Rocky Mountain Hype

A Sign on Colfax Avenue: Denver's Finest All-Nude Girls from Las Vegas. Well, that's how it goes in Colorado. Even the nudity has to be imported.

No one, you see, has ever been born in Colorado. Colorado or not Colorado is a choice people make when they come of age, at barmitzvah time. If America's puberty could be pinpointed by longitude and latitude, it'd be right there, Kansas to the east, Utah to the west. Coloradans have seceded spiritually; they give off an athletic, high-altitude arrogance. Wiser than the rest of us, more passionate and compassionate, more self-certain. More natural, damn it. As if they were organic human beings and we, you and I, were so many Swanson TV dinners. Let some clown say, "I'm from--ah--Denver," and I get this stupid inferiority feeling. I get that same stupid feeling when in the presence of men who do 100 sit-ups every day.

Why? God knows. Being Coloradan is surely the world's least expensive elitism. It has about as much face value as a B.A. from the electoral college. After all, naturalization takes very little effort: Move there, grow a mustache, buy a dog, have a divorce. And put four jiggers of bleach in with your blue jeans. The residency requirement is 32 days. Get snowed in long enough up on Red Mountain Pass and you'll be eligible next election, even if you were only en route from L.A. to St. Louis. Then you can start bitching about all the immigrants. About your neighbor's septic tank or the carbon-monoxide output from his Volkswagen. Definition of a Colorado environmentalist: someone who put up his A-frame last year.

They have a name for it in the Army: redeployment depot. That uneasy place where shattered platoons await reassignment to some other front. Following a guerrilla instinct, they have retreated mountainward: vets from the moratorium; from the Chicago convention; from the civil rights experience; from forays and scrimmages in the drug war. Colorado--Denver in particular, Aspen even more particularly--is 104,000 square miles of outpatient ward. Some are civilian casualties. Professional men and women who tend bar or play snow hostess while their native land works off its long probation. Many are single: families cost a lot in Colorado. The job market, bloated with refugees, is inelastic: a blacksmith has more room for advancement. And the cost of living, it would seem, is measured in feet above sea level. Nonetheless, they mean to invent a Switzerland, isolationist and haughty, smack across the nation's Great Divide. Some year they'll come down again and teach us all how to live.

Denver, for my money, couldn't teach us the right time of day. Rather than live there, I'd accept a four-year scholarship to Howard Johnson's. Colorado state treasurer Sam Brown has said, "If Denver was located anyplace else instead of ten miles from the mountains, you couldn't pay people to live here.... The mountains created Denver and determined its past and present character." Perhaps. As the Roman poet Horace once remarked, "Parturiunt montes, nascetur ridiculus mus" ("The mountains did labor and brought forth a ridiculous mouse").

The mouse is Strip City, nothing less. Tool in along Colfax east from 1-70; burger joints line up. mile after stop-and-go mile. The sheer cheesiness of it is spectacular; you might be driving inside a pinball machine, lit plastic bumpers to right and left. Figure at least one Coors beer sign per inner-city block. (That's another Colorado letdown, Coors. Coors is to beer as a Shirley Temple is to a boiler-maker.) The Denver horizon does impress; mountain peaks crest without breaking, a great, erratic hacksaw blade. When you can see them; smog, the color of some long-unchanged sheet, is on duty most weekdays. At 5000 feet, an auto-emission device can't function too effectively; Denverites outrank all other Americans for CO2 in their blood. The atmosphere, true, tends to be crisp and pleasant. Denver is a mile nearer the sun; 45-degree days seem 70-degree days. But the air is so dry my face after just one week felt like the sole of a nomad's foot. And, Lord, the static electricity; you could get punchy from shocks. Each doorknob is an assassin. Sparks two inches long zap from your motel key. Colorado could solve America's energy crisis and not by strip-mining. Just let the people of Denver scrape their feet, in unison, three times every day.

