On Saturday, it was time for me to be a serious cross country skiing beginner, on a trip that I broke the law to complete. This was a hiking club trip that I had signed up for over a month ago, and which was so actively anticipated that when I couldn’t find used skis I bought new ones. And boots. And poles. Then I realized that I looked like a total newbie amateur, a person so inexperienced that they didn’t even know how to lay hands on used equipment.
And I waited until too late to join in a carpool so I had to drive myself. Why do I do this to myself?
I got up early and left around seven. The meeting at the trailhead was at nine. I gassed up my 2006 Lexus (a version of an upgrade Toyota 4-Runner, this particular model going on 220,000 miles) and hit the road to Wyoming. This vehicle is not a Jeep but it’s no slouch in the slush.
Wide Open Spaces
Cold, wide open spaces. The miles to the Wyoming border are flat prairie land, dotted by cows and mobile homes.
When I got to the I-80 turn off, the wind was kicking up and semis were lining the road, waiting out the wind storm. I went through a wind farm and a flashing signs said “high winds road closed local traffic only.”
I went right through.
It was a risk I had to take. I had to go skiing! I had waited years, decades, to go skiing. God knows how this happened that no skiing had occurred for me and we’d been in Colorado, this was our fifth winter.
Skiing. It Was Imperative
I drove on through the wind farm, checking the rear view mirror for cops, wondering what I would say if they pulled me over. Perhaps “Isn’t Fort Collins local?”
“Fort Collins is in another state Lady.”
“Oh.”
But the plan never had to be enacted. The cops never showed up.
The altimeter in the car started to rise. The Lexus and I were at 6000 feet. We passed an elementary school surrounded by cattle pastures. 7000 feet. Now this was in the mountains. Snow was blowing. But it was too cold for slush to form. The road had been clear and the snow danced in whirls.
No giving up. I slowed down to 40. I went around curves and looked over the edge of embankments. The prairie was behind us, trees lined the roadway. Hillsides loomed. We passed Vedauwoo where we went hiking last summer, with its volcanic spires of rock like mysterious sentries. Where was it that, they say, a lost commercial plane crashed in the 1950’s and it was never found?
The snow began to pile on the road at 7500 feet. But only an inch or two. I kept going.
I Reach the Trailhead
Happy Jack trailhead is at 9000 feet. I got there, but no one was there from our group, or from any other group, either, to speak of. There were just two cars, a Jeep and a Subaru. Wyoming plates. I pulled over.
Was I the only one that had shown? Where were my friends from Mountain’s Edge hiking group? I checked my phone. There appeared to be a message from Gary but we were outside of cell range now. I couldn’t’ read it. Should I go home? I sat in the car with the engine running and the heater blowing. It was 20 degrees out there, wind blowing at maybe 15 mph. But I had all the snow equipment – the face mask, goggles, alpaca cap, goatskin gloves, gaiters, long johns.
I thought of going home.
Damn it though. I had driven up here! I had broken the law even! A couple other skiers, not from our group, drove up and set off down the trail.
No. I had bought the equipment, I would put it on, I would at least ski up and down the first quarter mile of the trail. It’s true, I couldn’t go into the trails alone, if you don’t hike alone you really don’t ski alone in a snow storm, even if you’re not a beginner, but I could at least mess around at the entrance and try my skis.
I got them out and set them on the car. Crash. They fell. I set them up again. Crash! Again.
Listening to My Bad Angel
“You are an idiot,” my bad angel told me. “No one else came because it was too dangerous, but *you* didn’t see that.”
Okay, Bad Angel. I am an idiot. But who cares?
I went to put the ski boots on. I got out and went to lift up the skis.
Lars Shows Up
And that’s when the Blue Dodge truck came around the corner. I know that car, from other Mountains Edge hikes. It was Lars and three other skiers. He pulled up, opened the window.
“Hey! Gary and his crew bailed out,” Lars said “the wind was too high, it was too much snow,. But I thought we’d keep going.” He looked at the Lexus. “Do you have snow spikes on the tires?”
“No.”
“You should …”
“Well .. “
Now one other car rolled up, a Subaru station wagon, the State Car of Colorado, for whatever it’s worth, driven by a woman I knew from the Vedauwoo hike.
And so, in the end, it was skiing for six.
Skiing for Six
Sure, I fell down. I fell behind. After snowplowing gracelessly down a hill, I skied right into a tree trunk in slow motion on the narrow trail through the woods. I told a guy from Brooklyn New York who said his wife had left “to find herself” that this was a cliché. Advice for Lars? That he shouldn’t give up online dating even though it was frustrating at best, possibly even depressing.
I talked to a woman my daughter’s age about *her* divorce and and her ambivalence about it and told her that it was hard to deny that somehow Leo’s very badness had contributed to the that fact that we had truly great kids. I think I skied six miles, including a good mile over unbroken trail like they skied in medieval Norway in one of my favorite novels, Kristen Lavransdatter.
(In Kristen Lavransdatter Erlend, Kristen’s husband, has to ski alone across 25 miles to his parents in laws house to tell them that Kristen has successfully given birth to their first child, albeit after only 7 months of marriage, a fact which might have raised his father in law’s eyebrows a bit …
Erlend was a rake who had been under the ban of the Church for living openly with another man’s wife back when Kristen fell in love with him and she should have known that he was trouble. But he was, according to the novel, a solid skier.)
That could not, by the way, be said of me, though there’s always hope I’ll get better. On the other hand, what I lacked in skill I made up for in enthusiasm. And gratitude for even getting the chance to try.
Gratitude Week
The skiing trip was the beginning of a week of gratitude. On Monday, we teachers went back to work, and my colleagues were grateful for what I could do to help struggling readers, and they listened when I talked, and they believed me when I looked at the test scores and made suggested what we should do.
Flying to California
Tonight, I’m on a plane flying to Orange County, which to me is a magical place, where I will meet Scarlett who is joining the Marine Officer Training Corps a week from tomorrow. I will help her pack up her apartment. In the airport, I sat and talked on the phone to Randa, about things various and simple: how many dogs were coming off the flight from the OC (8) and how many went on going back with me to California (4) and that the skiing trip was a spiritual victory and the farm fields covered with snow on the drive to the airport were so beautiful. And I felt grateful for so much.
There’s nothing like being over 50 and having experiences you’ve wanted since you were a child. Not just skiing, either, but having a group of friends who actually (well, some of them anyway) were up to do something really exciting and fun together.
