Independence and Me
A spirit-way of yearning, a long-ago sense of place
By STEVEN HATCHER

It's lonely up here. It's Nevada. Still Nevada and always still. Here I am in my morning silence making rich coffee and scrambling an egg on my Chevrolet tailgate, sitting and wondering: how will I do today on trusty skis and snow long in the tooth and weary of sun and future warmth? And the Chevrolet that brought me here and brought me here before and in my mind will bring me here forever tells me, "Don't worry, I'll watch from down here at our campsite of sagebrush and dirt. It's Nevada, you know, and Nevada is full of snow and you will be too by the end of the day."

It's never too lonesome when you have a talking and faithful truck that takes you high and high again in snow, mud, or dust deep and thick. It's a long way up from where we came. Three thousand feet since Elko. And when the Chevrolet said it was time to stop, well, we stopped. From here on up it's only me and my skis.

Here at our stop I watch as the snow, the full last of it, turns from impossible gray to lost and powerful blue to open and inviting white. It's all up to me. Right here right now, at this not-too-early six in the morning soft light, the secret of northeastern Nevada—the Independence Mountains—in stillness and lovely silence, with steep ridgelines and empty basins that look far into lonely Idaho and lonelier-still Oregon, is mine.

"Hello?" I hear it and I know it must not be true. But I turn anyway.

"Uh, morning?" I say as I stand, socks up to my knees, long underwear drooping and waiting to be tucked into some fleece or waterproof pant, coffee in hand. Behind him the full of Nevada washes out into the Owyhee and Bruneau drainages of sagebrush and forever.

I stare for an eternity-second at a man. A thin, strong man, obviously wise enough to know to come here. His gait tells me he's walked hundreds of these dirt miles, his beard tells me he's seen the deep snows that cling to impenetrable rocks, his eyes see me and know exactly.

"Takin' your skis up?" he asks in a German or Swiss accent. I know he knows the answer to that question and I know he would do it, too.

"Uh, yea." Me, still dumb with the idea that I'm not alone. Me, still finishing my coffee in long underwear while Old Swiss-German has hiked two thousand feet up, long before I knew the day existed. "Which way you headin'?" I ask, my hair in a mess.

"I would like to hike the cirque," and I know he means the long horseshoe cirque that feeds Chicken Creek. The cirque with Jacks Peak—who was Jack?—at its tallest pedestal, safely tucked into the long horseshoe.

"Great," I say, and I mean it. I now like the idea of mountain company.

"I think I'll take this ridge"—he points with his walking stick—"and follow it all the way around. I'm camped at the bottom, there." He tips his stick below the ridgeline. It points toward the now fully green Aspen stand.

"Great," I reply, still having trouble speaking. The Chevrolet smiles. The new hero of snowy Nevada vanishes from all sight and sound. Limitless silences.

But yes! Now I know. That was Thomas Mann, the heady German writer of all heady German writers, who greeted me this morning and brought back the limitless silence he wrote about in a long-ago ski story called "Snow." And Thomas Mann knew of the limitless silence but he knew of it in Germany or Austria or Switzerland, tall and Alpy and far away but nothing like the silence of Nevada where sound and words are hidden deep under the sagebrush and black-rock emptiness. Now he knows. He knows because he walks right up into the middle of it. The limitless, fertile silence of tall, snowy Nevada.

The words return to my coffeed head, too late for conversation but not for appreciation. With pants finally on and hair stuffed into a hat and silence returned I pull skis off a rooftop and bear down the dirt road that points up.

There is nothing finer or more refined than a Nevada morning. Its perfect cool air blows and settles into the Great Basin. Its air fills lungs and builds muscle and moves a body up a dirt road too steep anymore for an aged Chevrolet. I walk up the road where last year I drove, and somehow I'm better for it. I look up from my rock kicking and clumsy boots and I see the perfect Nevada: perfect snow-covered mountain whose north-side ski run is too perfect for a resort. Perfect slope and angle. Perfect dogleg skier's left that will take me to the top where I will witness greater and higher levels of Nevada silence and lonely stillness. This perfect mountain rests in silence while its kin, hundreds of miles to either side at some glamorous Lake Tahoe or Wasatch play field are trampled lovingly under skis and boards waxed and shiny new.

I smile because I have to, and because I know that no amount of sweat and coffee and exhausted protein will keep me from the billowed white top of my Chicken Creek and Mill Creek rock. Not like last year.

Last year I awoke at 11, at one, at three, and at five to watch dark, darker, and darkest clouds move in, spitting their June snows and ignoring the fact that I, in my too-human mindedness, had arrived. The clouds spit snow at me and woke me up to myself and I stood in the early morning grey that would not fade that day. And in the fog that hid the Mill Creek drainage, the same fog that would blind me off the mountain, the coyote, with yips and yaps that pierced the foggy silence, told me not to be so sure of my skis, that try as I might, today was not the day.