There's a go-go crime scene. Women are unemphatic. their voices sort of shrug, when they refer to Denver as Rape City. The mountain view isn't very rewarding if you're flat on your back. Capitol Hill, within gunshot range of the gold-leaf dome, has been designated a muggers' preserve. "We had this police chiefs' annual convention spring before last," said one resident. "One police chief, from California, I think, got shot in the ass by a mugger--right outside the state capitol." Street lighting is so sharp, so paranoid in some residential neighborhoods that the foliage around it will grow both night and day. There's an apprentice Times Square downtown. Porn shops charge 50 cents for browsing: some gall. One patron who refused to pay was shot in the arm and the leg. Frontier justice.

Yet the mystique hangs on. "Wherever I go, when I tell people I'm from Denver, they say, 'Oh, wow.' It's just great." Wherefore this national "Oh, wow"? I asked six staffers at the state capitol--all immigrants, as are Colorado's governor, lieutenant governor, treasurer, both Senators--what one might do in Denver that one might do in any other fair-sized American metropolis. Goose eggs. Horse collars. Big zero. It got embarrassing. After 15 minutes, somebody said, "Jesus, drive out to Stapleton Airport and watch the planes land. I don't know."

And somebody topped that one, "If you want to see the real Denver, go to Boulder." I went. Nothing. It isn't there, either. Just some university buildings thrown up in an architecture best described as late Cisco Kid.

Denver people do eat well. The restaurants are fine, everything from first-class Continental cuisine to Rocky Mountain oysters (bulls' testicles, I've been told). They also put the make on one another a lot. Heck, there isn't much else to do. Men ricochet oft women, women off men, as if they were molecules of some overheated gas; it's like a yearlong singles weekend at Grossinger's. Denver has no café society worth mentioning; there isn't any Western analog of New York's Village. People will line up for blocks to see, good grief. The Duchess and the Dirtwater Fox. You'd think it was the last picture show. Denver, let's be honest, Denver is Omaha with mountains. To quote Jim Moore, a deputy D.A. in Aspen (and, yes, an immigrant), "I consider it a pestilential city. It's smoggy and it's dirty and it's overcrowded and it's just a place I do not want to be in. But people come to Denver because they think it's a nicer place than where they are. And perhaps it is. I haven't been to Chicago recently, but I dare say Denver's a nicer place than Chicago." Some recommendation, that.

The mountains, then. "Their greatest impact is on the feel of Denver." You're listening to Sam Brown, not. only state treasurer but retired Vietnam moratorium maker. "People who live on the rugged coast of Maine are reputed to have qualities of sternness and self-reliance. The mountains have a comparable, almost mystical influence on Denver." Bull. It's one thing to be born on Maine's rugged coast, quite another to establish your 32-day residence in some apartment ten smogged miles from the nearest Rocky. The mountain song and dance is just so culture-chic. Somehow, mountains are more authentic, don't ya know, than the Jersey meadow-lands or the decent, harvestable wheat fields of Kansas. Because they go up and down? Because they're so pissedly inconvenient? Don't ask me. Mountain love is more or less a modern idea. Until the 19th Century, men were known to avert their eyes, horrified, offended by an alpine view. Such useless land was surely Godforsaken. Wordsworth and Coleridge were among the first folk who ever wanted to climb a mountain. For fun, not because it was in their way. Now we have a new and glitzy romanticism, the Rocky Mountain High. Made practical, of course, by two-lane tunnels and snowplows and plush après-ski.

A metaphor or two is expected now. Uh-uh, I'm proof against that sucker's game. They're big, the Rockies. They go on and on, up and down. The whole shtick is overdone: harped on, you might say. I didn't feel stern or self-reliant. What I felt mostly, well, 100 miles west to Aspen, I felt like someone had raped my Eustachian tubes. So much for mountain love.

•

Aspen. Aspen is 5000 dentists skiing down one hill. Our middle class still has its upward mobility: on a ski tow. Amid the culture-chic Rockies. Aspen is double chic. Take home two lift tickets, laminate them and have your ears pierced; Aspen is "in." From the motel window, I could watch the skiers up on Ajax, small and zigzaggy and as numerous at that distance as no-see-ums in April. Downtown, the awkward ski boots give them a Frankenstein lurch; astronauts, I imagined, practicing for some painful gravity. (continued on page 86)Rocky Mountain Hype(continued from page 82) The faces are raw, red; a kitchen match would light on any cheek. Red except for goggle prints, which make diem appear shocked, dazed, survivors of a mass catastrophe. Avant d'après-ski, they will run, nipples hardening, from motel room to outdoor heated pool. On the mountain, I am assured, they feel free. Yeah, but you should see them at the airport. Sherpa, that's what. Never have so many people been so encumbered for so few seconds of freedom on a ski run. And after all that, they probably fall down.

