Late Season

Late Season

1

It really does matter, this idea that we see and act from our own perspective, our own bodies, habits, history.

I was walking up from Timber Ridge to The Wall Bar when I thought about this. I remember teaching my lit students the poem Tintern Abbey, and quoting Wordsworth “We half create what we perceive.”

Let’s see how this plays out in writing:

I was walking up from Timber Ridge to The Wall Bar when I thought how different the mountain felt, how different I felt from all those other times (over 30 days here this winter). They feel like a dream, like the person who experienced them is a will o’ the wisp.

The mountain closes in two weeks or so, and has that late season feel. Some of these folks have had an entire winter in snow, or a good part of one. They’ve been in winter, in weather, and so the transition to Spring really feels like a transition.

Funny. I’m seeing the mountain for the first time again.

2

Let me explain. I’m sitting at The Wall Bar at Kirkwood, surrounded by people who’ve been skiing all day, some of them, and all week some of them, and all winter a few of them. The loudspeakers are on not too crowded chill mode, so that I can barely hear Edie Brickell sing “choke me in the shallow waters/Before I get too deep.” The date is April 19, 2011, which is late in the ski season and so a slush fest late in the day. Gotta ski early on a spring bluebird. Anyway, I’m not skiing for the first time all winter, and sitting with that reality. I took a knee to the leg playing goaltie on Sunday, and instead of being annoying, it’s like someone from the millionaires vs billionaires locked out National Football League tackled me helmet on quad. So I’m walking to the mountain with no skis, with my black briefcase and no jacket and non-waterproof hiking boots and a black Triathlete visor. No helmet; no sound system.

Turns out all this matters. I feel the melancholy of the season, a little, as we all get ready to not ski for a year. To some extent I think a few of us are recalling what just happened for us this winter. And there really is, I think, something to be said about this feeling; it seems natural, and I surely feel it. Am I representative of the skiers like me? Or is my slight athlete’s limp and attire and inability to ski coloring how I see the scene? One thing is certain; absent the carving on the snow, and absent the mood-altering and producing playlists that live on my iPod but really come out to play in my ski helmet, the day feels less like a cool indie movie starring me, and more like an indie movie about the end of something, somethings. The lack of soundtrack is a dead giveaway.

This is a flaneur question. I’ve been thinking lately about how much blogging reminds me of the 19^th C flaneurs like Baudelaire, the one Edmund White talks about roaming Paris without goal or agenda, simply observing (and being observed, and merging with different scenes, and probably drinking one’s way into the early evening, even if the drink is espresso and not absinthe).

In case you need a definition, one that appears at the top of a web search is:

The term flâneur comes from the French masculine noun flâneur—which has the basic meanings of "stroller", "lounger", "saunterer", "loafer"—which itself comes from the French verb flâner, which means "to stroll". Charles Baudelaire developed a derived meaning of flâneur—that of "a person who walks the city in order to experience it". Because of the term's usage and theorization by Baudelaire and numerous thinkers in economic, cultural, literary and historical fields, the idea of the flâneur has accumulated significant meaning as a referent for understanding urban phenomena and modernity. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flâneur).

And I am certainly lounging, not skiing, loafing, not working, taking in, not filtering at first. Perhaps I am a snow flaneur. In any event, the music is playing at half volume, everyone is chatting and the sound of human voices rises and falls, that sea of murmur a nice counterpoint to whatever is playing over by Monte Wolfe’s bar. The scene is what it is, and is not what it is not. What it is not is what draws a lot of people here I think: it isn’t pretentious, isn’t super ski bunny fashion, isn’t overrun with the wealthy and especially the young of the wealthy, partying wildly and running over hapless victims when runs cross.

I mostly love this place. Have all winter. Skied it how many days? That memory comes easily and stays, here at this lift-side table, unlike when I’m skiing, and focus is often necessary. Skiing is about spacing on the lift and thinking your thoughts, and there is a span of time – lift time – when if you don’t get annoyed you can take a time out and see what you are feeling, let ideas and memories come as they will. And then at a certain point in this lift meditation, you are at the Rite of Passage of getting off the lift, transitioning from lift time, dream time, to ski time, be time, even when it isn’t hit it hard and fast time.

The Wall Bar in sun.

3

I’m basking. Something about basking implies well being to me. I can remember times when my bones have been cold all the way down, and somehow I am now a lounging ski flaneur, a lizard in sun, on lizard time and not “die of cold” time. I think it was Loren Eisely who wrote about being on an archaeological dig in the Midwest of the United States, descending a narrow slit as the strata of rock and time moved slowly past his eyes. He talks about being out there, waiting for the dig, being utterly quiet and still, like the lizards are. Perhaps it is that unlikely meditation that prepared him for the epiphany of the piece, when as he descends he turns and is suddenly eyeball to eyesocket with a skull, animal skull, from long ago

It was not, of course, human. I was deep, deep below the time of man in a remote age near the beginning of the reign of mammals. I squatted on my heels in the narrow ravine, and we stared a little blankly at each other, the skull and I. There were marks of generalized primitiveness in that low, pinched brain case and grinning jaw that marked it as lying far back along those converging roads where, as I shall have occasion to establish elsewhere, cat and man and weasel must leap into a single shape. (Eisely, The Immense Journey).

