The sound of rain

Whenever it rains and I’m sitting zazen in the Tea House, the beauty of the water hitting the metal roof with the soft clicks and splashes that push out and expand into space, I think of this Zen phrase:

If your eyes hear
and your ears see,
not a doubt you will cherish.
How naturally the rain
drips from the eves.

Lady Chatterley’s Lover

I was a kid living on a 300 acre farm in a house that had five or six bedrooms. Guests would come and sometimes stay for weeks. 

Dorothy Brenan and her wealthy lawyer husband were great friends of my mother’s. Dorothy came to stay for awhile and her husband came up on the weekends. She bought my sister and me new mattresses for our beds. It seemed an extravagant gift. 

It was summer and Dorothy started to look very “country” in overalls and checked shirts. Soon she was hanging out in the barns where the young, good looking farmer, Jay, was tending to the dairy cows.

We kids played all over the farm, in the fields and the hay barns, and soon we noticed that something was happening. Way up in the hayloft, with bales of hay piled high one on top of the other, Jay and Dorothy were entangled with arms wrapped around one another and doing something we knew was forbidden. 

Kids are very aware of what is going on, even if they don’t know exactly what it is. And that was true for us. We started spying on their torrid love affair. One time we saw them making love way high up in the silo that was filled to the top with silage. Silage is corn that has been cut up in bits and pieces and fed to cows during the winter. 

The weeks of that summer went on and then disaster came to the farm and to Dorothy. 

The milking barn had stantions where the cows would stand and be milked. Right behind them was a trough with a conveyor belt where they could poop. With the flick of a switch the belt would move along the trough which ran out the barn like two arms stretching six feet past the door, and dump everything into a bin. 

One day, Jay turned the belt on, and was outside near the conveyor belts when he slipped and the back of his sweatshirt got caught in the rollers used to move the conveyor. The shirt coiled around and around, choking him. Dorothy was there with him but couldn’t figure out how to turn the conveyor off. Jay suffocated and died. 

We only found out when we came home from school and the house was filled with cries from Dorothy, sobbing in distress. It was heartbreaking and soon her husband came up from the city, took her home, and we never saw them again. 

The barn in Aspen early 1970s

When I was in my early 20s I dropped out of college and went to Aspen to be a ski bum. I got a job as a maid at the Vagabond Lodge and met Bill Streeter who had come from NYC to ski for a week. He fell in love with Aspen, and ended up staying for the rest of his life. 

That summer we sold our skis and camped out with friends at the foot of the 14,000 foot high Maroon Bells.

The next winter Bill and I moved into “The Barn” an old, falling down ramshackled place that had been initially rented by our friend Wilk Wilkerson, a National Geographic photographer and fellow skier. I think the rent for all of us was about $115 a month.

To get to our room we had to climb up rickety steps with no railing and cross a wide plank over the main space of the barn to our room. There was no heat. Our boots froze over night and we walked into town every morning to have breakfast at Andre’s to thaw out. 

Other’s moved in to join us: Mike Pokress, Spencer Pearson, Steve Horowitz. And over the years, long after I had left, the rooms became small apartments.

I found this out recently from a post on a Facebook group, Friends of Aspen from the 60s and 70s. Someone posted “Does anyone remember “the Barn“, where several artists lived when I arrived in ‘72?”

As I read the comments on the post I was shocked to find out that all of the guys I lived with as roommates, including Bill Streeter, have passed away. I’m the only original resident still alive. We were young and adventurous. I thought we’d all live forever.  

The Barn was finally torn down in the 90s. It’s probably been replaced with condos. 

It was a glorious time and a glorious place.