I hit Aspen in April, just as the ski season turned to slush. These are weeks of heightened tension; the whole town should take a Midol. After four months, ski patrolmen and waitresses and bartenders would rather not see another turkey (tourist) until Thanksgiving Day. Aspen turkeys, however, expect more than just the usual fast basting. When you've worked in other people's mouths all year for two very expensive weeks on Ajax, you demand a first-rate lube job. Demand. And skiing isn't enough. They demand to get laid, the one thing TWA doesn't provide in its standard tour package. At bars, at grungy discos like Little Nell's, they attack one another. I don't know how real turkeys procreate, but I have a general idea and, believe me, it can hardly be more for the birds. Everyone is hyper. "Friday, good God, and I haven't had my rig lifted yet." Men look at their watches, as though sex were a dinner missed. Tick, tick, tick, tick. It's worse than it is in Denver. And I can't think of a more damning indictment.

The locals are crabby. Dave Jones, owner of the Molly Gibson Lodge, told me, "I could hire slave labor, if I wanted to--kids here beg you for work. I know a lot of people who don't pay the minimum wage." One Aspen newspaper supposedly employed seven part-time reporters for two full-time jobs. Housing is not only expensive, it's downright unavailable. A foxy 18-year-old waitress complained, "Living is tough, but it's tougher when you're around people with money all the time. I'm trying to make my rent, right? And this lady comes down from Starwood crying; her chauffeur quit. I mean, I really get wiped out. You can't save, you end up trapped here. And there's so much flash from the turkeys. I get a hard come-on eight hours a day. It's getting so I don't believe anyone anymore. People fly out here so they can tell lies for a week. They're a million miles away from home; who's going to blow the whistle?? Jesus, why am I talking to you? I don't believe you're from Playboy."

There's a drug problem in Aspen. It's called money. It you have money, there's no problem. What does it take to get busted for pot in Aspen? George Sells, a local paraphernalia maven, will explain. "These two girls had an apartment. One smokes, the other one doesn't; got it? The one who doesn't is just deathly against pot. She calls the police: 'My roommate smokes marijuana." So the cops come down. 'Here it is,' she says, 'take it away.' The other girl comes home, goes to roll a joint. 'Where's my dope?' 'I called the police; They have it.' Irately, she goes down to the police station and demands her dope back. 'I want my marijuana, goddamn it.' So they had to bust her. I think they let her out next morning."

As you might have guessed by now, Federal drug agents don't have much respect for the Aspen police. Jim Moore, who is himself active in the Colorado office of NORML, seconds that perception: "I think they trust local law enforcement about as far as they could throw Aspen Mountain. And the feeling is perhaps mutual. They have a hard-on for Aspen. And I think Operation Snowflake [an undercover bust organized without local assistance] was nothing more or less than an expression of their hard-on for Aspen. They were throwing money around like it was water. A lot of stupid people got involved. Although it doesn't amount to entrapment, it comes pretty close. What they accomplished up here was minuscule in terms of the time and money and manpower they spent. I think the number-one drug of abuse in Aspen is alcohol. I don't think the per-capita drug use is higher in Aspen than it is in any major U.S. city."

"Right," agreed one young man with an off-center grin, "Aspen isn't the drug capital of America, but we sure get the best quality drugs."

It would seem so. Plastic bags of fine marijuana and hash and Tai sticks lie open on the table. Am I in some squalid back room? No, I'm in one of the more pretentious Aspen restaurants. A different smoke for each course. Waiters, in black tie, serve beef Wellington between the Chateau Haut-Brion and a roach holder. The waiters are not distressed. They accept, bus boys and maître de accept, tokes from a neat, self-enclosed pipe. Thoughtful, that; no telltale whiff to offend your neighbor. My companions and I are in a private room, yes, but people come and go. The penalty for possession of up to an ounce of pot in Colorado is $100, about half of what this meal will cost, and you don't have to tip. Public use runs $100 and a possible 15 days, but nobody in Aspen will lie awake tonight worrying. One diner is cranky. Mr. X left the coke at home. "Damn, I really like a snort with my Courvoisier."

