True Grit
The old guys were tanked by the time I hopped out of my Subaru and padded into Tom’s Place for a couple of fermented beverages. The conversation branched and eddied, sloshed and roared like an engorged spring creek, until, like all drunken conversations, it petered out into languid still water.
I, it became clear, was something of a nuisance at this particular drinking establishment, where everyone had known each other for a span of time measured in decades. And as the conversation lurched into the politically incorrect — the Vietnam veteran bartender unspooling a tale about a group of Vietnamese he was enlisted to teach ski at Mammoth Mountain, and capping the story with the zinger, ‘it was a whole lot more fun shooting at them than teaching them how to ski’ — all eyes swiveled to me, the lone outsider.
I have a certain penchant for being unobtrusive, so it was easy to gaze into the suds of my Sierra Nevada, hoist it for another deep draw, and act the fly on the dead-animal-adorned wall. After all, I didn’t want the stories, however insensitive, to end.
What I had stumbled upon may be plentiful in many other parts of the West, but in California, the congregation of inebriated locals, each with nearly a half-century of history on the relatively remote east side of the Sierra Nevada, is something as scarce as an undammed Sierra river.
I gathered many ribald historical tidbits from the ragged gallery of old-timers, like the fact that the colorful pasts of now-revered community members often included commercial ventures in mind-altering powders and herbs. For a good stretch — before one of the older patrons began crop-dusting the barstools and the conversation latched onto the surprisingly durable theme of farting — I was the student in an illicit history lesson in which the early frontier of skiing was explored, and debauchery and backroom deals took center stage in many of the anecdotes.
Like all good things, the party had to end. And this one shambled to a close with one of the old boys ordering his 15th beer, the bartender realizing he hadn’t paid his bar tab in months, and the group, seemingly exhausted by their retrospective journey, hushing to a Budweiser-soddened silence.
I had driven to Rock Creek, the high alpine valley south of Mammoth where the bar stood, to meet a friend for a winter backcountry trip. We were headed up to a hut beneath a sharp finger of granite with the Old World name of Le Petit Griffon.
And so, with the history lesson concluded, I settled my tab and headed higher into the canyon.
A night in the car was followed by a day of skinning to our destination — a luxurious wood stove, propane burners, and chairs awaiting us below the east gullies of Mount Starr, which we skied in the dimming late afternoon light.
That night in the hut, over a glass of whiskey and a delicious freeze-dried supper, my former college roommate and I did a little reliving of the past on our own. We embellished memories, like a nearly fatal slog up Colorado’s Longs Peak, where we peeled off the trail to scramble up a rock face with no climbing gear, only to be caught in a lightning-and-hail storm on the summit.
The stories felt good in the retelling. But, as the pace of the words eased, I thought back to the aging originals at the bar, stewing in beverages and past glories. And somehow our tales felt a little green, immature, and utterly too politically correct.
Comparing the present to the past is perhaps a futile activity, but that hasn’t kept anyone from engaging in it. In my case, I think of my years behind a reporter’s notebook, slapping together words on affordable housing, ski industry wrap-ups, and piece after piece about the parade of housing developments flooding the town’s building department. By comparison, one of Truckee’s early editors, D.B. Fink, was running the newspaper as well as running around town with a loaded six-shooter, raiding business establishments as part of the infamous ‘601’ vigilante group. Fink passed away in one late-1800s raid, when one of his more unskilled fellow marksman shot and killed him in the fever of a chaotic raid. Fink was the publishing Renaissance man so common in the early West — engaged in the creation of news, as well as the reporting of it.
And that is perhaps the eternal pull of history on each maturing member of the West. As our future whisks us forward into an ever blander tomorrow, the salty past, collected in dubious accuracy during listening sessions at old watering holes, is something to hang on to.
Perhaps my stories, marinated in decades of cheap, high-altitude beer, will one day ripen to the point that they will merit passing to a new generation of mountain dwellers. They can only be helped, I assume (in a thought that makes me shudder), by the increasing disintegration of the West’s rough edges. Until then, it is heartening to know that an unofficial history lives on, traded between old drinkers over bar tops — stories that will never make it into the sanctioned record of what happened in the lawless days before a deluge of vacation rentals and ski villages washed away the flotsam and jetsam.
