Road to Woody Creek Tavern
Graeme Tuckett, on a tour of the US, stops off in homage to his hero: the father of gonzo journalism, Hunter S Thompson.
It’s important to get the first line right. I think he might even have taught me that. So I tried ‘‘I was somewhere near Aspen when the coffee took hold’’, in homage to the perfect, much mis-quoted, opening stanza that kicks off Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
But I flagged that. No one’s ever going to pay proper tribute to Hunter S Thompson by cracking a cheap gag. And anyone who’s ever drunk American coffee knows it doesn’t so much ’’take hold’’ as limp down your gullet for a brief nap before converting itself far too easily into the warm urine it so nearly resembled on the way in. So that was out. And then I wrote: ‘‘the road to the Woody Creek Tavern is a thin ribbon of unremarkable tarmac surrounded by views that even a New Zealander has to admit are pretty special’’. But that’s not quite right either. Yes, the scenery around here is undeniably spectacular. The parched grass, fields, and myriad creekbeds suddenly giving way to belts of dark pine and fir trees that cover the steep hill sides to their tops. And beyond the hills, only a few miles distant, are the Rockies. Great, slab-sided mountains, each with its own name and history, each still wearing a mid-summer cap of snow that for all I know might never entirely melt.
But, I’m such a lucky sod that I once lived in Central Otago for a summer and an autumn. I’m hard to impress.
And besides, it’s not the mountains I’ve come here to see. It’s a pub. So I’ve settled on this: The road to the Woody Creek Tavern isn’t as rough and winding as I had hoped. In the decades since Hunter S Thompson first immortalised this bar by banging its name into his beloved Olympia SF, the land around Aspen has been ’scaped, speculated on, and gentrified to within an inch of its soul. He saw it happening and he railed against it to the end, knowing all along that the fight was lost and that one day the men he called the greed-heads, dirtmerchants, and jackals would win.
The Woody Creek Tavern was his sanctuary. But for a minute I worry the developers have won here too.
It turns out Thompson’s secluded local pub is now a bustling weekend cyclists’ mecca, with the fence outside stacked six-deep in pricy carbon-fibre creations.
In the garden the cyclists and day-trippers (and I know I’m just one of them) wait for tables and plough into glistening mounds of onion rings and fries. The massed conversation is a cheerful babble floating over the top of something poppy and anodyne coming from the outside speakers. I wasn’t expecting Joe Walsh and John Denver on a loop, but somehow this just seems wrong, even on a bright, holiday Sunday.
So I escape through the narrow doorway into the bar proper. And here, in the quiet, cool shade, with