Dancing in the
Streets Crested Butte Style
From wrong to
wrong the exasperated spirit
Proceeds, unless
restored by that refining fire
Where you must
move in measure, like a dancer.
-
T. S. Eliot, “Little Gidding”
In
a strange mix of grace and craziness, a group of costumed women doing
the stately Morris-dance lead down Elk Avenue a much less stately mob
that is
howling imprecations at a huge puppet on trial for its life, toward a
big
bonfire into which the puppet and a lot of old skis and grudges will be
thrown.
Or a midwinter parade comes down the street with masked and costumed
krewes
letting it all hang out (or as much as is possible in February) before
the
hibernation into Lent. Or a few hundred people dress up in red costumes
and
masks and dance to suggestive music in celebration of an event most of
the
celebrants weren’t around to know about. Or the floor of the Eldo
literally
bounces to the thunder of hundreds of people dancing to the honk and
wail of
the accordion as Crested Butteans celebrate the coronation of the new
king and
queen of Flauschink. Or kids ranging in age from ten to fifty conclude
one of
Colorado’s biggest and most irreverent Fourth of July parades
with what might
be the world’s biggest semi-sanctioned water fight in the middle
of the street.
Vinotok, Mardi Gras, the
Red Lady Ball, Flauschink, the Fourth of July – Crested Butte is
a town that,
in the eyes of its celebrants, knows how to celebrate itself. And these
are
truly “community celebrations,” even though not everyone in
the community
participates in them. They are not private parties; they are not
expensive
occasions for some socioeconomic faction to celebrate itself; they are
not
(primarily) Chamber of Commerce promotions to bring in more tourists;
they are
just a large bunch of Crested Butteans celebrating their common
appreciation at
living more or less together in Crested Butte.
There is of course another
perception of these events. A lot of Crested Butteans look on these
– tasteless
public displays! – with disapproval and don’t join in. Some
of them see it as
“juvenile behavior” that drives away visitors (except when
the events are
scheduled when there are no visitors, in which case why bother); others
find
it, even worse, disquieting in its anarchical undertones and worry
about the
undermining of basic law and order. And some of the participants
themselves
don’t get it, and undermine the events to the extent that they
see it as just
another excuse to get wasted and engage in anti-social behavior.
So what’s the truth of the
matter? Are these community celebrations a positive thing or a negative
thing
for the community? For any community? I want to try to make the case
for why they
are basically a good thing – even an essential component of a
healthy
community. It’s an appropriate time to do this; this winter will
end with the
40th celebration of Flauschink, an end-of-winter festival
that has
never pretended to have any socially redeeming value but, arguably, has
had
some. And as one who was present at its creation, I’m as good as
any to make
that argument.
Crested Butte in 1969, year of the first
Flauschink festival, was still a town without a foreseeable future.
Seventy-five years of coal mining had ended in the mid-1950s with the
closing
of the mines and dismantling of the railroad tracks. For the following
decade
and a half, the fraction of townspeople who had stayed courted just
about
anything that came along. A parade of new owners and lessees tried to
get the
Keystone Mine on Mount Emmons going throughout the 1950s and
60s with no lasting success. The ski area began in 1961 but went
through a
major “financial reorganization” in the mid-60s and was
still just hanging on
in a very competitive environment in 1969. Dr. Hubert Winston
Smith’s Law-Science Academy was a bright spot in the
summer; there were the dependable but slightly distant
“bugologists” up in
Gothic all summer; and there were a few mid-westerners building summer
homes in
the area. But in sum, the town had no identifiable economy.
So why was it so much fun
to live here? As novice editor of the town’s newspaper, I thought
about that a
lot. I had had no background or preparation for either the position or
for
informed thinking about what makes a community – but I’m
not sure that even
Ph.D.s in Journalism, Economics and Political Science would have helped
me
answer that question.
But even I could see one
thing that made a difference: the presence of people for whom hard
times
economically had been a way of life for many generations. Those were
the Butte’s “old timers,” the people
whose parents had come from subsistence economies in Europe destroyed by either industrialism
or war or both together, bringing and raising families into the worst
living
environment in the American industrial economy, a coal-mining town.
Underground
coal mining, the most dangerous and brutal work in the American
“melting pot” –
a pressure-cooker that filled from the bottom.
Those who were still here
in the 1960s were the ones who had outlasted the coal mines here; they
were either
retired from the coal mines on pensions that hadn’t been there
until their
saint John L. Lewis had wrung them out of the owners, or they had
escaped from
the mines by having managed to save and borrow enough to buy into a
business.
