We Had Marlon Brando’s Island Utopia to Ourselves
“Dad liked everything that lived on this island,” his son Teihotu told a filmmaker in 2016. “We did a lot of stargazing on the beach, we sailed on the full moon. A lot of not talking. Just looking. At this place, you have all the answers.”
The Man Who Saw Too Much
Fellow Aspen first responders were momentarily shocked by Ferrara’s news. PTSD was supposed to happen to soldiers, a malady incurred on jittery battlefields far from home, not in a Xanadu dedicated to strenuous good fun. But Ferrara had long suspected he had PTSD and wasn’t surprised. “Of course he got PTSD,” says Pitkin County sheriff’s deputy Alex Burchetta. “Mike always did it big. He climbed the biggest mountains. And when he was on duty, he seemed to get the biggest calls. Injury, trauma, death—for 30 years, that pager was on 24/7, and he couldn’t get a reprieve. You’d have to be naive to think that he’d be impervious to it.”
