The Gap

Kirkwood March 29, 2011

At about 3:15, I was flying down the bottom of 10 (well, really one of the runs: it felt like I was skiing from the very top of the mountain all the way down to the bottom, that big long bomber run you remember for a while). The snow up top was amazingly slow, given how steep the ledge was, and how steep the pitch just below The Wall. But then, about halfway down, I got the confidence to carve harder and faster, and so the run down to Off The Wall (the bar patio of choice, at the bottom of 5/6 lifts) was just pure fun and adrenaline. As were some other runs today: the ditch off of 11 again, the big ups and downs on those walls, and also every run on the groomed stuff off 11 and 5.

I skied down popped out of the skis and walked out onto the patio, which was literally baking in the sun. There are a bunch of tables and chairs, but I love the actual ski lift/bench at the back, so I plopped down there and gazed lazily at the scene: a black and white spaniel lapping water, a very cute girl saying the spaniel’s name over and over in a kind of annoying overly cute way, an easygoing table full of late 50 early 60 somethings, some party-people-looking dudes laughing and catching the large amount of rays falling on us. The mountain was still busy, the lifts not closing for 45 minutes or more; people coming in off the mountain, that look on their face: weather plus runs plus exhilaration plus blue sky = endorphins agogo.

A guy came up and sat next to me on the bench; his big old German shepherd ambled with him on leash, and sat in a dignified way beside him. Which made it all the more hilarious when a few minutes later he then tried to climb up between us on the bench. He didn’t make it, and his owner – John – who had been talking to him sotto voce th entire time, asked him what he thought he was doing. It’s just the kind of thing dog owners do, and I thought of my own dog at home, running with him in the sun behind cohousing…so there we were, two dog owners, and we struck up a conversation about…wait for it…dogs!

He mentioned right away that the dog had been despondent because the other dog in his life had recently died, or rather been put down. He said the disease and then said it was sort of like doggy aids, pretty grim attack on the immune system. From there we talked of less heavy things – aging, the way German Shepherds have been misbred – until the spaniel caught sight of the shepherd and wandered over to have a sniff and a looksee. John said “often it is little dogs that are the most aggressive” when the spaniel jumped back at the sudden turn of the shepherd’s large head. Over came the spaniel’s owner, and there we were, three dog owners at the top of the world, a bowl of blue overhead and the sun absolutely pouring down, everyone drinking beers and lazing and having that post ski moment. And all was right with the world, and God was on her throne.

I loved that the spaniel’s owner (a local I’d met last time I was up here, on a wild night at the Tower Bar) was worried that when he took a run, someone might run off with his dog. “She’s my kid, she’s my girlfriend right now, I don’t have a girlfriend, but I’ve got her, she never complains and loves me.” And I heard all the sweetness there and the irony too of course, but the love of the animal shining through.

Up in the sky a contrail going straight up. Like someone drawing on the sky. The plan just hauled up and up, and the contrail seemed to come right out of the top of a big old magnificent pine up on the slope.

Well we were a little cluster and so approachable and a guy came up looking for sunscreen (a little after the fact as both of us laughed at) and the spaniel guy clued him in to where you could get sunscreen at the ski shop. We were having that kind of talk that you don’t have as much anymore; people outside, with or without dogs, but not going anywhere for the moment, no one rushing off or giving the impression of being busy busy busy. I almost heard us lapse into southern drawls.

Finally the spaniel and owner ambled off. John and I talked and the talk came round to his owning a place up there, and his daughter 13 on the Kirkwood ski team, and how he’d retired and right after that came up to ski and tore the crap out of his ACL. But – he rehabbed, and now he was biking hard, and feeling great; he’d skied on the ACL with no problems. I thought about my knee and about rehab and ultimate and how the slow process now has the patina of a religious pilgrimage to the Land of Not Having and then Regaining A Knee. We sat and his words came into me and were productive that way, making a deeper space internally for me, while also letting him lay out the story for himself as well as me: the tear, the frustration (not only no skiing but no biking, no way to do That Sport You Really Love And Can’t Do Without).

And I heard about his other dog, the smartest one he ever had, and how when they’d put the dog down his wife and his daughter had a rough time, a really rough time, and how the Shepherd had too, all of his family mourning the animal that they loved and that clearly was part of them. And how his wife got ill and they sold their business in the Bay Area and moved up to Kirkwood to live. I asked how that was for the teen (not perfect but she was managing) and the wife. And he told me all the things she loved about the area, the wildflowers, the birds, hiking around, finding evidence of settlers and wagon trains and early inhabitants of the lake below the mountain. And I could here the love in his voice, shining through, a thing so lovely at the time that I marveled at it.

