There is always a way for serious drinkers

Press, 27 February 1984, Page 16

There is always a way for serious drinkers

By

NANCY CAWLEY

My gloomier friends painted a black picture. There is no drinking at all in Utah you know, they said. You’ll lead a very pure life. All you can buy in the bars is that 3.2 beer.

A thoughtful friend described the whereabouts of Salt Lake City’s one vital adjunct to civilised living — the state liquor-store. Even its location sounded dreary, “Over the railway tracks, near the river.”

The other drink places in town were private clubs, he said, but the membership fees were pretty stiff. I could hardly wait. At least I was well over the legal drinking age of 21 years. Of course I need not have worried. Pleasure-bent Americans will always find a way to circumvent any obstacle to their going on the razzle.

When I settled into my job at a ski-lodge an hour from Salt Lake City, I found that invevitably it would mean a lot of social drinking and partying, with suitable beverages always forthcoming from one source or another.

Indeed, at times it almost seemed as though the semiprohibitive liquor laws were an incitement to people to drink more lavishly.

Our boss was a slim version of Buffalo Bill, complete with cowboy boots, string tie, and luxuriant moustache.

His stetson only came off when he saluted the ladies. It was said that he had bought the stuffed animal heads in the upstairs bar as ajob-lot from some Western saloon.

Be that as it may, the huge bison head over the stone fireplace, the snarling coyote and the bighorn ram, all gave the pannelled room a frontier realism that made drinking there something special. Special it may have been, but not simple. Spirits and cheap Californian wines could be bought at the gift shops in the three lodges in the canyon (along with pompom hats, badges, canned pretzels, crazy T-shirts, and posters of powder ski-ing with “Utaaaah” on them). The bars sold “set-ups” — soda, tonic, lemonade or whatever — to mix with the spirits, plus tasteless, gassy beer such as Coors brand, that fizzed in your nose and brought on chain-burping. Regulars in the bars had their own bottles behind the counter, labelled with their name, all-American names

like Carrie, Art, Kim, Lusty, Stevo, Jimbo, Randy... and guests walked between the foyer liquor-store and the dining-room swinging their bottle of table-win for dinner.

When a few of us went downtown for a meal there was a different ritual, a bit like 8.Y.0. New Zealandstyle without the ready availability of liquor outlets. First find the liquor-store (“ over-the-railway-lines-near-the-river”), take a vote on what everybody wanted (a fairly pointless exercise as Chris usually overruled us and bought a bottle of his favourite tequila), and then find the restaurant.

At last, jammed companionably in a dimly-lit booth in “La Frontiera,” with huge plates of burritos, enchiladas or gallinitas con vino in front of us, glasses ready, and the bottle of tequila sitting brazenly in the centre of the table — still in its paper-bag — we felt the evening had truly begun.

Other methods were found to get around the laws of the Mormon state.

An enterprising Australian on the staff made her own Kahlua, blending it with cream to make very successful White Russians.

Another rich drink was provided by Kim and Stephan in their staff cabin at Christmas time — eggnog laced with rum, a festive American special that was wasted on me. Even the locals were disenchanted with the beer, so when it all got too much for them, a few of the young guys on the staff would make “A Beer-run Over the Border.’

We all chipped in for a

few six-packs of Heineken or whatever from Nevada or Wyoming, and hoped that the van wouldn’t be stopped and the beer confiscated. No-one would want to be drunk in charge of a pair of skis in the sort of country we were ski-ing in, so drinking was confined to special occasions on the ski-slopes. Power-packed Bloody Marys were dispensed in Watson’s Shelter, the mountain restaurant, on Christmas Day. On the last day of the ski season, May 1, when the wheels of the ski-lifts finally stopped turning, a group of us stood in a circle at the bottom of the main lift, in the gently falling

snow, and toasted the last six months with a carafe of white wine. Oh course all the partying was fun, but one drink that I remember with pleasure was non-alcoholic, and I drank it alone. A frothy hot chocolate in the almost deserted Alpenglow coffee shop, only days before they closed for the summer, all the crowds gone and the only action one of the guys wiping down tables somewhere behind me. Outside the big window a mountain blue-jay nibbled food off a hanging bird-feeder, snow falling past the big conifers. Going back? You bet. Let’s drink to it.