Here because they either had no reason to leave, or couldn’t
afford to.
Either way, they possessed
the native wit, physical stamina and stoic sense of humor that had kept
them
and their parents before them human on the “rag ships” from
Europe, and through
the generations of life as “chattels” going back to feudal
times, people with a
millennial history of figuring out how to make life worth living in
economies
that offered very little (if any) opportunity to “improve
themselves”
economically.
And mixed in with them
were handfuls of us new people – mostly a bunch of spoiled
exurban and suburban
hippies like myself who accepted the evidence from our pre-CB lives
that “money
doesn’t buy happiness,” and wondered what else there was
that might. Mostly
college graduates from the world’s richest and most domineering
economy, our
post-graduate education was in a place without a real economy, in the
company
of teachers who were used to that absence of what seemed to rule life
everywhere else in America.
Among other things, they
taught us to hang together by hanging out together like they did (easy
lesson),
and they taught us to dance. A harder lesson: I’d always thought
of dancing as
personal artistic expression, and the more beer I had, the better an
artist I
seemed (to myself) to be. But Mrs. Gal Starika, of Frank and
Gal’s Bar and
Restaurant, told me at a dance in her bar in 1968 that she was either
going to
have to teach me to dance right or kick me out. What she taught me
wasn’t dance
steps but respect; I learned that you aren’t really dancing
unless the whole
room is dancing – everyone “moving in measure,” as T.
S. Eliot put it. It is
individual only to the extent that every individual’s good time
depends on
every individual taking care of everyone else’s good time.
Learning to dance
with the whole room made it more fun.
And in some intuitive kind
of way, that education seemed to lead to the need for something like
Flauschink. The exact origins of Flauschink are best left shrouded in
the
ever-evolving myths and mysteries, which get better every year. But the
basic
truth is that it is indeed a local revival of an old European custom
– brought
to Crested Butte by the people who came to Crested Butte as refugees
from
Europe’s Industrial Revolution: the custom of turning a lot of
life’s entries,
exits, changes, or just going to the post office as a tradition, into
an excuse
for coming together to talk, eat and drink, dance, tell stories, and
otherwise
get merry. God knows the daily round of life itself, whether in the
master’s
fields or his coal mines or tending his ski lifts, didn’t produce
a whole lot
of reasons for the joy we are now supposed to find in our work; the
people who
survived were the ones who found or made the time to organize some
collective
joy with each other.
Lest you think I’m just
bloviating in defense of my own bad habits, I will note that a
respected
American writer came out this year with an exhaustive study that
affirms that
late-60s intuition (and its European origins): Dancing in the Streets
– A History of Collective Joy, by Barbara
Ehrenreich – author before that of Nickel
and Dimed and Bait and Switch,
two studies of economic life today, the first about the working poor
and the
second about workers struggling to stay in the middle class.
In Dancing in the Streets, Ehrenreich drops back in time to
examine
one fundamental difference between pre-industrial societies and our
contemporary industrial society: the absence today of what she calls
the
“ecstatic rituals” prevalent in virtually every traditional
pre-industrial
society worldwide. She focused primarily on medieval European cultures
for
which we have some written record, and found that in many parts of
Europe
during the height of Christian feudalism, as much as one day in every
four was
given over to community festivals for one Christian saint or another
– and
those “sanctified” holidays were only
“Christian” because the pioneer church
leaders had simply fastened a saint’s name onto already-existing
pagan
festivals.
She provides substantial
evidence that what we moderns have been schooled to think of as
“the Dark Ages”
were really not so depressing as we try to make them out to be. People
worked
hard with no hope of “advancement,” but they also played
hard, in
community-wide playing that no longer happens in the mainstream
society. Most
parties today are acknowledgements of divisions in the society –
college
keggers, country club balls, fundraisers for specific organizations
attended by
their supporters, and private parties of “our kind of
people.” Ehrenreich describes
another type of party that bonded whole communities on a regular basis,
and she
proposes that such hearty partying might be a necessary element for a
successful human community.
So why isn’t it part of
modern culture? She shows us that, at the beginning of what we think of
as the
modern era – from the 15th century C.E. on –
Europe’s ruling elites
began to banish the people’s celebrations and festivals. Various
reasons were
given for this, mostly bound up in the unholy alliance between
Protestant theology
and the early stirrings of the industrial economy that began with
Gutenberg’s
invention of the printing press (interchangeable parts and mass
production).