We talked for a while, a slow long while, and then he left for home and I went to fetch my snow boots, change, and head to the General Store for the four keys to happiness for today: whole milk (for coffee and hot chocolate and mochas), Tylenol (I’d run out of Magic Pills for the potential headache and body ache of skiing), Green & Black Organic 67% Dark Chocolate infused with Arabica coffee, and a big 24 ounce Pepsi (I blame Pete for bringing Cokes, which I respond to more or less the way Pavlov’s dogs responded to his whistle). Putting on my boots meant taking off the heavy ski boots, which is always a small but important pleasure of skiing; today however for whatever reason (the slow easy burn of the afternoon, the promise of a good meal and a cold beer in my future, the knowledge that I was no longer a Lift 10 virgin) each boot slid off and my feet emerged and this felt way better, way more delicious and pleasurable, than would seem possible. In the midst of boot ecstasy, I looked up to see a guy looking at me, so we started talking. Today was his first day of sking after a bad injury. Knee. I started to think perhaps the universe was telling me something, not necessarily predicting a knee injury, but underlining the Jesus like parable of the old guy and the slope. How’d you do it I asked? And of course it wasn’t skiing; in fact, he fiftied it. I explained: fiftying it means you injured it not really doing anything at all. Fortying it means you were doing something you always do and this time you sprained your ankle or twisted your back seemingly from nothing. He laughed and said he was doing some contractor work, plumbing and kneeling in a bathtub, and he got up. Bang. Knee made a bad noise. Surgery. And – voila – today, after having had surgery in frickin’ January, he was back, skiing The Wall twice and skiing Palisades and everything off Six. And that look on his face, that one, I totally understood, because that was my face too: trashed knee for me since August, a long slow rehab with plenty of worry and no ultimate and skiing coming up. September, October, November and the knee was still not right, even though I was praying to the rehab gods and making the Statiions of the Rehab Cross and being a very good patient.

And now here we were, both of us trading that story that includes months of material in a few sentences, but which each of us is the perfect audience for.

Boot on. Still a slight buzz from the luxury of putting on snow boots instead of walking the 250 yards home to Timber Ridge in ski boots. The sun seemed improbably high in the sky. All the concepts from the books I’ve been reading were percolating, my brain delighting in the pok pok of the process as a part of my mind cycled through topics for writing today, tonight, tomorrow, the next month: Hamlet’s Blackberry, Distraction, Computationalism and neoliberalism, the Mundane Cyborg and the Fukayama decidedly not mundane nuclear crisis. And one other idea: the gap.

I want to leave you with this idea, and hope that you consider it as a strategy for having slower, deeper days. The very shortened version of the gap is: in his book Hamlet’s Blackberry, William Powers remarks on a phone call to his mom. He’s late, she’s cooking dinner, he pulls out his phone. When he hits her speed dial number up pops a picture of her, one that – as he looks at it – he realizes he really likes. One that captures something essential and lovely about his mother. They have what he calls their very typical I’m late conversation, “it’s Kabuki now,” and then she says she’ll hold dinner. And then they sign off. And:

“I take the phone from my ear, glance again at the photo, then hit “END” and watch it disappear. Driving along, I feel an unexpected surge of emotion. I’m thinking about how fun it always is to spend time with my mother, how lucky I was to be born to such a warm, companionable person…As the minutes pass and I drive along, these thoughts about my mother flow into new ones…For a while, the car is a floating cloud of filial affection and, well, joy. It’s extraordinary, this feeling of time out of time. Everything dreary and confusing about my quotidian life has dropped away. I’m not rushed, cornered, inadequate creature I often feel like. I’m absorbed in these memories which seem to come from a place both beyond me and deep inside me, as if far and near, outward and inward, have come together in a new harmony.”

Now his book is about how cell phones and other digital devices have had a profound effect on us; how we have become busy busy busy, always connected and always distracted, disconnected from our internal worlds, the worlds of depth, lost in a sea of outside and external stimulation. Yet here is a wonderful mment where the phone allowed this powerful connection to happen. How, he asks,did it do that?

And his answer, a few pages later, is great. In between, he goes into a long side discussion of cell phones, of overhyped Steve Jobs talks and the iPhone ballerina who twitters and blogs behind the curtain during performances. But at the end of the day, what made the cell phone experience profound was the gap:

“…the real magic of these tools, the catalyst that transforms them from utilitarian devices into instruments of creativity, depth, and transcendence, lies in the gap that occurred between my phone call to Mom and the powerful experience that followed, That gap was the linchpin, the catalyst. It allows me to take a run of the mill outward experience and go inward. It is the same for every kind of digital task. If you pile them on so fast that screen life becomes a blur and there are no gaps in your connectedness, you never get to that place where the most valuable benefits are. We’re eliminating gaps when we should be creating them.”

Today after skiing and before shopping and writing (writing at least partly on cell phones, distraction, and cyborg competences in using prosthetics), I had that gap. It wasn’t a phone call; rather it was an afternoon of skiing by myself, often in a blur of turns and physical exertion. And perhaps you, dear reader, can fill in a gap of your own, one that allowed you to access that Arcadian space, which exists between phone calls, between busyness at work and busyness not at work.

Happy gapping!