A cool breeze ruffles my hair, pulled into a ponytail, as I ride my unmaintained road bike to work, gears skipping and squeaking as I gaze up at the towering pines lining the road. They flank modest homes with the kind of scruffy gardens of larkspur and hollyhock I hope to have one day.
At the corner, just past a tear-down being rebuilt to new heights, and kittycorner to the Boys & Girls Club, I come to a four way stop just before an immaculate black Audi does. But as I get ready to take the right-of-way the luxury wagon slides the stop and darts in front of me, its pitch tinted windows reflecting my disgust as they zoom by.
Wow, I’m just shocked that was an Audi, I chuckle to myself at the interloper. How many weeks a year do you even stay here?
I smile smugly as I continue on, basking in my self-righteousness. All as I ride my bike to my outdoor industry job downtown. From the single-family home my wife and I bought just four years ago.
Long ago, I worked my first job at a country club set on an old ranch at the mouth of a rugged canyon whose ragged peaks and tumbling waterfalls otherwise could have been a backpacking oasis. It was instead eighteen holes of manicured grass, a serene setting that rarely saw the likes of us, a crew of bag boys who took the job seriously, but came in hungover as much as not, smoked cigarettes behind the cart barn, and were told by management more than once to shave more. “Your youth is for working hard so you can enjoy life like we do,” a member once told us as we washed his clubs. But we were doing just fine wasting our youth having fun and dreaming of skiing, thank you very much.
When dreams of snow became reality each season, I would transition to my winter gig, waiting tables at a legendary steakhouse with a fast crowd. I’d run through that dimly lit dining room, upselling bottles of wine I had never tasted and pushing filet mignon six nights a week in a converted barn. It gave me all I wanted: mornings off to ski. Or sleep in at my $500-a-month pad if I chose to spend my tips in a blurry late night spasm the night before.
That was all years ago.
After dismounting at my office downtown, I carry my bike into my windowless office lit by fluorescent bulbs, and fire up my Dell. I then open Microsoft Teams and dig in for eight hours on my butt, selling. Some coworkers say hi to each other in the kitchenette. Others don’t. Most of us simply plug in. After entering orders and returning phone calls, noon finally comes. I scarf my lunch at my desk, crumbs falling in between the keys on my keyboard and onto the floor. I then change into my running gear, paste myself with sunscreen, and sneak in a run on the bike path.
Soon the clocks on my computer and cellphone read five. I head home instead of to happy hour or a live show, past the same intersection where the Audi cut me off, up to our two story home—with a cracked foundation, I love to add—and boil up mac and cheese for the kids who will soon be arriving home with their mother, laden with their dirty lunch dishes.
We wash those lunch tupperwares, a young family of four started by former die hard skiers and night-lifers somehow making it in a town beset by “declining voter registration numbers in short-term rental housing zones, increasing non-local ownership of homes leading to skyrocketing housing costs and decreasing birth rates by families pinched by tough economics and costly housing,” as Steamboat Pilot contributor Suzie Romig reported last year. Had my wife and I not threaded the needle between recessions by complete luck, we, too, likely would have been priced out.
Walking my friend’s dog this morning, past groves of aspen and funky older homes, under the purple and orange sky, the typical view down valley I expected was choked with a phalanx of luxury townhomes under construction. Later I peered inside the quiet restaurant on the corner, once a modest joint known for its affordable happy hour where you could have a quiet conversation. The dining room was now lined wall-to-wall with TVs, complete with a high-fare menu.
There’s more. Steamboat Resort now offers a premier “skip-the-line” lift ticket brazenly called “The True West Pass.”
But as I bemoan the unaffordability crisis; as I hold on to the idea that I was once one of the mountain town lifestylers, someone whose quiver still holds fifteen pairs of skis, almost all second-hand and mounted with telemark bindings, I remember something.
They sit on wooden racks in the garage of the home we bought in downtown Steamboat Springs, in the post-COVID years, no less.
On a Friday morning, I’m driving my children to daycare, past the new fancy coffee shops that have sprung up, places we occasionally grab an Americano from. And my four-year-old son is teasing me. Especially about my car, a 2011 Subaru Impreza that has almost 200,000 miles on it and rattles so violently that when I back it out of the driveway I worry I might wake my neighbors.
“Your car is so old, Dada,” he goads. “You need to wash it. Why don’t you ever wash it?”
But Little Ted could hardly know what this grubby hatchback means.
Waiting at the stoplight, I make my defense of it before the light changes and we drive on.
Past the bars downtown I used to frequent in the hazy evenings of youth. By the real estate offices and restaurants and banks.
Past who I once was.
And no longer am.
And all that’s left is this beat up Subaru.
About The Last Chair Column
This article was written by POWDER writer Jack O’Brien for his bi-weekly ‘Last Chair’ column. Click here or below to read the previous column.
