Sarah Haas, Peak to Peak. You probably know Casey Wynne as the face behind the espresso machine at Nederland’s Happy Trails coffee shop. She bought the cafe a little over four years ago, when she was just 24 years old. Now 28 going on 29, she’s grown up alongside her small business, her hair cycling through different colors of dye (now purple) as the once small ivies on the ceiling grew long by the space’s filtered sunlight.
Sunlight can be hard to come by in the Colorado mountains, but somehow Happy Trails always seems warm and bright, as if the steam rising off of the hot coffee knows the sun’s secret call. As she slides cup after cup of perfectly steamed milk across the counter, Casey wears a knowing smile, genuine but full of its own mysteries. Having spent a lifetime in customer service at bars and coffee shops around the world, her people skills are as finely crafted as her lattes, the milk textured in such a way as to bring out its inherent sweetness, and ours. Like art, a good cup of coffee can be a revelation, a delightfully bitter reminder of our own inner goodness.
I remember the first time I saw Casey revealed. It was a warm spring day as she readied my cortado. She rolled up her sleeve to expose an arm covered with ancient looking tattoos. As if to say, “Me too,” I slid my sweater up to offer a peek of my own ink covered skin. She gave a knowing nod and said, “That’s what I do, you know, tattoos,” by which she meant that she was also an artist who made her marks on bodies.
Six months later, I found myself standing in her South Beaver home tattoo studio, which is also filled with sunlight. This time, I was without my sweater. Casey had just finished shaving my forearm and was now petting my skin, examining the movements of muscle lines so she could place the tattoo just right.
“Hang your arm naturally,” she said. “We want this to feel like it belongs on your body.”
I can’t remember the last time someone thought of my body like this, taking the time to consider how it moves and how it will change with age. It’s a kind of intimacy that can feel scary, the kind of thing that would never fly in a coffee shop but feels easy in a tattoo studio where the smell of green soap hangs thick in the air. Casey and I both know that I will have to live with her decisions for the rest of my life, a truth that is our mutual privilege.
With the outline of my soon-to-be dagger tattoo placed, I lay stomach down on the table to look at a view of Golden Gate State Park at dusk while, out of my sight, Casey rubs my arm, and turns the machine on to a soft purr.
“Ready?”
People always wonder if tattoos hurt and the answer is, of course, yes, but they hurt in exactly the same way as coffee tastes good because of its bitterness.
“Stabbing someone with a needle has a way of opening them up,” Casey says. “A lot of this job is psychology, greeting whatever it is that comes up for them during this process, learning and keeping their secrets.”
And she’s right, no more than 30 minutes into our session and I’m telling Casey about how afraid I am to fully commit to a life of writing and art.
“Why are you afraid?” She asks.
I admit that I have no idea.
“Well, then maybe you’re not really afraid. Maybe you just think you are,” she says.
Casey is offering the kind of wisdom that doesn’t come easily, or cheaply, in this life and in the days, weeks, months and years that follow. I will never look at her tattoo without also seeing this sagacity as a part of it. The dagger Casey etches into my skin carries the lessons she’s earned in her life: the patience she learned while tending bar in Prague, the endurance she gleaned from running a small business in a small mountain town, the steadiness of hand she gained in her four years of tattooing, the self-confidence she mastered by always following her heart’s ambitions.
But the dagger is also a creation that Casey must give away, one that will walk with me out the door and into the rest of my life, and when I think about the generosity in that fact, I know, without a doubt, that I’ve just been touched by art.
“I’ve always made art and it’s always been good, but in my mind, it’s never been easy because I spent so much time and worry searching for perfection,” Casey says. “But there’s something about tattooing that’s different, something about it that allows the imperfect to be, well, perfect. Something that allows me to let go.”
Casey is only 28 going on 29, and although she’s done a lot of living in her life, she’s still got a lot of life left. For her, like for all of us, the future is full of uncertainty. It’s like a tattoo before it’s been gotten, a sketch of an idea that will always turn out differently than our expectations. But as Casey tells me on my way out the door, the best tattoos are the ones that have a little flaw because those are the ones you will grow to love and the ones that carry life’s most important lessons.
A weekly column about locals living along the Peak to Peak. To suggest someone for a profile please email Sarah at mountainfolktales@gmail.com.
