Galena House Publishing.What Frisco's Main Street Sounds Like in October
Between the aspens and the snow, the mountain town lets out its breath. Some mornings you can hear the creek from the middle of the street.
There is a week or two in October when Frisco lets out its breath. The aspens have finished. The snow has not yet decided to stay. The summer people have gone home and the winter people have not yet arrived, and Main Street, which runs from the foot of the Tenmile Range down to the edge of Lake Dillon, belongs for a little while to the people who live here and to the weather.
There are names for it, most of them fond. The off-season. The shoulder. The quiet. I think of it as the town taking off its coat.
A street that runs from the mountain to the water
Frisco is an old mining town, older than most of what you see on its main street, and it keeps its age the way mountain towns do: in a few small wooden buildings that have outlasted everything built around them, and in streets laid out for people on foot. At one end of Main Street the mountains rise so close and so steep they seem to lean over the rooftops. Walk the other way and the street simply runs out of town and into the lake.
In summer that walk is a parade. In October it is a walk. You can hear your own footsteps. You can hear the wind in the lodgepole pines on the hill, a sound like distant surf. Some mornings, standing in the middle of the street with nothing coming, you can hear Tenmile Creek running behind the town, cold and fast.
What the quiet is for
The quiet is not emptiness. The cafe windows still steam at seven. Someone is always walking a dog. Doors are propped open on the warm afternoons and closed again by four, when the sun drops behind the range and the air turns cold in the space of a conversation. The light at that hour is the reason painters come to the mountains: low, gold, sideways, catching every fence post and every window, laying long blue shadows across the snow on the peaks.
I have always loved places in their in-between weeks. A house the morning after a party. A theater in the afternoon, with the work lights on. A mountain town in October. You see the bones of a thing when it is not performing, and the bones of Frisco are good: a creek, a grid of small houses, a long view, and people who say good morning and mean it.
You see the bones of a place when it is not performing.
How to walk it
Start at the top of Main Street in the morning, with the range above you. Walk down toward the water without stopping to buy anything. Notice the oldest buildings, the ones smaller than they need to be. Notice the mountains in the gaps between the rooftops. At the bottom, keep going until the street becomes a path and the path becomes the shore, and stand there until the cold reaches your hands.
Then turn around and walk back up. It is uphill, and at nine thousand feet you will feel it, and that is part of it too. The altitude asks you to go slowly. In October, for once, the town agrees.
My novel Still, by Design. is set in a house at the foot of mountains very like these; it is at averylanemaxwell.com. My letters are at averylanemaxwell.com/letters, and the house's magazine of place, The Amber Thread, is read free.