our own freak show of artists, musicians, and those whom one asks no questions over the one just a few miles up the road any day. We always felt some trepidation about going back to New York after a few months here. Now we feel that trepidation sometimes about going into Aspen. Woody Creek will do that to you.
