“I set out in the late afternoon, to ski my property line. Not worried about the fading light, not pressured to do any epic skiing. No, just a woods inspection, where the Catamount Trail follows my land. Streams are mostly frozen, or easily avoided, where the water still runs fluid. I have a good idea now, who broke the trail with snowshoes. It’s a blessing, really. She’s a tough one’s, lived up here over 35 years. Older than me, by a little. Took on the neighborhood’s rougher days, when it was lawless. And stamped on a few toes. I’m a different sort of ridge runner, I reckon. But I respect her kind. There won’t be as much guess work for me, learning this mountain, thanks to her. Slipping between fir trees, on my short skis, trying to remember the telemark video I watched and which leg does what. I know I was taught by the best, but on downhill ski slopes, I have routinely & totally lost my cool. It’s only up here in the woods alone, where I can finally catch my stride. Up here, where you can head into raw powder exactly when you need or want too. That’s my heaven, these days. We all need a heaven. At certain times of life, it’s a warm body or a secure shelter. It’s money in the bank, or a sibling who’s totally there for you. I’ve had very little of any heaven, for a long time. So any pure place stumbled into, will take me by storm. It will conjure up past dreams, even things that really happened. Like the ski I did eight months pregnant with my first born, to a remote, off-grid inn set deep in the woods. Newlywed, as yet unawares of what I was dealing with, I remember pouring over a children’s clothing catalog called Hanna Andersson, under blankets in our loft bedroom. Fueled by wood stove, the whole place operated on a visceral level. How beautiful it was, despite my own personal tragedy and I still believe in such romantic things, though none have worked out for me. I still hear the silence of the forest, and my husband’s voice below in the log cabin kitchen, cajoling staff. In those days, the storms that buried the woods came with mystery. You had only so long to feel it, but until it faded, the magic was real. A lot of magic was real back then, that isn’t now. I don’t exactly know how to explain that. You sort of morph into new realities, and find other incredulous coincidences. Like how do you explain that my second cousin used to ski over Lincoln Gap to get to work. I was living in the same town at the time & never knew. Didn’t know him, until the day he called into a radio talk show I was doing with my other second cousin [Steve]. That’s how we roll, I guess, as a family. If you didn’t marry well, at least as a consolation prize you got multiple second cousins, way cooler than you could have fabricated in your own imagination & then some [Christopher].”