His friend has heard it before. "Coke--he uses that to prove he's got the money. For seventy-five or a hundred dollars an ounce, I can get off better on Schlitz."

Friend tells me of this bar in town where organic mescaline might be available. "I prefer organic, don't you? I'm a health-food freak."

You can buy Jim Beam, too. I turn up at the liquor store in time to help a middle-aged man celebrate his second divorce. George Sells: "A lot of people come here to get their marriages together. Aggh--they drop like flies. They come out here--'Oh, it's beautiful, look at all the happy people. Let's move in, maybe we can get it together.' " (Bronx cheer) "Dive, dive. Everyone's on the make. It's a bizarre town. This is not reality. This is fantasy-land."

And the liquor-store owner nods: yes, yes. "If you come out here with a weak marriage--just any shadows in the background--it's gone. with this much split tail walking around the street--man, you're gone. There are women who come in here and present themselves right on the counter. Especially from Texas." With organic mescaline and Texas split tail, do you wonder that kids will work for less than the minimum wage?

It's different in Vail. Vail is Co-op City at 8000 feet. Even Peter W. Siebert, board chairman of Vail Associates, will admit that Vail, the Lions Head section, anyway, looks "too sterile." I should say: The New York Hospital complex has more charm and a private room costs about as much. And Blue Cross doesn't cover Vail. In contrast, Aspen, with its low-slung profile (no building, by law, taller than three stories), has a certain visual manageability. Aspen means to recall the 1880s mining town it once was. Vail means to recall the 1960s ski development it always has been. In fact, Aspen is Frontierland. Aside from a few wonderfully decrepit places (the Jerome Bar is one), Aspen, like layouts in Model Railroader, shouldn't be examined at close range. There is restoration and there is restoration. As a sententious chap once said, "My brother replaced the handle and I replaced the head, but it's still our father's ax."

Colorado's generation gap is 50 miles across, as the crow that doesn't mind a nosebleed might fly. Gerald Ford skis Vail; at least one of his children, I am informed, skis or does something in Aspen. Vail's clientele is older, more staid; they ski wearing the equivalent of a Brooks Brothers suit. There are few (continued an page 178)Rocky Mountain Hype(continued from page 86) Buffalo Bill coiffures. I talked with the Vail paraphernalia man. "In Aspen you have to smoke; you won't be accepted otherwise. In Vail you do what you want--no peer pressure. There's tons of pot here but very little hard stuff." A poster suggested I Ride The Gondola, Lunch on the Mountain. This was one day after the Lions Head gondola had harvested two of its cars like windfall fruit: four dead, eight injured. I could still see two other cars in a nervous embrace, inches or seconds from that first step, the one that's a lulu. Locals admitted it had been terrible, and "Thank God it happened just as our season came to an end." Trouble at Vail is bad news for Aspen environmentalists. On Main Street, a bumper slicker said, Save Aspen, Ski Vail.

And environmentalists run Aspen. Flush the John, they'll make you file an impact statement. "Drugs?" I asked the young lady hitchhiker.

"Drugs?" she said. "Politics. Politics. There's more politics per capita in this town than in, God, Washington." That's a fair assessment. Marvelously sophisticated politics, too. Aspen, remember, is where the late Sixties holed up. People get off a bus and run for office: strife-tempered pros from the moratorium, the convention, from those anti-Vietnam trials where your defendants were numbered, for convenience' sake, like baseball players, the five, the six, the seven and up. In Aspen, it's theater. You don't need signatures to qualify, just flash a SAG card. Hunter Thompson ran for sheriff there on the Freak Power ticket. He announced that Sheriff Thompson would eat mescaline on slow nights--and won the town of Aspen (though he lost Pitkin County). With a 32-day residency requirement, some bizarre votes were mobilized.

