I ought to be getting used to it. Having ended ski season fifty times, it is sweet sorrow around which I am always conflicted. I anticipate spring and summer unreservedly, but I will miss skiing. We actually never stopped skiing last year; a pact fulfilled, a bit psycho—obsessive, compulsive—healthy and all kinds of fun.
Yet undeniably, living at a ski area, the yearly end of lift-served skiing is a major demarcation across all sectors of my life. Ours is a seasonal lifestyle, perhaps more so than most. We enjoy four distinct seasons each with its own pleasures; even mud season carries with it a certain, uh…cachet. It is the nature of the place though, and as the years pass, I know as soon as one ski season is behind me another approaches.
The actual changeover from ski season to après-ski mud season can be jarring. Accustomed to appropriately frantic end-days behavior, suddenly we transition to significantly more restrained pursuits…or not. The change is not subtle: ski season ends and I get my life back. Maybe it’s just me.
This year that transition has teeth sharpened on economic malaise practically unknown to an entire generation. Not in over twenty years has economic debacle so permeated our culture that it trickled down to places like Crested Butte. While I remain convinced that resorts are sustainable and people will always visit, no question: national economic woes will affect our traffic.
It is the rule not the exception that most ski resort businesses close up shop when skiing ends. Off-season is a good, authentic time of year when we relax after hosting visitors. This year, in the economic toilet, it is both blessing and curse to close the doors. One way or the other, there is relief.
Off-season means broadening my perspectives. I will lead a life less circumscribed by fifteen-minute bus-schedule increments. I will bother my horses instead of the ski patrol. If I want to ski, I will earn my turns in the time-honored manner of walking up hills in order to ski down them. I will frequent high ridges where ravens alone ride the thermals, and when I’m done I will sit in front of this machine and try to describe what I saw there.
“What?” asked my boss. “No more politics?”
Oh, there will be politics. How could there not be? If Earth really matters, then everything I see while out stomping around the mountains is worthy of respect. And the only effective path toward its preservation is political.
The converse is also true. When I spent my time writing about rodents in the backyard and saving the Uncompahgre fritillary butterfly, I found myself fighting an uphill political battle that ended at the Oval Office. And George W. Bush paid me no mind.
Furthermore, if I belabor economic disaster I get depressed and lose sleep. While the world should never forget how we got into this mess and who put us here, I have flogged that dead horse mercilessly. That is not to say I won’t flog him again, but it is time to get back to basics, to my fundamentalist and radical roots. I want to convey some sense of wonder.
Don’t be surprised then, to read about skiing in Earth Matters, because to me the fact that gravity works is a wondrous phenomenon. Don’t get freaked out next summer when I start going off about trolls or high-alpine sirens. And if the muse starts dictating, you can be sure I am paying attention and trying to get it all behind the cursor. Radical fundamentalism is often at its best when it is fanciful and nonsensical; just ask any radical fundamentalist.
John Muir wrote, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.” That is no news to an ecologist, and probably confusing to everyone else. Who knew the Uncompahgre fritillary butterfly would land on Bush’s desk? Who knew obscure derivative financial instruments could lay waste a world economy?
My job is to pick out something by itself and demonstrate what it is hitched to, how it is hitched, and why any of it matters. Politics is part of that, but politics can’t exist all by itself. It is connected to the other stuff, even seemingly frivolous pastimes like skiing, hiking and annoying my horses.
My horses don’t know about all that connected stuff; they know only that they are hitched to the post. It is probably better they don’t know about the big picture, because if they did know they’d be so full of themselves they’d be almost impossible to deal with. And I want things a little easier than that.
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