(A MOSTLY TRUE STORY)
BY JAY PAYNE
Before the Janss boys started Snowmass, when lots cost $1,500 and Freddie Fisher’s upside-down water spout defied gravity, I lived in the Woody Creek Trailer Park. If I rode my bicycle up the hill I could look past Hunter’s house up Little Woody Creek and see the district attorney’s place, kennels for thirty or forty English hounds, four unclipped poodles, stables for Morgan and Belgian jumpers, big enough to lift Henry VIII over logs and creeks.
The DA had a large patio behind his house that served as a dawn gathering place for guests awaiting their monthly dead-coyote hunt. Steam swirled from cups of tea while the master-of-the-hounds laid down a scent trail. English boots, jodhpurs, deer-talker hats, and red dressage coats sang their splendor. Two hundred yards beyond this steaming red ritual a rich kid, one of Aspen’s second-generation free spirits, lived with his tiny wife and two dogs, an Irish- and a wire-haired terrier. The kid stood six-foot-five, weighed a jolly bouncing 350 pounds, and sprouted bushels of curly amber hair.
Shortly after the kid and his wife moved in, one of theDA’s hounds came into heat. He put her in a dog run surrounded by an 8-foot high hurricane fence. Following nature’s messenger the kid’s terriers, undeterred by hurricane fencing, climbed over and sowed the seeds of hostility — unrealized until the whelping event. Imagine: the DA and his wife, his master of hounds, the veterinarian, and several select guests all ready to pop a champagne cork as each tiny new hunter entered their world. Seething rancor filled one house, raucous laughter the other.
Weeks later, without plan or puckish intent, the kid and I did our best to drink all the tequila in Aspen. We failed, but only just. My wife drove me home where I fell into bed. The kid’s wife drove him home, but besotted by fermented agave mash and driven by his ancestors, the kid chose to neutralize the alcohol by running naked around his large house. His wife weighed 90 pounds. She couldn’t push him inside, so she said something rude, like, “Stuff it!” and watched him launch his marathon. No one is sure how many laps he made. We know he reached the rear entry’s Dutch door. He managed to open the top half, but leaning over to unlatch the bottom half he passed out, his bottom half pointing directly at the DA’s patio. Call it fate, a devil’s prank, a Brahmin joke: next morning the gentry gathered for Saturday’s call-to-the-hounds. The DA and his guests either growled with indignation or choked with laughter as dawn’s light brightened all ends in the valley.
Alas, Justice, with help from the DA, sentenced the kid to a short stint in jail for using Mexican tobacco.
Alas not, the kid and I drank more tequila. I even shared a few “stirrups” with the judge.
