The week that the national media
descended on Eagle, Colo., the lead story in the local newspaper
was about a new swimming pool. The arrest of Kobe Bryant, the Los
Angeles Lakers basketball star, was noted on page 7, but not that
Bryant’s 19-year-old accuser was a local woman.
Eagle, located 30 miles from Vail and 70 from Aspen, is an Old
West, New West town. A drug store on the town’s main street
offers “nearly everything,” Fast Food Nation can be found along the
interstate, and houses of vaguely Victorian design snuggle along a
new golf course. This is the New Urbanism amidst the New
Suburbanism, springing from the Old Ranchism.
Journalists
who parachuted into Eagle struggled to describe the setting. Some
patronized it as “sleepy” or “drowsy.” Startled to learn of doors
left unlocked, the San Francisco Chronicle went further: “Quiet
doesn’t begin to describe Eagle.”
Such descriptions
are fair if your rearview mirror is a Los Angeles freeway or the
Golden Gate Bridge. In fact, cattle were trailed through the
town’s main street only 20 years ago, when the population
stood at less than 1,000. But today, the population has quadrupled,
and bawling calves have been replaced by whistling jets. Nearby,
Colorado’s second busiest airport caters to Wall Street and
Hollywood, presidents and vice presidents.
One of those
thundering jets presumably delivered Bryant on June 30 for surgery
in Vail by a doctor favored by professional athletes. Soon after
arrival, Bryant checked into a hotel farther up the resort valley,
near a place called Edwards, and within several hours had sex with
the woman, a hotel employee.
We may never know exactly
what happened in that hotel room, although people near and far
leaped to polar conclusions. Some suspected gold-digging on the
part of Bryant’s accuser, others saw the thuggishness of some
professional athletes.
Yet others pointed a finger at
race. Bryant is black, while Eagle has only a dozen blacks, noted
the Orange County (California) Register. A Denver sports columnist
asserted that no African-American could get a fair trial in white,
conservative Eagle County.
Cliches dominated the early
coverage. Confused by a two-stoplight town, many big-city reporters
resorted to off-the-shelf descriptions of a “posh” hotel and
“sleepy” town, a “flinty” sheriff and a “wide-eyed” district
attorney. Early reports of the principals were also, in a sense,
stereotyped — Kobe Bryant, the charming, good-looking jock, and
his accuser, the pretty cheerleader next door.
Amid the
celebrity scandal, one funny story emerged. Returning home from a
trip, an Eagle resident made his way past scores of reporters and
miles of TV cable. “What’s going on?” he asked. Told that
basketball star Kobe Bryan had been accused of rape, the man, still
puzzled, asked: “What high school does he play for?”
Places are rarely black and white, and neither are people. Among
the few African-Americans in Eagle County is one too poor to own a
car, yet this political novice won election to a top political
office, beating a real estate kingpin in a valley where real estate
sales drive the economy. Then, even after several skeletons from
the man’s past were revealed, he won re-election to the
county commission by a wider margin.
I repeat: A place
that makes a living from sucking up to rich people sent a rich man
packing, and instead elected a working class black man. Scratch the
surface, any surface – race, income, religion – and
“white, conservative” Eagle County becomes more complex.
Prejudice flourishes here, but it’s aimed first at obesity.
This is a place that worships athletic sweat and tends to mock the
pudgy. More subtle prejudice is directed against Hispanics, in a
county where nearly 25 percent of the population is Hispanic.
Truth is where you point the camera. The hotel where
Bryant says he had consensual sex and where the woman says she was
raped is rightly described as exclusive. Yet from this hotel, with
its Picasso hanging on the restaurant wall you can almost literally
roll a bowling ball downhill to a hundred trailers where the
Spanish language dominates. Posh or working class?
Eagle
may be “tiny,” but it’s part of what was the tenth-fastest
growing county in the United States during the 1990s. Is the local
freeway “congested” at rush hour? By local standards, yes, although
by the standards of Southern California, it’s probably
“deserted.”
Even more important, the language of conduct
varies. Going to a grocery store in Eagle, you always look people
in the eye. Avoiding eye contact borders on rudeness. But even in a
city like Denver, making eye contact is almost advertising that you
have an inheritance ready to dispense. Peripheral vision counts for
everything in the city.
That may be at the heart of what
happened in that hotel room: the direct look met peripheral vision.
Two people thought they were speaking the same language.
Allen Best is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a
syndication service of High Country News (hcn.org). He is a writer
who splits his time between the Denver and Vail
areas.
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