Jim Moore: "A lot of kids took Hunter seriously. A lot more seriously than Hunter took himself. They ran out and registered--some of them for the first time in their lives. Hunter was obviously having so much damned fun. I mean, he'd make statements like, 'We should plow up the streets and plant grass'--he didn't mean Bermuda--and they'd take him seriously. To me, that's the tragedy of American youth and their apolitical attitudes--you have to come up with something that squirrelly before these people will vote."

Pitkin County is managed, stage-managed, by three commissioners; last year they were very liberal. That's not all they were. One journalist told me, "The county commissioners are est graduates. Early last year, the commissioners proposed that, the county pay half the cost for any of its employees who would take the training. There were cries of 'church and state' in Aspen, where est has almost divided a small town into warring factions." Joe Edwards and Dwight Shellman were elected on an environmentalist, slow-growth platform. Sure enough, I've grown more in the past two years than Aspen has. Commissioner number three. Mike Kinsley, was appointed by Governor Dick Lamm when the more conservative electee suffered a massive heart attack (occupational hazard, that--for conservatives in Aspen). Edwards was described by Thompson as "a bike rider, a head and a freak." Right. And Shellman was the controversial one.

Shellman has been called arrogant. He wouldn't be surprised if that were true. "There are two ways to do this," he told me. "One is just to lay back and hang on to the job and make little increments to improvement as you can. That works for professional politicians. The other way is to go crashing into the china shop and start changing things. That's more my style. I get into terrible jams sometimes." Shellman has taken out a contract on the internal-combustion engine. "It's a goddamn drug habit we've got, called automobiles. You had to live in this town in '73, when the Arabs cut off the oil--we had to put together a mass-transportation system in two or three months. And you ought to go look at the high-volume sampler--it literally looks like someone took a trowel full of plaster and put it on a gauze plate. If I run again, it'll be on the platform that on such and such a date, for all practical purposes, there will be no private vehicles in town. If running against the automobile is a suicide mission politically, then it's time I died as a politician. You don't want to give a job like that to Hubert Humphrey or Ronald Reagan--those guys make too many concessions--you want to give it to some crazy s.o.b. like me and I'll get it done."

By now you've got a feel for the sweet nuances of Aspen political life. Slow growth, said Shell man and Edwards; they ate the short side of the mushroom and slow growth it was. Developable agricultural land has been down-zoned to 160 acres per unit under most circumstances. Suppose you owned, say, 640 acres of ranch land in Aspen Valley. Say you hoped someday to build a house on every five acres (few Aspen Valley homes cost less than $100,000). Overnight, instead of 128 units, you've got four. It's like getting kicked in the Rocky Mountain oysters. Particularly if your father and grandfather have paid taxes on that land for almost eight decades. Particularly if, due to low beef prices, you're maybe breaking even now. One rancher who owns several hundred acres--and who, last April, signed a petition asking for the commissioners' recall just six months before Election Day--laid some sweet libelous nuances about Shellman on me.

Shellman might shrug; he likes to have a strong effect on people. It's charisma in reverse. "There are cultural differences. Those who support Joe and me, they're folk who have lived in urban areas and have experienced the severe restraint upon their liberty. Coming here, they experience a sense of freedom. On the other hand, in the rural areas, there are people who literally homesteaded this country--or their father did or their grandfather. And they did it at a time when there was no government at all. They see the growing participation of government in everything to a level that seems intolerable. Yet, to us, it's acceptable because we've experienced intolerable levels of government before." That's the quintessential pollution, government. It's irreversible. You might clean up the air, but no one has yet managed to reduce emissions from Washington or Denver.

•

I drove a dozen miles down-valley one moon-forgotten night. Then up, up into the mountains for maybe another five, maybe six. Just before Pitkin County ran short on asphalt, I saw a solitary gate. Beyond that gate they stored darkness for resale to the rest of Colorado. After ten feet, I was two inches taller: Mud had resoled my boots. Up around Capitol Creek, there's a subway stop between your front gate and your house. And, abruptly, dogs were near. Two. Enough. I knew it was two dogs because their snarling had a terrible stereophony. I'm resourceful; I pushed my tape-recorder button: Brandenburg Concerto Number Six. The dogs were not impressed. There I was, alone with barks and Bach and my avalanching heart. I didn't need a laxative that night. For five minutes I walked, one hand out, the way I do in an unlit bedroom. I expected either to be bitten or to run into my bureau. Then lights bullwhipped on in the low, long ranch house. And, I swear it, there he was, young Abe Lincoln getting on to middle age. "Come ahead. The dogs won't bother you. Except maybe the black one, he might nip you a little." Yep, he did. Nipped me a little. Unpegged my right pants cuff, in fact.