But today is different. Thomas Mann's visit tells me. The Chevrolet tells me. The Nevada still-lonely silence tells me. And now this perfect slope at my Chicken Creek Mill Creek Resort with no lift fees and uncrowded elevation tells me. Where is the coyote today? Only the ever circling red-tailed hawk shows me real elevation, circling as it does over the tops of the red and black and even June-white rock that mark the threshold of floor and ceiling, the separation of snowy space and ski time.

I stumble on and stumble I go. I hit the still-frozen morning blue snow that will roll and fold me up—snow like an old cloud, too tired to float high in impending summer sky, destined to die an elegant death of dripping melt, partnered next to its young and lean neighbor, the Subalpine Fir, and cranky older Bristlecone Pine. It is this latter tree—hardly a tree at all but more like a wooden trophy of ancient rocky mountainside—that most impresses and most pushes me onward and upward.

As I sweat and labor in the still, soft light of Nevada morning—a heated mass atop frozen snow—I bump along, head down, breathing heavily but happily, and I nearly collide with a remnant so old and so giant, and so quiet. I look up just in time to lower my head under a long arm of gnarled, red-brown, barkless, needleless history. It leans out in defiance of gravity against slope and all possibility only to turn itself in again with graceful, sculpted twists of grey and white streaks, emblems of royal heritage. The Oldest! The Noblest! Longaeva! Bristlecone! All hail the Kings-Queens of our mountain fortunes, our mountain stories, our gifts of wind, rock, fire, and water!

I do my best to say hello without disturbance. Then and there, under the arm of Royal Bristlecone, it matters not what I think but what I feel. I feel welcomed and privileged, one of the fortunate few. I scoot uphill in my awkward fluidity and lose all thought.

Higher now, deep inside a stand of fir that divides two distinct parts of my solitary resort. A stand of fir that blurs my upward vision. I struggle with the steepness; I struggle with the frozen snow of a north face that even in the long days of Nevada sun hardly ever sees light. I mistakenly try to avoid the fallen branches and torpedo cones from rough winter storms. I duck and crawl and fall in tree wells that swallow skis. I look up and up is nowhere. The same fir, the same thin stretch of snow I'm supposed to go up, switchbacks and all.

Blue snow and blue morning light, it's all the same. It's blue and it's beautiful at 8:30 or 9:27 or 6:51 or who knows when. What time is it? I'm not supposed to sweat like this. I'm not supposed to pant as coffee and eggs seep from my pores and disappear into the blue. I'm not supposed to, am I? Of course I am! I shriek, and I point myself up into the bluer blue of far away and the farther away mountaintop.

"Well," I say out loud to no one, and my sentence ends, the spoken word still escaping me. I'm in a happy fury of realization and relief: skis kicked off, water and new energy kicked on, skis on pack now, pack on back now, head uphill, the staircase so obvious now—though obviously covered in snow—shows me the way. Step by step, legs swinging as if half-pendulums, I'm carried into the clear.

Out of the fir! I think but cannot speak, another shriek inside my head. Another series of sweat and panting and even, perhaps, slight doubt, but onward I go. I break from the fir and it's nothing but warmer sun and distant mountaintop ahead. Another happy fury: skis back on (climbing skins still wet from struggle), water and new energy back on, backpack on, scooting back on.

On and on, happy fury takes me all the way to the top. I scoot around a perfect dogleg and see what I couldn't see from the Chevrolet: more snow and white. A ski run so perfect it ends and begins at a mountaintop, close now, and glazed with light. I am and will be the first and only patron at this far away and perfect resort of mine, lost in the unending chain of Nevada sky-high rugged rock.

From high on this solitary top I can see it all. To the north, the Independence Mountains stretching into Idaho and, nearer, the staircase that drops from me to the Duck Valley Indian Reservation nestled in its own prettiness. To the east, another snowy secret of northeastern Nevada—the Jarbidge Mountains. Land of controversy. Land of shovels and Swiss peaks. Home to a cowboy poet I've never met but know he must be there now in his spirit-way of yearning and long-ago sense of place.

To the south and the pride of Elko—the Ruby Mountains, resting now that helicopters and snownoisemachines of winter have left the one accessible canyon an open sore of wasted fan belts and spilled oil and deep sapling-killing gouges. I ski in solitude for them. To the west, the unknown Santa Rosa Mountains. As tall as all of Nevada but lost somewhere in the haze of late spring. I save them for another chapter.

They are all here. Together. We surround each other in the enormity of an immemorial basin filled with all things antiquated. Sagebrush. Rock. Bristlecone. Snow. Rattlesnake. Wild horse. Aspen. Pronghorn. Bull Trout. Sun. Sky.

