they going to pay for it, even with investors? Prices’ll have to go up, and the mountain’ll still be what it’s always been, a mole hill with attitude, just like the rest of this woodchuck state.”
Sad to say, even if untrue, but that had a ring of familiarity to it. Vermont’s economy wasn’t far different from the rest of the country’s, but it was miniaturized to where it looked quaintly third-world. No matter what we did commercially up here, or how well, our best was always a blip when compared to places budgeted in the billions. The one exception was maple syrup, where we topped the nation by a fat margin, but even there, who really cared? A half-million gallons a year still only supplied a demand less than that for caviar. So, I understood what Willy was saying about little Tucker Peak. Spend what it might, it could never hold a candle to resorts in Utah and Colorado. Worse still, it couldn’t even compete in sheer size and height to the best in Vermont. In a market rewarding bigger, steeper, faster slopes, Tucker didn’t look slated for survival, much less rebirth.
But then, I’d thought the Internet was a pipe dream, too.
And I had to give it to Tucker Peak on aesthetics. Like Stratton, although smaller, it lay encased in a bowl of mountains. A single road led into it, up and over a humpbacked cleft, and the initial view of the resort, as the car turned the last curve at a low-flying, bird’s-eye level, was straight from a fairy tale. The base lodge, surrounded by buildings, stores, sheds, and the nightclub, looked like an alpine village, the slopes and lifts fanning out like anchor lines from the heart of a spider’s web. The sprinkling of slopeside condos resembled outlying rural homes.
The most striking feature, however, towered far overhead, above the buildings, the access road, and even the broad, carved mountain bowl cradling the ski trails. Lining the horizon, with the blank white sky as a backdrop, looking spectrally indistinct in the barely falling snow, was a row of modern windmills—stark, pale, streamlined, and huge—eight of them with rotors so wide, it seemed unlikely they could move. And yet move they did, with the same ghostly, silent, otherworldly grace that elephants have drifting through the night in a herd.
In another effort to pay the bills, Tucker Peak had leased its ridge-line to a local power company for this experiment in alternative energy, granting itself in the process the single most unusual feature of any ski resort in the country.
All of it—the village, the fan of trails, the beautiful mountains, the surreal windmill farm, and the colorful sprinkling of brightly clad skiers across the white snow—made me think that in a world so given to appearance over substance, I might have been too harsh in giving Tucker Peak an early requiem. Faced with such an ethereal picture, this isolated, small, vertically challenged ski bowl just might find a way to compete with its brawnier rivals.
“Where do we go?” Willy asked, as impressed as if we’d just come to a crossroads in Kansas.
“Western slope. Something called Laurel Lane. Number 318.”
I drove down into the pseudo village, noticing how its alpine image fell apart under closer scrutiny. The buildings, of ersatz Swiss design, began losing their picturesque appeal. Dark, supposedly shingle roofs emerged as painted metal; the pattern of wooden beams on fake stucco walls turned out to be only brown paint. The whole vision became threadbare, cheap, and perilously impermanent. I was abruptly forced to wonder if fifteen million would make much of a dent, a thought driven home by the addition of a quiet group of placard-wielding protesters camped out by the base lodge’s front entrance.
I passed between the lodge and the nightclub opposite, paused where the road split into a Y, and headed uphill to the left, skirting one side of the crazy quilt of interlocking ski trails. I noticed that the skiers I’d seen earlier,
Sad to say, even if untrue, but that had a ring of familiarity to it. Vermont’s economy wasn’t far different from the rest of the country’s, but it was miniaturized to where it looked quaintly third-world. No matter what we did commercially up here, or how well, our best was always a blip when compared to places budgeted in the billions. The one exception was maple syrup, where we topped the nation by a fat margin, but even there, who really cared? A half-million gallons a year still only supplied a demand less than that for caviar. So, I understood what Willy was saying about little Tucker Peak. Spend what it might, it could never hold a candle to resorts in Utah and Colorado. Worse still, it couldn’t even compete in sheer size and height to the best in Vermont. In a market rewarding bigger, steeper, faster slopes, Tucker didn’t look slated for survival, much less rebirth.
But then, I’d thought the Internet was a pipe dream, too.
And I had to give it to Tucker Peak on aesthetics. Like Stratton, although smaller, it lay encased in a bowl of mountains. A single road led into it, up and over a humpbacked cleft, and the initial view of the resort, as the car turned the last curve at a low-flying, bird’s-eye level, was straight from a fairy tale. The base lodge, surrounded by buildings, stores, sheds, and the nightclub, looked like an alpine village, the slopes and lifts fanning out like anchor lines from the heart of a spider’s web. The sprinkling of slopeside condos resembled outlying rural homes.
The most striking feature, however, towered far overhead, above the buildings, the access road, and even the broad, carved mountain bowl cradling the ski trails. Lining the horizon, with the blank white sky as a backdrop, looking spectrally indistinct in the barely falling snow, was a row of modern windmills—stark, pale, streamlined, and huge—eight of them with rotors so wide, it seemed unlikely they could move. And yet move they did, with the same ghostly, silent, otherworldly grace that elephants have drifting through the night in a herd.
In another effort to pay the bills, Tucker Peak had leased its ridge-line to a local power company for this experiment in alternative energy, granting itself in the process the single most unusual feature of any ski resort in the country.
All of it—the village, the fan of trails, the beautiful mountains, the surreal windmill farm, and the colorful sprinkling of brightly clad skiers across the white snow—made me think that in a world so given to appearance over substance, I might have been too harsh in giving Tucker Peak an early requiem. Faced with such an ethereal picture, this isolated, small, vertically challenged ski bowl just might find a way to compete with its brawnier rivals.
“Where do we go?” Willy asked, as impressed as if we’d just come to a crossroads in Kansas.
“Western slope. Something called Laurel Lane. Number 318.”
I drove down into the pseudo village, noticing how its alpine image fell apart under closer scrutiny. The buildings, of ersatz Swiss design, began losing their picturesque appeal. Dark, supposedly shingle roofs emerged as painted metal; the pattern of wooden beams on fake stucco walls turned out to be only brown paint. The whole vision became threadbare, cheap, and perilously impermanent. I was abruptly forced to wonder if fifteen million would make much of a dent, a thought driven home by the addition of a quiet group of placard-wielding protesters camped out by the base lodge’s front entrance.
I passed between the lodge and the nightclub opposite, paused where the road split into a Y, and headed uphill to the left, skirting one side of the crazy quilt of interlocking ski trails. I noticed that the skiers I’d seen earlier,
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