Walt Wieben is the name. Large landowner; down Aspen way, that's what they'd call him. Large landowner. You can guess, can't you, how those words might come, past the uvula, off the soft palate, out of some environmentalist and liberal mouth. Wieben has 450 acres; the Wieben family has had them since 1910. Four hundred and fifty acres will support about 150 beef cattle and 150 head will support--just about--Wieben, his wife and the two sons still living at home. I judge that Wieben may take home half of what a Teamster takes home and no pension, no benefits. His speech is circumspect, measured, even bashful. Temperate, I'd say. You are aware of his wrists and ears and ankles: they're in the Sergeant York tradition. Clean-shaven, unlike all those urban, for-show cowboys down at the Jerome Bar on Main. We sat, drinking tea. near a coal stove. His kitchen is companionable but used: Wood around the drawers has been scored by a generation, perhaps two, of earnest pulling. I felt, well, reassurance; as once Americans knew assurance. It was a good place to be.

My eldest son, he's been in construction since he got out of school two years ago. Works for the Ski Corp. in winter. I can't pay him what they do. If I did, he'd just about have the proceeds and I'd probably have to work for tine Ski Corp. I don't think one of the boys will stay, maybe the littlest one, if the others are all gone. But we're going to need a change in our beef-pricing structure before I could honestly ask him to. There aren't that many people my age who've stayed in ranching. This is the tail end. It's true all the way up and down this whole valley. You see older and older men trying to run an operation. You get to be 65 or 70 years old and you keep trying to run one of those irrigation shovels all summer long--well, you just don't have the zip.

"Down in Aspen, they say they want to preserve agriculture, same time they're raising taxes on us so we can't exist. Last year, they spent approximately $200.000 just on bicycle paths and cross-country ski trails. That doesn't improve the environment a whole lot and we have to help pay for it. Mass transport, if it comes to Aspen--we'll pay for that, too. And prices. Baler twine jumped from eight dollars a bale three years ago to as much as $36 now. Heck, you can't make a living comparable to that of the man who's working on a ski tow--but the equity of your land did increase. From that standpoint, a number of people stayed in the business. But now they've zoned us to 160 acres. Our land value has dropped tremendously. I'm not for door-to-door housing up and down the road, but yet I think a man has the right to his property, as long as he's not infringing on his neighbor's right."

Starwood. In a better time, that's what his property might have become. The sign is discreet: a wooden scaffold, a metal star, a threat, Starwood Roads Are Private--$100 Fine. Regardless, I proceed; it'll make an interesting entry on my expense account. Three hundred thousand dollars; that's budget price for a home up in Starwood. You can glimpse five or six from Aspen Valley; they jut like so much shelving bracketed into the steep mountainside. Each seems a large and very defensible pillbox; it'd cost three platoons to silence any one of them. Stop. The security guard has waved me down. "I like to keep it at a low key. You don't want to offend people." He's business-suited. The tie clip is a low-key pair of tiny, tiny handcuffs. "When tourists come up, I say, 'I can't let you go through, but I can give you an autographed picture of John Denver.' I must average 16 to 18 cars a day that come up here just to see where John Denver lives." Colorado doesn't much care for John Denver (in Denver, they call him John Aspen). That 100-proof Rocky Mountain High, it'll just attract more apprentice elitists to the state. John Denver, you see. has Colorado's tone down pat. They begrudge him that.

I'm sorry for the way things are inChina,

I'm sorry things ain't what they usedto be,

But more than anything else I'msorry for myself.

Screw China. What about number one? Me. Me. That's it, that's Colorado. Isolationism and a fine, dramatic sense of self.

