The sameness of ski towns

Because of the poor spring snow conditions, on the 22nd we put the skis in their rack on the Jeep and drove over Frémont Pass from Leadville into Summit County, the heart (or other metaphorical internal organ) of Colorado’s ski industry. After walking around the business district of Frisco, driving to see if my uncle’s former cabin on Lake Dillon is still there (it’s not, apparently), and walking around the business district of Breckenridge, Mary had an observation: “These ski towns are all the same.”

RIGHT: View down 7th Street in Leadville, Colorado, which has not yet succombed to being a ski town.

In what way, for instance, does Main Street in Breckenridge differ from Elk Avenue in Crested Butte? Answer: Main Street in Breckenridge is longer and slightly wider.

At the core, the old mining town, Historic Register plaques in place–bars, ski/snowboard rentals, antiques shops, real-estate offices, interior decorators (for the million-dollar-plus trophy homes), boutiques for “adventure apparel,” real-estate offices, restaurants, souvenir stores, maybe a lone museum (“Our Mining Heritage”), real-estate offices.

The next ring out: newer commercial buildings–the professional offices, the municipal offices, the fire station, the police department.

Then the condominiums with names like Edelweiss.

Then the upscale subdivisions for the “trophy homes”, so often named with the “The (blank) at (blank)” formula that is supposed to exude classiness to buyers in Denver or Dallas. Example: “The Turds at Elk Meadows.”

The other formula applies to ski towns built from scratch, such as Vail, in which case there is no core, only Bogus Bavarian or whatever style was in favor at the time of construction, with an outer ring of tasteful strip malls.

One visit to Summit County per decade is enough.

On the plus side: Weber’s Books, 100 S. Main in Breckenridge, tiny but well-stocked, had an autographed copy of Mary Sojourner’s new collection of essays, Solace.

When I was a kid in the 1960s, the decor and nomenclature of Colorado ski towns relied heavily on the ersatz-Austrian, sort-of-Swiss, or bogus-Bavarian model. Everywhere you looked (and still look, in some cases), was “Alpen-this” or the “Something Haus” or “Hof.” For the full flower of the bogus-Bavarian 1960s, visit the older parts of Vail.

It’s not just Colorado, of course. Park City, Utah, has its Edelweiss Haus condominiums; if I had $10 for every “Edelweiss” and “Haus,” I would be much richer. (The Edelweiss flower does not bloom in the Rockies except on signboards.) Now, when I see these Berchtesgarden School houses, restaurants, etc., I think that they should be next in line for historic preservation, after the Mining Boom structures of the late 1800s.

Over the equinoctal weekend, Mary and I took a room at the Mining Boom-era Delaware Hotel in decidedly non-Bavarian Leadville. (It has an “Alps Motel,” that’s all.) We put in a few miles of cross-country skiing on snow that was turned to mush and slop by a week of unusually warm weather. On Sunday, we skied to the Tennessee Pass Cookhouse for lunch.

On the wall were several Tibetan-style Buddhist pictures: a mandala and a landscape of a Himalayan monastery. Right next to the last was a painting of the Cookhouse itself, done in the same Tibetan style. Is that going to be the next trend? The Cookhouse itself is a big yurt (or ger, as my friends who have visited Mongolia insist that it should be called), possibly produced by this firm or someone with a similar product.

LEFT: The Tennesee Pass Cookhouse

What comes next, the Potala Condominiums? A few people are already raising yaks, I know. Trendy-Buddhism already has a toehold in interior decorating and, for a local-history angle, the CIA trained fighters in the doomed early 1960s Tibetan resistance movement just down the road at Camp Hale, the old mountain-troops base.

‘A hint of paganism’

Sydney Carter, who wrote the hymn “Lord of the Dance” to a tune (“‘Tis a Gift to be Simple”) originally created by the Shakers, a movement of 19th-century American religious communalists, has died. Says the Daily Telegraph in Britain, “But the optimistic lines “I danced in the morning when the world begun/ and I danced in the moon and the stars and the sun” also contain a hint of paganism which, mixed with Christianity, makes it attractive to those of ambiguous religious beliefs or none at all.”

Full story here.

And some of us hear only Gwydion Pendderwen’s more blatantly Pagan version in our minds when we think of it.

Thanks to GetReligion for the link, where blogger Douglas LeBlanc is discomfited by those pagan overtones too.

But she is not a Western goddess

Right-wingers complain that naming the new planet Sedna is a manifestation of liberal white guilt or something.

No doubt they would have been happier if the astronomers had chosen “Hekate.”

Not being Inuit, the name merely reminds me of a former comic strip in the Pagan magazine PanGaia, in which Sedna had a role.

