A Trip to Owl Farm

It was a bright morning in the midwest, and as the Rockies rose before me, and then rose around me, I drove past Woody Creek twice before I found the correct right turn: down into the canyon, off the wide divided highway to Aspen, and onto the Woody Creek main drag. Aspen has always sold its funky charm to its celebrities; never mind that it served Hunter S. Thompson as a home base since he purchased Owl Farm in the early 1960s. Never mind the center of Woody Creek is still a trailer park, a collection of surprisingly shoddy late 1970s metal boxes: one, next to the main drag, had a broken window and an unmowed lawn. Each trailer and lot is owned by the local ski company, to provide affordable housing for resort workers. Otherwise, the land is simply too valuable: "bet you've never seen a half-a-million dollar trailer," joked one of the locals.

Of course, the trailers in Woody Creek are the exception to the rule, as the Big Money can hide away where ever, in the hills beyond the town. Thompson always railed against "the greedheads;" that is, those capitalists for whom no amount of money may suffice. As private planes flew overhead Woody Creek hourly, writer and Thompson's neighbor Mike Cleverly described the day that Ken Lay's wife rolled up to his modest cabin, accompanied by Secret Service: the first news of the collapse of Enron had emerged, and Ken was in town to sell all FOUR of his homes in the Aspen area. Down the road from Thompson's beloved Owl Farm (he once called it his "lighthouse"), the Wiley brothers-- the pair responsible for the Swift-Boat ads that smeared John Kerry-- have a few homes, including one designed by a family member that looks both like a gnome home and fallen-down English cottage. I heard that she sat with an architect and molded the idea out of a lump of clay. To appease the locals, the Wileys donated $600,000 to the local animal shelter.

Other homes are owned by Kevin Costner, Michael Eisner, Kate Hudson, and Jack Nicholson, and others. Hanging out at the cafe and tavern in town, twice I was told that, in Aspen and Woody Creek, "the millionaires have moved out, and the billionaires have moved in."

On Thompson's road, the quiet is priceless: sprinklers sound a wet flutter over manicured lawns, and the squawk of animals rise sporadically from the hills behind the Thompson compound. Hunter's widow, Anita, played with a dog in the side yard; lining the fence that runs across the front of the yard, a woodpile continues to rot. Welded vultures still adorn the gateposts; a welded bat stands on a pole outside the two large picture windows in the front corner of the house.

In town, the Woody Creek Tavern doesn't mention Thompson explicitly, anywhere: photographs, notes, paintings, and years of memories adorn the walls. I met a guy who delivered booze weekly to Owl Farm from Aspen, driving a case of 1.5L Chivas Regal bottles, a case of Groschl flip-top bottles and a case of 1.5L bottles of red wine, "for his secretary.?

February 2005 was an especially dark time in America; though the economy had not yet collapsed, the "greedheads" had already long taken control. Thompson chose to stare down the barrel of a shotgun over enduring Bush's second term; like Plato's "Crito," Thompson had come to abhor the political and social system he had helped to create. On that night, Hunter and his wife had had a fight; she was elsewhere, likely in town; he had been walking with a cane as well, after health problems made him weak. Mike Cleverly wouldn't confirm that Hunter had typed "COUNSELOR" on a lone sheet of paper in his typewriter. Cleverly's own collection of Thompson stories-- The Kitchen Readings-- is available on Amazon; as Hunter's neighbor and friend, he chose his words and stories of Thompson carefully. The definitive biography of Hunter, he said, is being written by Douglas Brinkley, who accepted no pay for his extensive editorial work on two volumes of Thompson's letters.

I passed Cleverly a card with my website address on it, and he chuckled: there is no high-speed internet on his road. "Thompson never had DSL?" "Hunter never had a computer. They'd keep sending them," Cleverly said, "and he'd use them, and then a day later they'd be in the trash." It's important to know that, for all his Gonzo travels, Hunter never surfed the web from his kitchen, never explored the internet from home.

I drove through Aspen ("don't deny yourself," Cleverly told me), leaving behind a dream of Woody Creek, Colorado: Hunter wasn't home, and his widow took no interest in me, holding up a copy of her latest book, "The Gonzo Way," hoping for an autograph. The sun shone across the arid landscape; the sprinklers kept the wealthy lawns wet, and growing.