April 2006
Monthly Archive
partway!
Posted by squirrley on 29 Apr 2006 | Tagged as: home
well, here’s half a meditation (to be finished soon):
It’s Saturday. I’ve been reading Ian McEwan’s Saturday, and it is oddly reflective of my own interior world.
I’ve been back from skiing for nearly a week. The thing about the ski trip is that I hardly thought at all. The first full day out, the temperature plummetted, falling below -30 overnight. It pretty much stayed that way for much of the trip.
It was fine. In fact, it was quite civilized. Zola’s slow roasted coffee (leftovers from a film shoot donated to Peter) by the fire in the mornings. An easy, rolling start if the weather so required. One -30 morning our campsite, the only site out of the wind, was in shadow. It was too bloody cold to do anything. So cold that we couldn’t thaw the eggs; the egg whites were fried, and the yolks still congealed and globulous, even after a half-hour’s slow toasting by the fire, followed by cracks into the frying pan. Anyways, that particular morning, we just sat around enjoying breakfast an extra hour till the sun slid its way over the bluffs and sparkled on our tents. Then we broke camp, and were quickly out on the ice.
My hands are still stiff: every morning for the last week they have been swelling. I thought at first it was just cold: it’s pretty tough to do anything in big fat mitts, so I was constantly whipping them off and bare-handed setting up my tent, undoing zippers, securing bungees.
But I think it’s more likely I have ’skier’s claw’, sort of like tree-planter’s claw: seizing up in the hand from all day repetative motion of clenching and plunging a ski pole into snow.
Anyways: for most of the trip, my mind was a blank. There were some stunningly beautiful moments. Moments on all scales: the feathered growth of crystals on the surface of the river ice, like the down shed from a baby duck. Tracks of wolves, blown over by snow or etched into the ice in such precise detail you could make out every claw. The strange sliding tracks of otters–foot tracks follow by a large long swoosh of the belly coasting on the ice. Scenes of rapid jolt and flight in the 3 pronged tracks of rabbits. Dragging tracks from injured animals.
And of course, wide swaths of landscape. A deep, glistering canyon, a mile long and almost half a mile high, which we glided through easily (one of the few stretches without snow over the river). Pinnacles of rock, dropped like dragon’s teeth, on the ridges of hillsides. Wide willow flats (repleat with animal prints–a family of wolves actually tracked part of our party through this stretch, and howled in the night) trickling with channels and pathways. An impossible tangled mess where we got blocked off on every side by melting overflow and thawed channels, and wound up camping the night. But though we couldn’t get out, we could see–we were the centre of a shallow bowl, elliptical, as if the world around expanded through a wide-angle lens. Our foreground was a world ordinarily only reached by canoe: a rich breeding and feeding ground, habitat for moose and foxes and all kinds of birds. A maze of passages, brambles, thin trickles of mud. All low-lying. And awash far away, separated by the main arms of the river and the miles and miles of flats, the rounded white topped caps of mountains lapped out to meet the arc of the earth’s rim.
We later passed through these mountains. Tundra mountains: more like large mounds, treeless and rounded. Shaped almost as large sand dunes, only carved out of snow, sloping over the land. Wondrous.
Anyways, other than the moments of open looking, I hardly thought. Or rather, all my thinking was instrumental. I slogged. I set up camp. I packed up. I put on layers. Took them off. Broke trail (though not nearly enough). Dragged my pulk up and over hills. Snacked.
Partly, this slogging was self:-inflicted: I had a bunch of wrong stuff, or rather stuff I improvised with but found a lot more slow, such as my 3 season tent which was ill-suited to set-up in thigh high snow. There’s so much to learn on any new style of trip. My first full day out I half-froze; I’m sorry to have towed so much unnecessary stuff (chiefly food, at Mr. Rifkind’s advice–but the reality is that at -30 with a stiff wind one hardly lunches at all, the only really useful thing, except for hot meals, are snack-foods. Try making a sandwich when the bread and all the fixings are frozen!). But I’m glad that I did have assorted equipment options. My second day out, having survived a bone numbing wind chill when I finally realized ‘this is like -40, I should be wearing a face-mask’, I completely restructured my outfit. Fleece pants over long johns: this sounds sweltering, and would be in any either milder or wetter climate. But it’s so dry that you can sweat buckets and in ten minutes all of it is wicked and evaporated away.
After the first frustrating night, I also tried to get more efficient with my set-up and camping. But there was only so much I could do–being unwilling to follow the lead o’ the sizeable minority who slept straight outside, tentless and tarpless. My set-up, with two bags rather than one really good winter one, and other various cumbersome additions, such as the slightly-warmer-than-being-straight-outside tent, was just slow.
I was definitely a group laggard. Whether it was my slippery skins (the little rugs one attaches under one’s skis that have a one-way grain that bristles to prevent backsliding) and difficulty getting up hills on them, or my mess of stuff, or just that I’ve always been pokey, I think other people had a lot more free time. I had to concentrate fully from the moment I woke up in the morning–right away packing up the sleeping bags, reeling in the thermarests, flipping the fly off the tent so it could start to dry–in order to be together enough to be packed and out with the group. Somehow, others managed to do most of the work of cooking breakfast, cleaning up, and looking after group tasks–and still they’d be zipping out of camp before me.