And somehow, someway, I must insert myself into this chain of permanence, for I participate gladly (and almost without choice) in the tradition of travel and knee-dropping rhythm brought to this desert from a far away Norwegian town. Same skis (more or less). Same heel that both steers and floats above it all. Same pack on back with the same necessities: chow, water, toggery, and, if lucky, some aqua vitae from old, dented flask.

Same snow, or at least same elements that brought us snow, whether it's dry-dust Nevada or green-sea Norway. Same exuberance, or it must be—how can you participate in this primordial snow-travel tradition without exuberance? It is the same, I think. I know. A trail of energy centuries old and centuries young.

And because of this I give my thanks:
Thank you to the North for these mountains below me—
Thank you to the East for the sky above me—
Thank you to the South for my body and ability—
Thank you to the West for the life ahead of me—

With duties complete I rest on rock high above Chicken Creek's horseshoe cirque. My story is the same story as those who traveled from the Telemark town of far away on heavy skis and boots of fine leather. Wool caps. Wool pants. It's all the same. And it's all the same here in morning-light Nevada as it is in Adirondackian New York or upside-down New Zealand or tall-skinny Japan or crunched-between-France-and-Spain (where it's also the same!) Andorra.

I think that at this moment there could be hundreds or thousands of us lonely ski travelers perched high above rocks and creeks and forevergreen trees smiling at nothing in particular but the whole lovely mess of it all. The whole chance to do nothing at all but move around on frozen water, on frozen (or thawing) mountains with only two pieces of wood (or wood-like) underfoot and a pack of chow and toggery on back. It's nothing and it's everything. It's about the best we can offer to this giant spinning rock of a planet: an engagement of understatement and elegance. Tomorrow I won't be able to tell that I've been here and worked around this hidden stretch of Nevada snow—all tracks probably blown over or melted or returned to a similar state, a state in the way I found it last night: pristine and humanly empty.

I look up from my thinking to see Thomas Mann walking the ridgeline down to my perched seat. Thomas Mann—who later I find out is not Thomas Mann at all but a French Canadian with a German accent, whose name I don't know—still wise and tall and also in love with the loneliness of endless Nevada. As we talk and share hiking and skiing eats, he tells me of his love for far-away empty places—eastern Washington, northern Nevada, southeastern Oregon—and I know that I'm not alone in these empty places that I, too, love.

And I feel that it's good not to be alone, isolated within isolation. It's good to be connected inside the Great Basin and beyond. In all my exploratory ski-scooting around the county of Elko—a county the size of New Jersey and 46,668 strong—I have encountered only this here very soul who sits in front of me, beard white and legs long and thin, and that includes the heavy engine buzzing of wintertime Ruby Mountains. I like this man, this first-time visitor in my cloistered world of eternal snow and sagebrush and mountains. We talk until it's time to go. He heads toward his long horseshoe ridgeline and I prepare to reap my reward for sweating uphill.

And oh yes, part of the magic of this process of physical sweat and struggle and too much time spent head-hiking and thinking is that the end, the finality of the struggle, is filled with the most not-thinking fluid movement of body-only leaning and gliding down and farther down and all quiet except the soft slice of peaceful metal on blissful snow. It's sound without sound. It's cerebral mind-numbing without the words and false ideas to garble and confuse. It's a connected movement of float-falling too light and free for rigid words filled with rules tight and affixed with something too precise for this. The end, the freefall, is all there is to know and it's exactly unknowable and unspeakable without the participation in and of itself. So much so that I commit to the end a full three times, a trinity of up and struggle and down and bliss, snow perfect and soft and sun perfect and soft and all of Nevada spread below me in beautiful equanimity. There is nothing better than this and this is all there is: a story in constant motion that began anciently in rock-and-ice Norway and in struggles and freefalls all the way to the current Now. Three times. Exaggerated and complete bliss. I don't even notice the second or third upsweat. I simply throw skis on my back and happily start kicking. It's that kind of day. It's that kind of motion. It's that kind of story.

I might have gone for four but the late spring sun takes its toll on unsuspecting snow and I slog out of Bristlecone and Subalpine forest and straightline back to my waiting, faithful Chevrolet, patient among the mule's ears and lupine and bluebell and mission bells. Back down. Safe. Happy.

New cooler-cold beer in hand, a cassette tape (analog) plays from dusty speakers; I sit on the tailgate and sing. Music from college days of a decade or so ago. Beat Happening. Pastels. Unrest. Shrimp Boat. I love to listen to distinctly un-Nevada, un-rural music as I sit and gaze at my perfect resort before me.

It makes me feel betwixt and between everything real and all that I know to be true.


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