A Winter's Day
We won't find answers until we leave the wrong places.
By CHRISTIAN BECKWITH

In the mountains, some days are better than others. On the good days we put on our skins and remember what we're looking for before the last of the car's warmth is gone from our clothes. It is a ritual cleansing: clumsiness replaced by the grace of a turn, confusion giving way to an elegance not found in town.

Here on a winter's day there is nothing but powder, the path of our tracks, a stillness in time. Pine boughs, brittle with cold, crack and settle as the day evolves, keeping time with the wind's passage and the muted burble of a brook hidden away until spring. Light comes into play: deep, first, with the sun's early rays, then thinning as the day grows broader. It will gather into pastels before the end—but no thought of that now. We are here to ski.

At the top we eat, laugh, have a drink of water. Then one by one we begin to turn, just the fall-line and gravity and us in the middle, our weightlessness complimented by breathing and the pounding of larger hearts. Ah, here it is, that which we've come for: a rhythmic balance, a moment of poise. Far from the clutter of workaday lives, we discover our spirits in mouthfuls of snow. Laughter bubbles up somewhere beyond senses; was that mine?

Doubled over at the bottom, our breaths alternate with giggles as we wait for our friends. Then they arc toward us in soundless curving swoops, spooning our lines with their own. These are our signatures. They will last one day, maybe two. For now, that is as much as we need.

On days like these we understand that we won't find answers until we leave the wrong places. In the ski cabin later that night our conversations are quieter. There is no need for loudness. Food, drink, the sound of wood snapping in the pot-bellied stove; outside the temperature dips below zero. Dreams come, deep and lucid, earned on another winter's day.


Christian Beckwith is the editor of Alpinist magazine, which he edits from his hometown of Jackson, Wyoming.


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