The Great American Saloon Series/Crawling Through the Clouds
Shiflett, Dave
THE GREAT AMERICAN SALOON SERIES CRAWLING THROUGH THE CLOUDS Organist, are you asleep on the keys? And you, Reverend, must you glare from the pulpit as you ring my head with thorns? The...
...We'll buy him one too...
...Inside the Lord's House, the figures in the stained-glass windows mock the crack-lipped drunk...
...What's this...
...The fishers of men work in semi-darkness...
...T he drive back down Clear Creek 1 Canyon takes you in and out of the sunlight, with the canyon walls so high in spots that you have to rest your chin on the dashboard and look straight up to see the top...
...A Coors executive says you get the same kick from eight regulars as you do from nine 3.2s...
...The fact, however, is that the difference between 3.2 beer and the regular stuff is minimal...
...If it rises out here, people will climb it...
...T he Glory Hole is in Central City, 1 an old gold-mining town about a half-hour or so from Ponder Point, weather permitting...
...Sooner or later, from deep inside the brain, comes a message: Retreat...
...The sky is as blue as a Nordic eye, but this eye is of unlimited acreage and can make an admirer feel like a shrimp, should the admirer stare into it for very long...
...Within rifle range a couple of hot air balloons drift toward the southwest...
...Then there's the 3.2 snare...
...People of sensibility should be warned that the men's rooms in many mountain establishments are adorned with vending racks...
...6 C Tine, Whiskey, Beer," says the neon sign behind the Toll House bar, and in midafternoon there's lots of it roaring down, some heading toward livers in dire need of a retread...
...In the restroom, more commodity dispensers hang from the walls, including an illustrated collection of "sex positions from around the world" along with the usual plastic goods...
...Because it has snowed recently (fifty-one inches the other day on Mount Evans), we can ice down a sixpack merely by dropping it into the yard, allwithin easy reach of the sunning chair...
...meanwhile a tall, thin blonde glides with a geezer, she smiling and winking over his shoulder at the spectators, then shutting her eyes and resting her cheek against the top of his head...
...The rule of thumb is that a rookie can pan about $10 worth a day...
...On the walls hang the heads of buffalo, elk, a bear, a big cat, and something with long horns—a bull of some kind, and thank goodness it's dead...
...Go off the road and the ravens are going to find you long before the cops do...
...If you get too hot, step off the patio...
...Wasn't there another reason we came here...
...Let's head for the Glory Hole...
...A huge plate of ribs, beans, and cornbread hits the table, and soon enough there's a pile of bones and bottles before us and the kids have barbecue sauce ear-to-ear...
...The stained-glass windows are dull, for overhead a great mass of clouds stretches like an endless tombstone...
...The deer are chuckling...
...The Light Unto the World flickers...
...Any news in Black Hawk...
...rr hese things always start so innocently,, this time with a Saturday afternoon drive up Mount Evans, one of Colorado's 14,000-footers...
...Down the mountain we roll, through tunnels carved through rock mountains, then we reverse course and head up Clear Creek Canyon, past several gold panning operations...
...through the mountains and a misguided 3.2 policy can be brutal...
...Even at 5,000 feet, there's 13 percent less oxygen...
...With that in mind, a newcomer might think he can drink twice as much of the stuff and get off the same...
...Believe me, this happens...
...Perhaps we should drop two birds with one stone...
...Others of us are content to sit out on the back patio and work on our tans...
...But spending the night in a low oxygen room with less humidity than the Mohave takes a horrible toll...
...The Hole is in an old building initially used as a funeral home...
...Last stop is Crook's Palace, down the hill in Black Hawk, where the zip code (80422) is reminiscent of the elevation (8422...
...The parched air, so thin at that elevation, causes a steady panting...
...And what's more, the sign out front says Jesse James drank here...
...Well, the fellow down at the end of the bar, the one drinking that 24-ounce Bloody Mary, was turned away from a local liquor store the other day...
...We'll stop by there on the way back to the high plains...
...That's something else to ponder as we make our way to the nearby Toll House...
...Budweiser...
...In every direction peaks rise to stunning heights, but they are dull on top, quite unlike the Tetons, which are ragged enough to slice the guts from a hurricane...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1990 39...
...We get there just in time for the gunfights...
...Soak the hammers in varnish," he said, which makes the felt hard and gives the piano its tinny sound...
...Crook's bills itself as the oldest bar in Colorado, and it looks that way inside, with floors worn down soft and faded curtains that might have been hung in Doc Holliday's time...
...But now the creek is frozen so solid that a tractor can't break through...
...To be hung over in church is a terrible degradation...
...Louis...
...A nice trick is to bring along two mugs, drinking from one while icing down the other...
...And so the trouble began...
...All rise for the "Ode to Joy," but you want only to stick your fingers in your ears...
...And by the way fella, if you're driving back down the hill, you'd better watch what you drink up here...
...Where's the dog...
...On the way down, there are lots of cars pulled off on the wide shoulders, and looking along the canyon walls you see people making their way up toward the sun...
...if the beer isn't cooling down fast enough, fill a mug with snow...
...The horned one, tugging at my sleeve...
...You see, all the bars in the West came from somewhere else...
...Men and women—locals it appears—and not a model among them...
...Wouldn't serve him...
