I didn’t catch the name of the guy who would sit next to me when the host at our table told me.
Tom Clyde looked up. “He’s deity here,” he said. Here being Deer Valley, at the fall tourism luncheon at Stein Eriksen Lodge. I was most struck by the thought of our irreverent Twain of a columnist considering someone, anyone in that light.
Sure enough. Something about the bushy white mustache, a certain knowing in the eyes, reminded me straight off as a less bombastic version of my captain (we called them foremen then) and the Supe on my hotshot crew, legends themselves in that world.
I was glib, as glib as I had growled at my barely teenage son not to be when he met Earl Eaton, finder of Vail Mountain, during a 40th anniversary event we stumbled into at Mid-Vail two decades ago.
“I hear you’re deity,” I said to my tablemate straight off, and he smiled the small smile of the real deal. I just liked him. He said he recognized me from my picture in the paper, that he’d read my column. That was cool. He also introduced me to Raelene Davis at Ski Utah and talked her up so convincingly that I had my card out for her in a flash.
I only remembered later I hadn’t done the same with him. There’s a doh!
“Bob Wheaton,” I told people later.
“Oh, he is deity,” they all said, every one. Retired now. Worked his way up at Deer Valley Resort from maintenance manager in 1979 to general manager in 1988 and then ran the whole show from 1997 through 2018. That’s the dominant No. 1 ski mountain in North America for more years during his tenure as president and chief operations officer than the Patriots or Celtics ever reigned in their worlds.
My first encounter with a deity was with Duke Kahanamoku, he in a wheelchair, me 4 or 5. We were just buds on a lawn looking at fish in the Ala Wai Harbor near sunset while my mother elbowed my father as she watched from the Waikiki Yacht Club’s bar.
I didn’t meet many notables while on the hotshot crew, though the governor of Montana joined us once while we waited for our helicopter ride to the day’s assignment.
“Santa Barbara, huh?” he said. “I think I recall Santa Barbara as about a six-pack away from San Luis Obispo.” Some of us went on to professional lives, doctors and lawyers and such, but we were a rougher bunch then. “Sounds about right,” my foreman muttered.
The politicians tend to be more practiced with journalists, some friendly and some not so much. Same with the actors, the athletes, the musicians, the moguls. I suppose they’ve seen too much of us and us of them.
The first time I met Phil Jackson, he paid zero attention to me and focused on my high school senior son, who to my astonishment unloaded all his athletic hopes and dreams for running cross country in college.
The second time we met a few years later, I got to thank him for his attention in our first meeting to my son and glibly joked about all but ignoring me. That raised a little smile, and he asked about the kid. Jackson is a deity to me, though not as coach of my favorite teams in my favorite sport.
I appreciated President Ford for telling stories to my young, young children, among others, before giving the annual Christmas tree lighting speech in Vail Village. I had zero sense of awe but plenty of warmth for how he treated the kids.
One of my all-time favorite colleagues in journalism, the ever-exuberant Ross Leonhart, couldn’t help but confess how star struck he was several years ago while filming an interview with Mikaela Shiffrin on a chairlift at Beaver Creek. He gushed. She laughed and bantered in the vein of “you silly.”
No one I’ve mentioned, save my hotshot bosses early on, had anything remotely like that effect on me. But I’m without fail a quivering mess inside whenever I meet a novelist, any novelist. I imagine I cover it well, better than Ross with Mikaela anyway, but it’s there.
The last one I met, just last summer in Aspen, was Jamil Jan Kochai. I’ve read his “The Haunting of Hajji Hotak” twice so far. Same with “99 Nights in Logar.” I got to walk him part way back to his hotel downtown after a group dinner, overtalking, wanting to ask him so much, trying to stay cool and not overwhelm him with old white guy weirdness. Too late. Oh well. But he was patient and friendly, accustomed to fans.
That is the thin line, isn’t it? Between reasonably objective appreciation for the remarkable, and rank ridiculous fandom. Strange that only the authors do this to me. The all-star journalists don’t, not beyond admiring maybe more fully than most their talent.
But how can I be glib with one deity and a stumbling, bumbling mass of jello with another? Status seems to have little to do with it. Wealth, nope. Recognition of human talent and achievement neither. Celebrity least of all. So what is it?
The big clue probably is aspiration. Not professional, but core. The highest of all the arts to me is writing, and fiction over nonfiction, unbuttered toast by comparison.
So the novelists alone make up my personal pantheon. I think of one of them, Arthur C. Clarke, and to butcher his thought, something he said about civilization’s advancements appearing as magic to more primitive minds. In this case, mine.
In journalism, I meet a lot of people in a lot of fields like that, deities in their worlds, though it all washes over me except for this one thing. For me, plainly, the one thing. Then I’m not glib, but lost for words.
Don Rogers is the editor of The Park Record. He can be reached at [email protected] or (970) 376-0745.