THE MOUNTAIN CABIN
Mid to Late February · Aspen, Colorado · A Week · Hosted by the Court
The Mountain Cabin is a house taken in Aspen for a week at the end of February. Eight places. Skiing arranged each morning, one long table each night.
Members come for as many of the days as they wish. Some take two nights and some take seven.
The Form
A hotel gives you a room. A house gives you a kitchen at midnight, and those are not the same thing.
Every family with money and land worked this out a long time ago, which is why the shared house is the oldest social arrangement there is: the shooting lodge, the summer place, the villa taken between four families. People who have spent a week under one roof know each other differently from people who have had six dinners.
What a week produces is not conversation exactly. It is the accumulation of small things. Who is up first. Who cooks badly and cheerfully. Who is quiet after two drinks and who is not. None of it can be arranged, and all of it is the point.
The Court takes a house rather than rooms for that reason, and takes eight places rather than twenty because a house has a natural number and exceeding it turns it back into a hotel.
The Week
Skiing each morning, arranged in advance. Guides where the ground calls for them, and equipment fitted before anyone arrives, so that nobody spends the first day of a week in a rental shop.
Members ski at their own standard and in whatever company suits them. Nobody is grouped.
Afternoons are unprogrammed. The house is there, and so is the town.
One long table each night. The same eight people, or as many of them as are in the house that day, and no seating plan.
Nothing else is scheduled. A week that is filled is a week nobody remembers.
What Is Asked
The code is stated in the invitation. What is worn on the mountain is a member’s own affair.
Members say in advance which nights they will be at the table, so that the kitchen knows.
Telephones stay in pockets at dinner. A photographer attends for part of the week, and what is worth keeping is sent afterward.
A member may bring a guest by arrangement, and answers for them. A guest in a house is a larger undertaking than a guest at a dinner, and the Court asks accordingly.
Nobody is pitched at the table.
The Places
Eight. It is the number the house holds and the number a table holds well.
Members are written to in the autumn and say which nights they want. The sum is stated in the invitation, charged by the night, and covers the house, the skiing and the table.