A kinder, gentler Anglo-Saxon invasion?

New tools of DNA analysis are causing British archaeologists to rethink the idea of the Anglo-Saxon invasions that followed the collapse of Roman rule. Anyone who has imersed themselves in the Arthurian period tends to think of Anglo-Saxon versus British conflict as something resembling “ethnic cleansing.” I remember as a kid reading Walter O’Meara’s The Duke of War, one fictional treatment of Arthur, the “decisive battle” of Mount Badon, Romanized mostly Christian British versus heathen Saxons, etc.

New studies of teeth in cemetaries of the period, however, are showing fewer persons than expected who were born outside Britain, as the BBC reports here. Was the change, the language shift, more cultural than violent? It’s still an open–and interesting–question.

Heresies

Yesterday by the photocopier, Colleague A (Political Science) cornered me. She and Colleague B (Psychology) had been at the local Barnes & Noble store and seen the B&N edition of The Encyclopedia of Heresies and Heretics, which I wrote in 1991 when a friend was acquisitions editor at ABC-Clio and invited me to do a book for them. “Is that our Chas?” wondered Colleague A. That’s what happens when you teach in one field and write in another!

Frankly, I was amazed a few years ago when B&N reprinted it. The check was a nice surprise too. Now it’s apparently out of print. I had been curious who bought the book, aside from the original intended market of librarians. This review from British e-zine editor Matthew Cheeseman gives one suggestion. (The lower trade-book price doesn’t hurt, either.)

A little Googling: here is an someone with an online Christian ministry building a virtual homily around my introduction. (Unlike Cheeseman, Timothy King evidently does not Google his sources.)

And speaking of a different sort of “heresy.” My humor column from the earlier, print version of “Letter from Hardscrabble Creek” on “Training Your Soul Retriever” pops up on an actual dog-training web site. (Scroll down). Or you can read it here. It was a gentle parody of retriever experts such as Eloise Heller Cherry and Richard Wolter. What would happen if Wolter collaborated with neoshaman Michael Harner?

Reincarnation

A study from Barna Research Group on beliefs about the afterlife shows 18 percent of Americans accepting the idea of reincarnation–even some evangelical Christians. Other contradictions abound as well. Thanks to Joe Perez for the original link.

The Roller Coaster

In a little bit of a haze from some hay-fever medication, I finished the first draft of Her Hidden Children, my book on the rise of contemporary Paganism (mainly Wicca) in America, over the weekend.

Now I have started the complete re-editing, and that means I am on the emotional roller-coaster. It’s pretty good. It’s pathetically sophomoric. I have some original insights. No, it’s just a miserable dribble from the cauldron of scholarship. It would have been better if I could have written it ten years ago; now it is dated, and who will care, anyway? No, I had some original insights.

And so on and on and on.

The only thing to do is to get it into the publisher’s hands (only a year and a half late) as soon as possible and move on to the next thing.

Meanwhile, I am awaiting my copies of The Paganism Reader. Co-editor Graham Harvey says–and the illustration here, from Routledge’s web site, seems to confirm, that Routledge stayed with their utterly dreary cover design.

In the real world: I saw my first kestrel, flying low against a strong northwest wind, while driving to the university today. I left home wearing a leather jacket over a fleece vest, but at some point realized that I need not need the Jeep’s heater on (not that a 1973 CJ-5’s heater produces all that much warmth), and by the time I reached Pueblo, I was shedding layers. Spring comes on in a rush. When is the next blizzard due?

Vanity vinyl

From the Pork Tornado blog, a couple of pages of the strangest and/or worst album covers ever. Most date from the 1970s, but that’s not the problem. As someone who was alive and buying albums back then, I can say that some of these would have chilled my blood even then.

But it’s like “vanity publishing:” if you want to pay for it, you can be a recording, uh, artist.

Next, the Associated Press Stylebook

Wren at Witches’ Voice posts an item about a student Pagan group meeting in a Kentucky high school, much to the surprise of administrators.

But here is the interesting part: the reporter’s last paragraph explaining what Paganism is. In fact, he repeats the Pagan “party line” about the antiquity, earth-centeredness (whatever that means–I’m trying to define it in a book), and pervasiveness of Pagan beliefs. The scholar in me makes a wry expression; the Witch in me smiles.

I recently bought a new copy of the reporter’s bible, The Associated Press Stylebook and Briefing on Media Law, which has no entry for “Paganism,” although it does cover other religions and denominations within them, with instructions for writers, e.g., “Episcopalian” is a person but not an adjective. At this rate, I can see a small change coming for the next edition.