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A Tide of Aggression by Derek Taylor - added May 19, 2006
 I had only a slight idea of the force in which I was entwined when the doctor stuck the syringe into the hanging flesh just above my right eye. I
cringed slightly, trying to suppress the pain of the needle stick in my bloodied and sensitive eye socket. "It's a tough place to take a needle," the
doc commented, noticing the tension that just filled every one of my muscles. It's worth it, I tell myself, because now, through the six stitches that
will close the gash above my eye, I won't feel a thing. And at least the cop finally took off the shackles. For that I was thankful.
Throughout the weekend I had caught glimpses of this phenomenon in which I unwittingly and unwillingly became a part, this tide of aggression, of
deviance, anger, and frustration that swept me up on an otherwise quiet and peaceful Monday night of dinner, drinks, and football with a close
friend. The signs, however, were there, on the front page of the paper over the next three Thursday's.
The first was the Dodge Durango that took a dive deep into the 60-foot gully lining the road between the town of Crested Butte and the resort. It
was stolen and driven drunk, on the wrong side of the road, with the lights off when another car came from the other direction. They traded
passenger's side headlights, yet both drives somehow escaped uninjured, despite the stolen Dodge taking a nose-first header into the creek. The
driver tried to run, but was apprehended later that night.
The anomaly didn't start or end with the truck. Earlier in the week, a man from Breckenridge went berserk in a glass blowing shop, pulling a knife
on one of the owners and telling him, "You are the devil; you have to die." The other blowers fended him off, chasing him from the shop with pieces
of molten glass wielded in metal tongs to great effect. The man then tried to run the glass blowers down with his car before making a Bo and Luke
Duke-style high-speed break for Kebler Pass, where the Marshals headed him off.
Elsewhere in town estranged boyfriends were administering thrashings to their ex's new beaus, closed hotels and community buildings were being
vandalized and burglarized, and private property was being destroyed at the hands of restless locals.
While there was no decipherable pattern to this wave of anarchy and turmoil, it was easy to speculate at the cause. One of the wettest and coldest
summers in years had given way to the driest, warmest, most brutally long and mild Indian summer in memory. The resort opening had already
been pushed back a week, and judging by the progress of snowmaking attempts, where covered hillsides were melting into streams of run-off
under an uncharacteristically hot November sun, no one in Crested Butte was going to be getting face shots until the second coming of Christ, or
global thermonuclear war, which ever the new millennium decided to bring first. Normally laid back locals were chomping at the bit, full of a
pent-up eagerness to ski unprecedented even in this ski-crazed locale. And there was no outlet in sight.
News of the crime wave began circulating around town days before the paper broke it. The local average of "maybe on felony a week, at the
most," was being shattered, and even the chief of police seemed to have his finger on the problem, if not a solution. "Maybe it's the lack snow,"
Mt. Crested Butte Police Chief Hank Smith said in the Chronicle and Pilot. "People are getting disgruntled." Even the resort's Senior VP of
Operations Scout Walton knew where to place the blame. "It is hard to predict why it's happening," he told the papers. "But I think if it would
snow the problem would be solved. I think people are going stir crazy right now."
A strange force had fallen over this normally quiet mountain town. Call it what you like—bad karma, negative energy, pure and simple satanic
evil—the effects of this entity, this shinning of sorts, were clearly visible throughout town. Infidelity was running rampant. Beer bottles were being
hurled indiscriminately across bar rooms. Vandals were stuffing rags into gas tanks and lighting them on fire. Cars were getting their windows
smashed, and their contents stolen. All the while skis and snowboards sat idle in the corners of obsessively neat houses, and snowmobiles rusted
on brown lawns. Frustration had become the predominant mood in town. Frustration, impatience, and, eventually hostility.
I sat in the front seat of the police cruiser, the gash above my eye still numb and tight from the Novocain and stitches. The shackles were off for
good now, and I talked casually with the cop driving me home from the hospital. As we crossed the town limits, almost on cue, the radio crackled
with the report of a break-in at the Sheraton. I was dropped off on the way to the hotel, and the cruiser sped off to make yet another arrest, one of
ten to take place that week.
Weeks have passed and I've yet to come up with a better reason for why I started drinking Maker's Mark early on a Monday night after a hard
weekend of raging parties. I can't even begin to explain, at least not accurately and without bias, how a simple misunderstanding with a good friend
turned into an argument over car keys and eventually into an all-out brawl that didn't end until two cruisers and an ambulance showed on the
scene. I can't explain it, because after an hour of discussing it the following morning—my eye now a blackened shiner and my friends nose all
swollen and crooked—we came to no good conclusions ourselves. We each took responsibility for our own part and apologized to each other. And
as we walked out of the apartment into the warm, sunny, November air, I heard him speak four fitting words.
"Dude, we need snow!"
Derek Taylor is an award-winning cross dresser originally from Central Connecticut. A Senior Correspondent at POWDER Magazine
and the Skiing and Moto X researcher for ESPN, Taylor contributes regularly to Freeskier and ESPN the Magazine. His work has
also appeared in Maxim, Outside, Freeze and Bike. After over a decade in Crested Butte, Colorado, Taylor recently relocated
to the Wasatch Mountains of Utah. He still refuses to recognize the Carolina Hurricanes as a legitimate hockey team.
A version of this story originally ran in the December 2001 issue of Freeskier Magazine.
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