The Ultimate Green Man

“I’ll be your mirror, reflect what you are, in case you don’t know”
         —The Velvet Underground

He’s a handsome, brilliant artist and athlete, which is how he captured the hearts of art lovers, beautiful women and the Crested Butte community over the years. His art can be found in big cites and in the collections of former Presidents. If you’re in town right now you’re surrounded by his work. From the bicycle racks that slant with the angle of our sidewalks to the Spear Thrower in front of Town Hall to the Grump we burn at Vinotok, he is all around us.
When he wasn’t capturing hearts, Andy Bamberg was hanging with the boys on the trail, on the Eldo bar stools he sculpted from steel or sometimes on my back deck.
We would make our own island in my backyard. It was a sacred space we’d conjure with laughter, coffee and tobacco. It was a space we called “Dude Time” during which we spent two minutes talking about Crested Butte politics and a thousand hours talking about women.
 To sit and listen to Andreas Bamberg talk about women was like listening to the voice in God’s head as he sculpted them.
The world was Andy Bamberg’s art gallery. He saw portraits in the wildflowers and sculpture in the physical form. He saw biceps in tailpipes and bear claws in industrial drill bits. Although we loved his art, it was his fascination with all things mechanical that saved so many of us money and time over the years. Bamberg couldn’t fix everything with gears but he loved to try and even if he couldn’t fix your problem you’d have a pretty good adventure with him while he did. One day he taught me how a combustion engine worked right before making the one in my car explode.
He helped so many of us. That was the irony about Andy; although he was constantly battling his own medical Grump and keeping the bill collectors at sword’s length, he was our hero when we needed him. We should have been helping him more than he helped us. But if Andy was here, he’d tell us we were helping him, and then he’d tell us we were good people or that we were beautiful. That was Bamberg’s greatest gift; as a man and an artist he knew the portrait of ourselves we all wished to see. He made men feel cool and women feel hot.

“No one will ever think I’m as beautiful as Andy Bamberg did,” said one person celebrating Andy’s life last weekend.

“He was the ultimate Green Man.”

Some of you have never met Andy Bamberg in person but if you’re reading this it means you have a connection to this community and it means you now live in the absence of a wise philosopher, healer, artist and lover of life. It’s now our charge to treat each other in the Bamberg way, which is a Pretty Good way.
If you’ve loved Andy Bamberg since you first met him or if you’re just meeting him now, know that to carry his torch you will need to blow off work every now and then and go for a bike ride, read something, write something, make some mischief, tell your children they’re smart and strong, tell your husband he’s the man of your dreams or pick the coldest winter day and ask your wife if it “feels hot in here” and when she says no smile and tell her, “I can fix that.”