(Being the Tale of a Rocky Mountain Canary’s Response to ‘Economic Downturn’)

“A donkey is a domesticated ass and so is a burro, used as pack animal(s).” [thesaurus.com]

Here’s a picture postcard from the past, with this caption at the top: Rocky Mountain Canary Looking for a Tenderfoot. On the back is a postmark from 14,110-feet, stamped over these words, “The ‘Rocky Mountain Canary’ got his name because of his raucous bray; however, the burro is held in considerable esteem by prospectors, miners and others who must travel in the rough country beyond the trails. He is a patient, intelligent and faithful companion and helper.”

This is how his season had gone. After a Christmas break marked by record powder dumps, ridiculous overtime hours and no major fuck-ups in his department, the ski resort handed the canary an “Employee of the Month” award, along with a gift certificate to one of the town’s finest restaurants. In February, a mix of grease, gas, negligence and bad luck blew the restaurant’s kitchen halfway across Main Street. When the news reached him via ski-town gossip, our canary looked vaguely disappointed and (oddly) amused. “At least,” he grunted, “nobody’s dead, yet.” Sometime later, he threw the suddenly worthless gift certificate away.

Now that the ink is dry on his foray into corporate winter tourism, let’s consider how it came to pass. For most of the canary’s working life, Milton Friedman’s merry band of derivative-wielding free marketeers had made “haves” richer, and “have-nots” poorer with complementary spirals of inflating prices and stag-flating wages, along with reflexive spasms of topend tax cuts and bottom-rung bankruptcy curbs. The canary’s kin lost their stakes early in the game, so he learned while young to work hard at whatever job was at hand, whenever times got tough and money tight. A few years back, he’d been ambling along with a variety of half-assed enterprises and seasonal employments to his name, living in a field outside town, and whenever he had enough money to tip the bartender, quaffing quality brews in local pubs while contemplating the dynamics of trickle-down economic theory. Whether it was the beer, the conversation or just a whiff of stagnant air from the local real estate bubble, our canary grew uneasy several seasons before any of his mountaintown cohorts smelled the danger. He quit risking money on his enterprises, dusted off his credentials and took on a couple of jobs to pay debts that had started to keep him awake at night — real, full-time (if still seasonal) jobs.

To understand our canary, you must know he’d long ago been discovered to have latent skills for making things — people, machines and situations — work, while showing a perverse pleasure in the doing of the thing, which made a perfect recipe for a lower-management field commission in the war-zone conditions of your run-ofthe- mill High-Country resort enterprise. You should also hear that he once spent several years working at a world-renowned ski resort without ever sullying the company’s ski-lifts with his used-gear-clad ass, considered himself more a disciple of Al Johnson, the skiing mailman of the Elk Mountains, than of the self-important European-accented ski instructors that roved the birthplace of destination skiing, and yet had been considered a shoo-in for a long-term management gig before he escaped. For many years, the canary had buried this history. How was he to predict that a simple, worldwide economic downturn would cause him to re-visit a form of insanity he’d almost forgotten? In short order, the canary’s name was being bandied about as an “indispensable employee” in the halls of upper-management. The first winter, he was a simple seasonal, an affable enigma to most co-workers — cashing his paycheck and disappearing into the backcountry on days off, and this sense of easy money was what lured him back for a second season. It began innocently enough, though warning bells should have pealed when the canary was offered a “lead” position and then two days before the mountain opened was informed that he was expected to cobble a crew out of thin air and a handful of stale job applications. Here, we should see that the canary had never backed down from a challenge, and the thought of unpaid bills and financial collapse may have pushed him into the abyss. Soon enough, the canary pissed off quite a few, puzzled most of the rest and passed more than his share of sleepless nights. When the resort’s veterans lined up to describe the reasons something couldn’t be done, mainly because it hadn’t been done before, he thanked and ignored them. When the head of resort security warned him that a grudge-toting maintenance guy was a bad-ass with a row of bullet-holes in his truck door, he nodded and shrugged. The canary’s manner was rough some days, much too noisy for comfort, but old-timers claim it was the biggest snow year in the last twenty-five, and when something needed dug out, they say he shut up and shoveled.

Now that big government has covered their posteriors with a veil woven of forgiven debts and non-voting stock buys, trickle-down’s talking heads again say that the best thing to do in a market-driven financial system teetering on the brink is to create ever riskier types of debt, to drive even more esoteric derivatives with other people’s money (OPM); and here is where your Rocky Mountain Canary is different. When times got tough, he went to work, made things run to a greater or lesser extent, and kept his politics to himself. When machines broke, he cajoled and wheedled a repair, or patched it himself. When this or that worker didn’t show, he took the shift, and the overtime pay. The next season, he finagled a decent pay raise for the crew in the upside-down economy and grimly hung onto a memory of the equilibrium that he’d found during his long hiatus from managing other people’s shit (OPS). He stayed at it long enough to build a semblance of an operable system where chaos had reigned, and when the debt was gone, so was the Rocky Mountain Canary, flown with the season to a clime where there are no lines of hand-wringing “haves” to stand behind.

Down on the ground, under wispy clouds of economic recovery freshly seeded with rumors of multi-trillion-dollar bailouts and stimulus enough to the suck the chrome off a bumper-hitch, weeds grow around the model houses of dream investment properties swimming in debt. The resort tries to lure season-pass cashflow with promises of El Niño manna from the sky, as corporate suits bail on bonuses and bennies once taken for granted by local aficionados. This season’s optimists hope against all reasonable odds to best snow-fall records of a hundred years with the first dump, and point to promised new expert terrain with trembling anticipation, while pessimists wryly mention disappointments of past dry fronts and donut holes, and eye the resort’s still-unsold condos with an air of superiority as they bray about more broken promises to come. No telling from here which camp is right this time, but when another Rocky Mountain Canary postcard comes my way, I’ll drop you a line.

Contributing editor B. Frank’s last piece for the Gazette was “The Lost Art of Campfire Bullshitting,” which appeared in #160. He lives on the edge of the Colorado Plateau.