•

Remember that quote about est and the county commissioners? I filched it, plus five or six other items, from Mike Moore, the former editor of the Mountain Gazette. The Mountain Gazette is one of the good things about Colorado, a suave and splendid magazine. Moore on Aspen: "Aspen's like a transplanted Greenwich Village. All the good people our there--the 'in' group--they want to be someplace else, but they can't leave one another. If they all got into a plane and went to Cleveland, they'd be happier, the 50 or 60 of them. Their concerns, their social issues, they just aren't that important. It doesn't compare with the problems of real poverty. I'm on their side in the fight, but I don't think it's a very important fight. The urban liberal immigrants have been an asset to Colorado. They came here and wanted to do it right. But Colorado's not Utah or Montana. The future is Strip City, from here to Cheyenne. Growth is inevitable. They came too late. It's beyond saving."

Shellman did not run again. If he had run, it would have been on the Kamikaze ticket. Thompson has said of his own baroque campaign, "For a while, I thought I was going to win, and it scared me." Left-liberals have that problem: They run against an office, not for it; they're too good, too special--it's part of the image--for government. Campaigns are acceptable; the campaign is hardly more than so many street demonstrations back to back to back. Theater. But elitism has tough ground rules. When you get elected--and by a democratic majority--Christ, that's not very elite at all. Power and style don't speak when they meet; only the unpowerful can be free. In 1974, some very special people were elected to Colorado state office--on Nixon's coattails, you might say: Governor Lamm, Lieutenant Governor George Brown. Treasurer Sam Brown. Sam Brown won't run again. I think he's sick of apologizing to his radical friends for all those conservative, unspecial three-piece suits he has to wear these days. George Brown might get benched. And, according to my Deep Throat on Capitol Hill, Governor Lamm, who came in like a lion, would rather be kicked upstairs--Secretary of the Interior, now, that sounds just right. Elitists either lose or leave; it's a point of honor.

Lamm campaigned as the environmentalists' environmentalist. He was quotable. He said things like, "I want to help prevent Colorado from becoming a colony of the U. S., an energy colony." In time, you thought, Lamm's Colorado would sign up with OPEC. He also said, "I don't want to suggest that Colorado ought to secede from the Union, but...." Secede from the Union? Thai's nothing; Colorado had already seceded from the world. In 1972, Lamm was field marshal for Colorado's successful anti-Olympic campaign. First time, I'd guess, that a landlocked state had ever put the screws on U. S. foreign policy. "I still love to ski and mountain climb--in fact, I'm probably the most athletic governor in a hell of a lot of years." That's Lamm: boastful, impetuous. Elite. Athletic but not a team-sport man. Sure of himself; maybe not quite so sure of you and me. He's attractive, even pretty. That wonderful pelt of silver-white hair, it must be on the endangered-species list. I like Lamm. I get a kick out of him. Yet somehow I think: He's a nice guy to visit, but you wouldn't want to live with him.

Lamm made a foolish tactical mistake: He got elected. Is he happy now? Doesn't sound like it. "I've got a senate upstairs," he told me, "that I can't even get the Lord's Prayer through--because the bankers don't like that bit about 'forgive us our debts.' It's just an incredible time to be governor. I'm out in political no man's land--where the environmentalists say, 'Jesus Christ, you stopped the Olympics, why can't you go out and stop oil shale?' We're really trying to walk a line here. And that's the trouble--anyone who tries to walk a line gets fired on by both sides." The isolationist isolated. It's somewhat apt.

And George Brown hasn't been what you'd call an asset--unless that's a diminutive. "He's not heavy," Lamm might sing, "he's my lieutenant governor." Brown is black. At the Lieutenant Governors' Conference in Alabama in August 1975, he recalled a moving slice of personal history. It goes like this: 1943; Brown is an Army Air Corps trainee in Alabama. His plane crash-lands. Blackout. (Brownout?) Where am I? In a farmer's hut. Severely injured. Also in chains. Also--what's this?--a letter K has been branded on my chest. Grown lieutenant governors wept to hear him tell the tale. One oversight: it wasn't true. Brown had never crashed. And apparently branding was popular at some fraternity initiations at the time. K for Kappa Alpha Psi, not K, as had been implied, for K.K.K.? Brown wears a profile villainously low since then. And he doesn't take his shirt off at the beach. "My body," Brown has said, "is the only privacy I have left."

