The Crested Butte News Serving the Gunnison Valley since 1999
By Chadwick Dixon
It’s great to see a renowned athlete giving back. Last time I saw alpine ski racer Bode Miller was at his New Year’s Eve party in 2001 just before he became a World Cup phenom. We grew up one town away from each other in northern New Hampshire learning to ski at our beloved Cannon Mountain—home to steep sheets of ice far from the powdery playground of the Rockies. He mastered the art of speeding, and I mastered the art of floating. His was a lucrative pursuit, mine was a penniless indulgence in neurochemistry.
With his new film Paradise Paradox, this champion has now taken on the next Olympic-sized challenge: mental health struggles in ski towns. Wow! Finally, I thought, as I viewed the trailer the week before his talk at Fort Lewis College. This is a topic I basically lived for a decade in Crested Butte.
As beautiful as these dreamy locations are, there are nightmares lurking just under the magic carpet. By sparking the conversation, we are looking where we didn’t want to look before to try to save people’s lives. And it’s well overdue. As stated in the film, ski towns have seen a massive surge in suicide in the last decade. Rates in such towns have recently been documented at quadruple those seen in other towns around the nation. Personally, my list is long. I wince at even considering all the names of fallen friends from my decade in Crested Butte. I keep them in my heart, making small homages to their memory, gazing northeast towards CB from the summit ridge of Purgatory before another blissful plunge is begun. I wonder how, if someone had reached out to them, they could still be here today skiing with me or maybe, having said “to hell with winter,” lounging on a beach in Mexico with their kids. Was there enough access to mental health care that could have turned the tide in their most tumultuous times? In a world run by profit-hungry insurance companies, the answer apparently was: no. A lot of health insurance plans don’t cover mental health visits. Hopefully the awareness generated by these efforts can move that boulder.
After the film was shown, the panel was opened to a question-and-answer session. Unfortunately, I was not selected to ask a question, so I hung around to meet Bode after. We reminisced about the “good-ole days” in Franconia, NH when a single parent could afford to take their family skiing and when we could hitchhike back to town after shredding. We both commiserated about how much skiing has transformed in our nation. I mentioned my years of driving snowcats in CB (now owned by Vail Resorts), a place where the cost of living has skyrocketed while wages have gone nowhere. We peered around the proverbial elephant in the room by concurring that the wealth inequality in America has reached ludicrous stage.
As I finish typing this in a small café in downtown Durango, I glance over at a real estate brochure showcasing the finest properties in the region. I flip to the back cover and see “We built our company on a belief in local businesses, relationships and the impact that locally-focused real estate can have on our communities.” My jaw drops as I stagger to imagine how many locals can purchase anything in the town they have lived. I wonder about the droves of people “moving” to our community to buy second or third “homes,” so interested in being a part of the community that they only visit a few times a year and rent it out to vacationers for the quick profit. Ironically, the headline of the ad is “100% Colorado. Because it 100% matters.” In a market completely inaccessible to the hourly worker, yes it 100% matters. I have never met a worker celebrating joyously as they rush to their second or third job in an endless hamster wheel. In reality, it is this burnout that can push one down the depression spiral.
Opening the dictionary, the first listing of community is, “the people with common interests living in a particular area.” The key word here is LIVING. Visiting your nth “home” for a few weeks a year and driving the cost of living through the roof is the antithesis to community. This threat is real. I watched it gut CB of the community it once was, and many former residents wrote like articles verbatim. I applaud our local government for limiting the number of VRBO permits. Yet the realist in me is skeptical that this alone will keep a working-class resident in what has become a trophy town. This morning I parked afront another small “Great Deals” house for sale. Listed price only $852,000. What a deal! How many hours a minute would one have to work at the ski resort, or restaurant or school or wherever to even be able to sit down with a loan officer.
The next day the Community Foundation organized a panel of mental health experts. Bode brought up an observation he made during his years skiing around the world. He mentioned noticing that unlike in America, workers at the ski resorts in Europe were valued. Whether it was the cleaner, the bellhop or the shuttle driver, people were compensated appropriately and that led to a sense of community. He noticed a “WE” culture as opposed to the “I” culture so prevalent in this nation. He related that people valuing each other in the work sector leads to the age-old network called community that has been severely eroded. Given how social media has done generational damage to how we treat each other there is still hope in a “WE” centric culture. It will require a large shift in focus. Maybe instead of staring at our screen we can stare into each other’s eyes and be available for others, in the here and now, when they may need it the most. Hopefully this kind of buy-in can offset the other kind of buyin’ to build back the resident communities we need to thrive.
