I know how they feel.
In my younger years I’d stay active during the winter. Looking back on it now, I can’t recall why. I’m not sure I ever really enjoyed the winter weather. In fact, there’s a significant chance that I went outside solely to prove that I wasn’t a sissy; in other words, peer pressure, pure and simple, even if that peer pressure sprang from my own psyche rather than from my peers. I apparently had something to prove, even if I was the only one who cared.
Now that I am rapidly approaching
senior citizen status, December is the month in which I gradually shut down.
Early December is usually fine hiking weather, but by January I will have begun
my hibernation, which for me involves: reading some of those classics I should
have read back in high school and college, watching Seinfeld re-runs, and tying
flies for next year’s fishing season. If I get desperate I’ll watch some old
Alfred Hitchcock movies and maybe the Godfather trilogy. I’m just trying to run
out the clock until March.
And yet, I can’t fully resist the
call of the mountains in mid-winter. In the spring, I’ll be drawn to
south-facing slopes like Fort Harry or Styx Branch on LeConte for their warmth,
but in the winter I’ll go to a north-facing slope like the Rainbow Falls trail
or the north side of Greenbrier Pinnacle for the ice and snow. I’ll only do it
once or twice because it’s hard, just plain hard. The cold is not just
uncomfortable; it’s bone-chilling, snot-freezing, lung-stinging, toe-numbing,
finger-stiffening, muscle-cramping cold. Sometimes even life-threatening.
A quick summer hike is no big deal. You throw a water bottle and some snacks in your pack and you go. If you later find that you’ve forgotten something, you make do with what you have. It’s not like your gonna die. In winter, on the other hand, you think long and hard about your equipment. You make a list, check it twice, and pack accordingly. Then you take everything out of your pack and double check your list and your equipment. Then you put it all back in your pack with a small sense of apprehension that you might be forgetting something important – because everything is important in the winter.
The mountains in winter remind
me, in an odd sort of way, of the desert in summer. The weather is not fit for
man nor beast. It’s quiet and still and lifeless. We humans can take it only in
small doses because it seems to stretch out forever with no end in sight. And
yet, it’s beautiful in a stark, almost oppressive, way. If nothing else, winter
gives you a deeper appreciation for the other three seasons the way the desert forces
you to appreciate cities and air-conditioning, and maybe even people.
And so we go to the winter mountains
for their stark beauty with just a hint of danger. In June, as I walk out the
door with my day pack hanging on my shoulder, Phyllis says, “Have fun!” and I
say “I will!” In January, she says in a more solemn tone, “Be careful.” And I
promise her, “I will.” Then she looks at me, seriously, and I add, “I promise.”
So I spend the day with the ice
and snow… and the quiet. The soft, deep, serene silence. These gray & white
woods are so quiet that I feel lonely, even awkward, like I don’t know how to
act or what to pay attention to because there are no noises to grab my
attention. Nothing to distract me except my own thoughts. This must be what a
sensory-deprivation experiment is like… or a monastery.
And then it starts to snow…
silently. It’s only three o’clock, but the sun is low and these lovely woods
are getting dark and deep, and this day hike that had been a chore now becomes
a holy moment. I stand still and watch the woods fill up with snow, and for the
first time today, I am not tired, and I am not wishing I was at home in front
of the fireplace. I don’t want to leave because I have finally, finally, become
comfortable in these frosty woods – lovely, dark and deep. But I have miles to
go and promises to keep.
No comments:
Post a Comment