What Makes a Place

By Tyler Hansen

Eating dinner in the laundry room isn’t my preference, but sometimes it has to be done. Years ago, I was playing music for a private party in a house that looked like something out of Succession. The pantry was bigger than my living room, the bathroom vanity was carved from moon rock and the bedspread was the Shroud of Turin. Even Anna Wintour would have been impressed. I took a brief set break and scurried off to some unassuming corner of the house where I wouldn’t disrupt the aristocrats as they discussed hostile takeovers or whatever it is that people of their station talk about. Which brings us to where I started: sitting cross-legged on the floor of the laundry room while shoveling dinner into my mouth.

here I was, distilling, in this on-the-nose word picture, bourgeoisie vs. proletariat class distinctions, when the host of the party, the guy who sleeps under the Shroud of Turin every night, poked his head into the room and asked me what I was doing. He wasn’t scolding me, and he wasn’t demanding I get back to entertaining him; no, he was inviting me to the table with his guests. As I sat down amidst a bunch of incredibly successful and upwardly mobile folks, I was prepared to have nothing to offer. Instead, all they wanted to hear about was which trails were my favorite and to debate the benefits of 29-inch wheels.

If I can paint with a very broad brush for a moment, I have a sense that some people go to places like Aspen or Telluride because that’s the logical thing to do when you’ve accrued a level of social capital. On the streets of Aspen, you can act like a patrician and receive your due reward. “Yes, sir, your Moët is properly chilled and your Beluga is served.” Aspen belongs up there with Ibiza, Lake Como and post-apocalyptic estates on private Caribbean islands. But people come to Crested Butte for an entirely different reason. They come here because they want to be part of the mystical, occasionally off-putting, but almost always endearing character and funkiness that defines our community. Yes, there is magic in the rivers and valleys and peaks and aspen forests. But sometimes that just feels like a footnote to the greatest offering of this valley: the people.

And to illustrate my point, I’m going to point to something a little unexpected: hitchhiking. Even though we now (thankfully) have a pretty robust public transit system connecting both ends of the valley, there remains a culture of giving and receiving rides. I can mark different seasons of my life by hitchhiking stories. When I was 14, I caught a ride from some local high schoolers from the mountain to town. They cursed a lot and said some things I’m pretty sure would have mortified my parents. When I was 17, I gave a ride to a guy I knew from pickup soccer in the park. In an effort to impress the girl I was with, I drove recklessly (I was 17, after all), and he asked to get out in the middle of nowhere, preferring abandonment to my driving. My wife once picked up a guy who flew his hang glider from Telluride to Almont and was looking to get home. The stories go on. But perhaps my favorite hitchhiking story took place last summer.

My wife and I have a tradition of taking a staycation on our wedding anniversary. It’s great. We forsake our children and pretend like we’re tourists in the town where we’ve lived for decades. Last summer, we did what no self-respecting 47-year-olds should do and stayed out late. Not 10 p.m. late. I mean we shut down Izakaya Cabin, where the servers know us by name and kept us late making off-menu drinks. Then we shut down the Dogwood, where we ran into a group of river rats we’ve known for years. Then we closed out the evening at an EDM concert at the Public House. My knees hurt just thinking about it. We were the oldest people at the show by a good 20 years, and they let us in for free, in part because I’m guessing they don’t have a formally defined AARP policy (and I knew the door guy). As we got close to 1 a.m., I realized, with a growing pit in my stomach, that the buses quit running at midnight and we had no good way to get back up to our hotel room on the mountain. We were, in a manner of speaking, trapped.

God bless her, my wife suggested we grab our townies and ride up the rec path. Preferring a solution that didn’t involve us going into cardiac arrest in the middle of the night, we opted to hitchhike from the Four-Way Stop. Late though it might be, surely someone would come by and play the role of the Good Samaritan to us wayward travelers. My optimism, however, seemed misplaced. For the first 20 minutes, it was dead quiet, save for some of our servers from Izakaya returning home. They kindly offered us some of the dessert they had with them, surely concerned for the welfare of such frail old people. When a car finally came by, I practically threw myself in front of it in an effort to flag them down. Quite rightly, they ignored me, mistaking my desperation for some sort of manic episode. Just as things were starting to get dire, a car came by, drove past us, stopped, then reversed back to us. I couldn’t see inside as the window rolled down, but I heard a voice call out, “I think you know my parents.”

It was an odd greeting, to be sure, but not entirely unheard of in a town with the population of a suburban middle school. The driver called out her parents’ names to me by way of introduction. Yes, indeed, I knew this girl. More than that, I knew her from when she was in utero. I knew her in the way that I was friends with her parents before they ever got married. We explained our predicament, and she kindly offered to give us the lift we so desperately needed. As we loaded into the car, we realized it was full of high school girls we knew from some place or another, and they spent the entire ride up to the mountain begging us not to tell their parents they were giving us a ride.

Side note: as a fully functioning, responsible adult, it was strangely off-putting to be relying on kids the same age as my own for a ride.

That’s the end of the story. We got back to our hotel, thanked our teenage Uber driver profusely, and promptly went to bed after staying up way past our bedtime. As I look back on that night, it was a microcosm of all the things that make this place what it is. It was an evening “where everybody knows your name and they’re always glad you came.” And that was exactly what the host of the party wanted when he poked his head into that laundry room. He wanted to connect to something that felt human. Not manufactured. Not curated by social media influencers. He didn’t see me as a resource; he saw me as a representative of this place that is so filled with magic.

You get to do the same thing. I encourage you: spend your time here thinking not about what you can take from it, but how you can partake in it. If you do, you’ll have a great time. I guarantee it.

And that girl who gave us a ride? It was the daughter of the publisher of this very magazine you’re reading. Thanks, Calla.

Tyler Hansen lives in a hobbit house in the middle of an aspen forest with his wife, two sons and a dog named after a Will Ferrell character. A graphic designer and musician by trade, he has a fondness for old guitars, linen pants and European alleyways.