Lamm has had his moments. At a famous press conference, he stage-whispered, "I want them to stand, goddamn it." Kind of an elitist sentiment, wouldn't you say? Not the first lime, either. I quote from a Denver Post article:

At an A.B.A. All-Star luncheon, Larry Varnell "referred to the fact Lamm walked across the state during his 1974 campaign for governor and said he 'cannot be completely unfamiliar with the jockstrap.' ... Lamm was visibly annoyed. As the governor was leaving, Varnell rushed up to apologize. Lamm complained about the introduction and told Varnell, 'Nobody stood up when you introduced me.' "

Lamm does tend to be brash. Or rash. Depending on his degree of success. This interchange occurred between us:

Lamm: "We have the Federal Government now spying on our citizens through the FBI, we have them assassinating foreign heads of state----"

Me: "Which heads of state?"

Lamm: "I don't know. Diem? I--I. Ah. Trujillo, Diem--how far do we go? Lumumba? I don't know many of them. But, anyway, I think that the precedent is there. You know. There was. Whether. I can't. You know. You know the testimony as well as I do. I happen to think. Without. You know. It's.... The best evidence seems to point to J.F.K. on Diem and some of the other people were very actively involved in removing heads of state. The point. The point is. Whether it's that or that--for instance...."

Hum. Rash.

Showbiz; the simile crops up again and again. "Politics--I always describe it as a stage in some ways. A few people sit in the front row of that theater." And a few technicians sit backstage. They can pull the curtain on you.

Richard Plock, Republican senate majority leader--and a good technician--assessed Lamm in this way: "Dick has turned out to be quite an elitist. He doesn't really feel comfortable with people. Dick had the conception that the governorship would be a continuation of espousing grand causes. And what he didn't realize was that it's the day-to-day running of a 1.6-billion-dollar corporation that's the primary function of a governor." Day-to-day. One-point-six. Corporation. Enough to make any elitist bring up his lunch. Why, that sounds almost as bad as "large landowner."

Lamm must wish he were out in Pitkin County. "I look to Aspen with great interest as the picket--just as armies used to have pickets going on before--to find out what's right and wrong." It's more fun being up front with the skirmishers; more fun than being at G.H.Q. in what Lamm terms "this terrible hot seat." When you get elected as an environmentalist, no one knows who really elected you. Gosh, Barry Goldwater is an environmentalist. And George McGovern. And Shellman. And Wieben. Governor Lamm woke up on November 6, 1974, to find that he had no consensus. A secret: Despite Aspen, despite all the activist show-and-tell, Colorado--like any American state--is pretty damned conservative. It has mortgage payments to make, doesn't it? Payrolls to meet? And it has an intractable Republican senate, just as much elected, that has kept every significant clause of Lamm legislation from sifting through.

I think Lamm has lost some stomach for the game. Government, that day-today part--particularly when people don't even stand up for you--is for uncharismatic, stolid men like Plock. Lamm has had to compromise. Compromise: Mother Mary, that's the sort of thing Richard Nixon used to do. And compromise on the energy issue. Colorado, you see, may turn into our resource colony, after all. "If I could come close to an issue where there is a difference between what I ran on and what are the kind of realities that confront me in office, it would be oil shale. I have to persuade the environmental movement. I really feel Colorado no longer has an option as to if it is developed. The Federal Government can--will--come in and say, 'To hell with Colorado.' There're too many people in Congress who've heard that there are a trillion barrels of oil in Colorado oil shale. By God, it's much better to make sure that Colorado controls the conditions." And so--rabid environmentalists won't easily excuse him--Lamm gave "qualified support" to Federal legislation that would guarantee a couple of billion dollars for oil-shale development.

Lamm has caught on. Shellman and Edwards haven't, but they will. Colorado just can't make it as an intramural Switzerland. They may be elite up there, but we've got them outnumbered 100 to 1. Three or four divisions. Maybe some napalm to soften Denver up. Don't worry; Colorado can be taken.