The Right Place at the Right Time
“We gatta get out of heer.” My best friend Keith said that to me in the fall of 1973.
We were barely twenty and sitting at a watering hole in Brockton Massachusetts, a working class town on Boston’s South Shore.
“Wanna go to the movies?” I asked.
“No man, we got to get out of this town, this state, or we’ll wind up like them.”
The “them” Keith was referring to were the ‘townies’ at that bar. Like us, they were former jocks and high school heroes who either got kicked-out, or never went to college. Most worked construction and were showing the signs of not enough exercise and too much beer.
My friend was correct: we both were well on our way to becoming one of “them”.
Keith had just been asked to leave his second college in nine months. The next step was a factory or construction job. Since my high school GPA was lower than those of most plants, I didn’t apply to any schools. Rather I got a job off-loading ships, earning a good wage and a bad back.
In terms of that place in time, we were doing all right. We both had fake ID’s and enough money for the evening. But that said, looking around that bar we knew we had to leave. But we had no idea where to go. That being the case, we went to the movies.
Robert Redford’s Jeremiah Johnson was showing. The story was about a mountain man who came west to the Rockies to seek fame, fortune, and kill things.
The romance and landscape captured our imagination. On the way home Keith said, “We should go to Colorado.” Though I liked the movie, the snow and cold caused me concern. Keith assured me that it only snowed in Colorado during ski season, only at night, and was sunny the rest of the time. He also said that unlike Boston, Colorado had a ‘dry cold’. “Don’t let all that fur Jeremiah Johnson was wearing fool you. It’s not cold in Colorado, the winters are worse on Beacon Street.” I believed him.
Keith was no stranger to skiing. He had gone to Vermont on two ‘Lutheran Youth’ ski trips while in Junior High school. I was raised Catholic, my people didn’t ski, we played BINGO, so I took him at his word.
We brought my Volkswagen square back to a friend who was a mechanic to get three of the four cylinders working and left two weeks later.
Before leaving, I went to a ski shop in Boston I told them I was heading to Colorado to ski and needed to be outfitted. When I admitted that I had never skied, they took it as a sign to unload all the out-dated and ugly ski gear.
We stopped in Breckenridge to visit a friend and never left. We couldn’t - Keith drove my car into the Blue River. Once acclimating to the altitude, Keith became involved in the competitive shot drinking circuit (In the seventies, self-abuse was more or less condoned). After retiring the side in a Yukon Jack drinking contest, (twelve shots in 90 minutes), Keith drove my car into the river.
We took the fact that God spared his life, and I decided not to kill him myself, as a sign that we were where we belonged.
Back then Breckenridge had many dirt streets, some wooden sidewalks, and six women. We both found work in the service industry, me as a waiter, Keith tended bar (naturally). There was no snowmaking, cable TV, or fresh produce. On the plus side, there was plenty of parking, a season pass cost less than a hundred dollars and draft beers at the Gold Pan were twenty-five cents (the six women drank for free).
I wrote my mother a letter saying, “the beauty here takes your breath away.” Thirty years later, for me that is still the case.
Summit County has grown up since those days, mostly for the better. Some of my fellow longtime locals call our town “too big,” “commercialized,” and “exclusive.”
Sometimes I’ll call it that too; but mostly I call it home.
Jeffrey Bergeron, under the alias of “Biff America” can be seen on RSN television, heard on KOA radio, and read in several mountain publications. He can be reached at biffbreck@yahoo.com. Biff’s book Steep, deep, and dyslexic is available from Backcountrymagazine.com.
