Crumbling Ski Slums A Sad Scenario

(Vail, CO — Brie Magazine, April, 2029 — April 19, 2016)

Derelict chalets, dilapidated castles of days gone by too quickly, are all that’s left of the once haughty ski village here. Now most of the buildings held together by second-thought visquine and he neighbor’s duct tape are the homes of high altitude brannigans who live out the legacy of credit cards and plastic architecture gone wild in the 80s and 90s.

Today the railroad employs most of those fit to work. Soup kitchens cater to locals as well as wealthy gamblers on their way to San Francisco and New York City.

Poor construction, over-building and corporate cancer have, in hindsight, been isolated as the culprits in the fall of what looked to be a bullet-proof sub-culture/bonanza high in the Rockies. At the height of the war people weren’t much on skiing.

A stroll (daytime please) through the abandoned slope-side condos gives one a quick, bleak picture of the stark desperation at hand. Crime, drug abuse and degradation are rampant, as homeless vagabonds now inhabit these once ostentatious citadels. Children, adored in discarded, and certainly out of fashion, ski outfits play next to deserted lifts. The parents of a lucky few, refugees from collateral damage, are forced to work in Summit County.

In nearby Eagle a baby cries in a doublewide. A lone Chevy pickup curves its way through town perhaps searching for a loaf of bread, true enlightenment or a misplaced gearshift knob. It’s beginning to snow.

-Dinty Moore

Future February, 2029

“Rumors of my canonization are greatly exaggerated.”   – Bernie Sanders with apologies to Mark Twain.