For the Protestants, the religious festivals were just Romish excesses
that
came between a person and his or her intimate relationship with the
somber and
judgmental Protestant god; to engage in any form of dancing, singing,
any kind
of noisy celebrating, was to endanger one’s soul. And for the
economic movers
and shakers, this of course tied in very well with the urbanization and
industrialization overwhelming Europe, requiring an increasingly disciplined,
orderly and
docile workforce. “One reason for suppression,” she says,
“was a fear that
festivities could get out of hand and even lead to revolution.”
She also ties in two other
important changes emergent in European society during those same
transformative
centuries: one being the growing separation of “the
individual” from the
community. Ehrenreich cites literary philosopher Lionel Trilling:
“Historians of European
culture are in substantial agreement," he wrote in 1972, "that in the
late 16th and early 17th centuries, something like a mutation in human
nature
took place." She summarized this “mutation”: “This
change has been called
the rise of subjectivity or the discovery of the inner self and since
it can be
assumed that all people, in all historical periods, have some sense of
selfhood
and capacity for subjective reflection, we are really talking about an
intensification, and a fairly drastic one, of the universal human
capacity to
face the world as an autonomous ‘I’, separate from, and
largely distrustful of,
‘them’.”
And she points out the
correlation between those changes and another important change that
began
around the same time: an “epidemic of depression” –
“melancholy” – which began
early in the 17th century and continues, in variations
augmented
with anxiety, right down to the present. We tend to think of depression
as a 20th-century
ailment, but Ehrenreich finds substantial literary evidence that
depression has
maybe just finally come out of the closet in our century. “Something was happening,
from about 1600 on,” she says, “to make melancholy a major
concern of the
reading public, and the simplest explanation is that there was more
melancholy
around to be concerned about.”
Are all of these
correlated changes causally connected too? The rise of the Protestant
ethic,
the suppression of festivals and their “collective joy,”
the evolution or
revolution of the individual as distinct from the community, and an
epidemic of
depression? Ehrenreich thinks so; and without positing it as a
single-cause
solution, she argues pretty convincingly that reintroducing
community-level
festivals, carnivals and other general opportunities for
“collective joy” might
help alleviate the massive depression in American society and, in the
most
literal sense, help each of us to “get over ourself.”
I won’t speak for the
other revivers of the Flauschink celebration in Crested Butte, but I
will say
that Crested Butte in the late 1960s cured me, at least temporarily, of
the
brand of individualism the culture and its chief enforcer, the
education
system, had instilled in me – the perception that I was a free
economic entity
contracting with the society around me for what I wanted from it,
giving back
only what was necessary to get what I wanted. I had never experienced a
community till I got to Crested Butte in 1966, which had a community
instead of
an economy, and was managing to survive.
The place also cured
me, at least temporarily, of a chronic cynical depression I’d had
for so long
that I didn’t even know I had it, since it was nurtured and
reinforced by most
of our contemporary cultural institutions, television foremost among
them. I
have backslid too often since, into both that toxic individualism and
its
companion depression; but of all the things that help me get over
myself, the
surest is getting out and making a fool of myself dancing, with a bunch
of
people I live with, like or don’t like, enjoy or just tolerate,
all doing the
same, and all moving in measure, more or less.
Another thing that
Flauschink has done, for all those in the community that care, is to
mark the
end of one thing and the beginning of another – not just the end
of winter but
the end of a season into which we put a lot and (we hope) take out a
lot. My
first two winters in Crested Butte ended – again in T.S.
Eliot’s words – “not
with a bang but a whimper.” Or not even a good whimper; everyone
just sort of
left. For someplace warmer, Mexico or Montrose. But from the
first Flauschink in 1969 on through the 39th last year,
we’ve
“flausched” winter and the ski season and danced in spring
(please, please
come) with the exuberant acknowledgement such changes deserve in the
natural
calendar of life.
So, at the fortieth
celebration of Flauschink – it is what it is, as the other
occasions of
collective joy in Crested Butte are what they are: just a way to
balance out
our serious efforts to make something of ourselves by indulging for a
bit in collectively
making fools of ourselves. I would not pretend that Flauschink or any
of the
others have helped the economy. Heaven forbid. But I would suspect that
I am
not the only one for whom they have, if only temporarily, made the
economy more
bearable, as well as life in general.