...Besides marital aids, one offers a packet of pornographic pictures advertised by a scantily clad woman, around whose lower extremities is drawn a circle, above which is written an odd message: "This way to Canada...
...Downstairs at the Toll House there's an interesting collection of pictures laminated into the bar...
...Goats and monkeys...
...Just outside Golden, a group of climbers pull themselves up a frozen waterfall...
...At Ponder Point, some distance down the hill, one has time to gather his thoughts, perhaps even to calculate the mountain's weight, which is no doubt considerably more than the weight of the human race, for whatever that's worth...
...These are great scenes, but they don't come cheap: the icy wind blows 50 miles per hour, drying the eyeballs...
...Then it housed a newspaper...
...The mountain lions havebeen gobbling up the dogs, and there was a bear cub in the dumpster the other night...
...And as the shepherd speaks soothing words about peace and love and unending bliss, your burning brain transmits a single, maniac demand: "Get up out of this pew and get me a drink of water...
...A beer for grandma...
...Your eyes are solid black...
...Also at Ponder Point is a loo, but wouldn't you know it...
...We're drinking Coors Winterfest, a high-alcohol beer (about five percent) that mixes pleasantly with the wood-heated air, which is lightly pressurized here at 8,000-plus feet...
...the door is locked...
...And you, Iscariot...
...How do you get that thing to sound that way...
...Naked people...
...You see, they still sell 3.2 beer in Colorado, and a newcomer might think that 3.2 beer has half the kick of the real thing...
...Plenty of flab, plenty of hair, and few have bothered to have their moles removed...
...Dare we imitate the elk and the mountain lion, or shall we hold out for facilities...
...Finally it became a saloon—a real saloon with a guy playing the honky-tonk piano...
...If you're tired of internal combustion entertainment, take a stroll around and you might see some elk, and maybe a mountain lion...
...At the Glory Hole's front door stands a cowboy maitre d, six-shooters and all...
...On the wall there's a cartoon featuring a couple of deer looking up at a naked man who has been hung by his feet as if bagged during a hunt...
...Immensity is piled atop immensity...
...But he didn't say it soon enough.c unday morning after a pub crawl...
...This all sounds paradisal, but you've got to watch what you drink in the upper elevations...
...Is it really the oldest bar in Colorado...
...No thanks, but how about a snack...
...Nothing sultry about any of this, but everyone's smiling...
...I asked the pianist as he plinked through "Let Me Call You Sweetheart...
...In case of flash floods," one reads, "climb to higher ground...
...My eight-year-old son looks up at one display and asks daddy what those things are...
...At sea level, the dehydration would be significant purely because of the alcohol...
...The gun battle is fast and loud, after which the actors head back to the bar and the band cranks up...
...Retreat, Satan, retreat .. . Dave Shiflett is deputy editorial page editor at the Rocky Mountain News and TAS's Rocky Mountain editor...
...Some fall to their deaths, but it doesn't happen all that often...
...You get it...
...Hung over in church...
...The bar at the Glory Hole arrived from Omaha a few years later—at least I think that's when it got here...
...What's worse, the humidity often drops to around 17 percent...
...Crook's bar arrived in 1859...
...Why, he did work in Missouri, says the bartender, and he sure did drink at this bar—when it was located in St...
...Up ahead, smoke rises from chimneys in Black Hawk, several hundred vertical feet below our destination...
...The drive over is scenic, the road signs instructive...
...And with the good Lord's help, it will never happen again...
...A beer for the piano player...
...And what's this other word bubbling up in the gray cauldron...
...The wooden cross convicts him: "You have been bamboozled by your corpuscles again, fool...
...Inside houses in the winter, the humidity is lower than in the Mohave Desert...
...All I can say is thank goodness it has never happened before...
...In the olden days, we would have shot the ceiling full of holes...
...He by Dave Shiflett whips along, reaching occasionally for his Budweiser...
...A beer for the sheriff...
...Funny, pal, but what about this bar...
...Central City, you see, is something of a tourist place, but to a bearable degree...
...C. Everett Koop's Condom Cry has gone unheard...
...the bartender asks...
...The offering plate passes, but your contribution resides in a Central City cash drawer...
...There are mountain goats, too, but they spend more of their time on the other side of the hill...
...In the throat, blisters rise...
...The choir sings like angels, but today it is only noise...
...38 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1990 The cost per beer is $2.50, steep for these parts but necessary to pay the band and the gunfighters...
...I thought Jesse lived and worked in Missouri...
...If the mind wanders East, it recognizes that if you tossed all of Manhattan's skyscrapers into a pile, it would not make a mound large enough to rate as a foothill here in the Rockies...
...They're measuring his horn, and they ain't much impressed...
...But wait a minute...
...The dance floor fills quickly: one fellow hops around, with hair halfway down his back and a sheath knife hanging nearly to his knee...
...The peak road, the highest vehicular passage in America, is closed because of snow (it is open only during the summer), but at Echo Lake, just below the timber line, motorcyclists blast across the ice dragging rope-clutching friends like water-skiers...
...The local people don't think this is a coincidence...
...The barmaid, who reserves a bar seat for my eight-year-old, fills up his shot glass with coke, which he drains with a gulp...
...Dinner, sir...
...Zounds...
Vol. 23 • May 1990 • No. 5