That moment. Eisely is certainly sui generis, but as an essayist he and a few others have merged environmental knowledges and the essay form. And this is valuable because it experiments with a language designed to instruct but also to entrance, to invite into a more complex world.

I come back from this memory to realize I am basking in sun over 50 years later. And I recall Eisely writing in 1957,

Though he was not a man, nor a direct human ancestor, there was yet about him, even in the bone, some trace of that low, snuffling world out of which our forebears had so recently emerged. The skull lay tilted in such a manner that it stared, sightless, up at me as though I, too, were already caught a few feet above him in the strata and, in my turn, were staring upward at that strip of sky which the ages were carrying farther away from me beneath the tumbling debris of falling mountains. The creature had never lived to see a man, and I, what was it I was never going to see?

What, indeed?

[This is Ramona. She apparently has a reality show. I thought she exemplified sophisticated basking well enough to rate a citation.]

4

The flaneur came about around the same time as 19^th c Realism and its literary effects. And so the essay, that excellent genre for the middle style, the anti-Ciceronian style, that easy Senecan amble…is for me a place of comfort. I can bask in certain kinds of language use. And I can use these effects to paint a picture for you, you who are not here, as skiers come off the mountain in droves. The snow is now utterly SLUSH! Did I say that late afternoon is when the grabby snow emerges like some horrid under bridge troll to grab you when you pass by?

So. These chairs are serious outdoor chairs here. Big metal; heavy for wind. And oddly comfortable for metal. They’ve been here every day and seen it all, the huge storms that blew snow sideways and challenged us to just get back down, the day after January day of no snow and worried people and still-happy skiers (hey with a huge early base the skiing was pretty sweet! And it did snow in February, just when it needed to).

I’ve sat in them many times this year. I remember two weeks ago sitting here in crazy hot 55 degree sun wondering how I was going to get home, no car, no plan. Now the sun is in and out, spring sun and white-gray overcast, calm and then breezy and then a chill winter wind from god knows where, and everyone feels it, like that moment when someone walks over your grave. People are talking and energized and happy to be down from the slush. Runs are compared, different parts of the day discussed, yesterday is mentioned (snowing, windy, often minimal vision) only to be incorporated into the other Days of Skiing that make up the body of skiing in your body, if that makes sense. Part of skiing is skiing in different conditions, being able to hang with all kinds of snow and weather, like baseball it’s a long season and there are lot of games.

Plans are also being made. The guy in the shorts and white restaurant jacket is indeed a chef, talking on the phone to someone who has plans for them. But the chef is calling to find out whether his replacement really is coming, and he sounds worried. Sounds also like he’s talking to a boss or someone else in charge, since the conversation is very polite. And suddenly he laughs, conversation shifts to its all good, he’s suddenly resigned to the fucking double shift, or not, and the not knowing because he hasn’t heard from his chef sub…or whether his sub is even on the mountain, or back in south lake, or Jackson, or…

Everyone who works here gets used to working way too many hours. Easier to overwork a few people than have too many employees…and someone is always quitting or leaving for whiter pastures.

4

The scene is, as my 15 year old would say, chill. I’m watching the various scenes unfold. The two dogs, the one dog who isn’t happy with the other dog, the owners negotiating the conflict pretty well. The young dude in long hair beard bright plaid shirt shorts snow board boots, and his story. About the place in New Hampshire, the one he’d heard about but never found, until that day. Up on top of the mountain, find a trail that goes along forty or so steps to…picnic tables. Hibachis. Secret grilling, wine drinking, a styling way to interrupt the ski day. The skiing Arcadian.

Off the mountain I feel this guy coming down hard, even in slush, and I pick my head up and watch him hit a big fat hockey stop almost spraying the locals. He stops, jabs at his bindings, steps out almost angrily. Comes off the mountain in a big helmet, goggles, who knows what’s going on in there. Maybe he got in a fight with his girlfriend who is five years younger and they have different ideas about a lot of things.

He walks by, storms by, or maybe he’s smiling behind that gear and he’s walking off the hill like Travolta in Saturday Night Fever, feeling it.

Five or so minutes later, more conversations, food and beer is mentioned, names of other ski places and other states and countries are overheard. The wind picks up a few empty plastic glasses and they veer over the ground, erratic, like the uncertain or the drunk.

The dog that wasn’t barking starts again, and peace is once again at risk. The couple sitting on the bench made of an old lift bench talk about telemarking, freeheeling, and the dude sees a workmate and they laugh at the inside joke: they all know the local tele stud, and like him, and put a sticker on his car (one that I’ve seen easily 20 times because I walk right by his parked truck):

No one cares that you tele.

Everyone is laughing at it, the attitude of it, the admiration mixed with chapping about potential “I tele and you don’t” attitude.

Jane, the woman on the bench, the one with tele boots, says we need to make another bumpersticker to balance the other one out: “If it were easier, it’d be snowboarding.”

Laughter, shaking of heads, thinking about those skiers and those borders, this run and that day and those moments, when none of these words matter too much. Just the something that happened to you, that you did, that time.

End of season.