Clinging to this mountain - #17
And refusing to let go.
It’s ski season, baby! Well, kind of. There’s about a foot of snow lingering in our town, little enough that the dirt road already revealed itself after a short sunbath and the taller grasses are poking through like someone could only afford a handful of hair implants. Supposedly by the next newsletter, it will have snowed 15 more inches. But it’s a weather forecast. It’s about as accurate as a horoscope.
But that’s not stopping me from kitting up. I don’t know if that’s even what skiers call it, but such is the burden of doing something new. You get to look stupid without suffering from the embarrassment of knowing it. Here are a few other things I don’t know:
Where I’m supposed to hook my radio
How tight my boots are supposed to be when I’m just skinning
Is it actually called skinning?
How to prevent my CamelBak from freezing
How to rip my skins off without taking my skis off. (Here’s a video of a woman doing this where she says you, “give it a nice whip,” but so far my skins have required more of a life-or-death tug-of-war.)
These are the best fitting boots I’ve ever worn and I already have shin pain, which, who knew it was called Shin Bang? Not me!
After reading that article, starting to suspect these are not the best fitting boots.
It’s ungainly to be a beginner again. Nice gear can only offer so much protection from the curiosity of a stranger before they’re like, “what is that girl doing?”
She’s struggling, that’s what she’s doing. That’s what she likes.
After years of being a part-time athlete, my eyes are bigger than my stomach when it comes to some things. You’d think the very idea of doing something that requires you to carry a shovel, a probe, a radio, and a “please save me” beacon would be enough to convince me to start by earning on my turns on the groomers, but it just isn’t.
And I think it has something to do with my face.
In two weeks, I’ll turn 36. I’m old enough now to know that 36 is not old. I’m no longer the same lunatic who told herself at 24 that if she didn’t amount to something by 25, she might as well give up. In many ways, I feel younger than her. I eat better. I’m stronger. I don’t have back pain. My joints don’t hurt. My flexibility hasn’t diminished. I’m also not binge drinking multiple times a week, but time and sun and joy are starting to etch away at my face. Lines are deepening, a canyon of concentration is becoming a permanent monument between my eyes, and TV seems to have convinced people that it’s not just kitchens but everything built in the 80s that is due for a renovation. And renovate they have. I started to notice it more in LA. Faces around me weren’t accepting the same fate as mine, and the stillness of their beauty somehow accelerated the slipping of mine. It sent me into a descent of life maximization.
I started new projects and new skincare routines. I made spreadsheets tracking my habits. I (obviously) moved to a whole new state. But in my desperation to cling to youth, one idea out shouted the others: become an extreme athlete.
However fresh I’m framing the arrival of this new goal, this type of goal is not a new thing for me. Once every two or three years, I lose my fucking mind in a nihilistic tailspin, that nothing is worth it unless I suddenly change every aspect of my life to become something better, something stronger, something worthwhile. Have you ever taken an Enneagram test? I’m a Type 3. Here’s what that means:
“Threes want success not so much for the things that success will buy (like Sevens), or for the power and feeling of independence that it will bring (like Eights). They want success because they are afraid of disappearing into a chasm of emptiness and worthlessness … Threes fear that they are nobody and have no value.”
The Enneagram does not hold back. Why this insatiable hunger refuses to attach itself to my desk job and insists on me doing something significantly more dangerous, I’m not entirely sure. But something tells me it’s closely related to combatting that feeling of emptiness with feeling alive.
And man do I feel alive out there.
This tiny town is almost of the backcountry. National Forests surround us on all sides. In less than 30 minutes on foot, you can feel so achingly and magically alone that you forget there’s a town within crawling distance. The perfect playground to make a complete fool of yourself, to fall face forward so hard and fast you snap out of your bindings and smash your knees directly onto the skis in front of them, to disappear into a cloud of powder and not have any idea if your skis are even still attached, to pizza the entire way down the trail through the trees because you’ve seemingly forgotten everything your ski racer of a father taught you some twenty years ago.
It doesn’t matter out there, because it feels so incredible to be alone, to be scared, to be unsure, to have only yourself to figure it out.1
Yesterday was only my third day of skinning. And despite my lungs and my legs having acclimated enough to carry me to the good snow, I have so, so much to learn. But I can tell you this: I can feel the clunky sliding of the skis beneath me get smoother and smoother. I can feel my heart pumping harder and harder as I cling to the side of the mountain and to my poles, to grace and to competence. Away from the roads and the people and the laundry and the emails, on a mountain whose spectacular silence dwarves my thoughts and my worries, I feel myself crack open. I am vulnerable — not in an intimate, private way, not in feelings and fears, but in every bone, every ligament, every cell offering itself to the vast and complete violence of the natural world. The cold air exchanging in my lungs, exhaling hot steam on a crisp, white day. My lower back wet with sweat, my cheeks sun-kissed and snow-burned, with the sole goal of climbing a mountain only to dance through its covered gullies and talus fields, leaving a trail of rhythm and joy behind.
Out there, success isn’t tethered to anything but getting up and getting down unless you explicitly ask it to be. It is the closest I have found to that chasm of emptiness I fear so much — a place where I have no worth and no value beyond any of the trees or elk or birds in the sky, and it is exquisite.
Maybe it is not youth I cling to, but how easily youth entangled itself with danger and the feeling that yielded. That is a feeling so far and foreign to sitting at a desk that the desk begins to warp just supporting the writer describing it. I was a tree once. I was of the land and the air. I was there, I can still feel it, I can still feel.
Being a ski instructor in high school doesn’t help me here. I am a novice and the most eager kind. I still have avalanche courses to take. I still have muscles that need strengthening. I still have fears that constrict around me. I am at the bottom of the mountain, still dreaming of getting there from the top.
The wrinkles get deeper in that blinding snow, as I furrow my brow and look up into the sun, as I laugh at myself and get mad when I fail. So long as the snow gets deeper with them, I don’t mind. Youth does not escape me in the great white bowls of the mountains. It clings to me, because we’re the ones who forget it, it does not forget us. It watches with the curiosity of a stranger, “what is that girl doing?”
She’s struggling, that’s what she’s doing. That’s what she likes. Now are you going to ogle or are you going to join in?
Don’t Panic: When skinning alone, I always bring my radio and spot. I always tell someone where I’m going. I always consult with experts on safe routes. I always check the forecast and the avalanche reports. I always make smart decisions about danger. Or at least I do when I’m writing about it.