2008: Training in quiet country 'til the sun goes down

I have now been back home in Oregon from Ecuador for a month and a half--the same amount of time I spent out of the country. The comparison between the two periods of time, though, is impossible. On the one hand, I remember my time in South America as a kind of othertime, a space that isn't quite congruent or running right up together against this one. On the other hand, utterly at home in the northwest, I think back to my time spent on the equator as if it were yesterday--I could go back at any moment, it feels that close.

Even though it has really been late fall the majority of my time back here, coming straight away from the warmer climes really did throw me into what felt like winter in mid-swing (and I a ripe banana ready to peel or split). But home felt as warm and inviting with friends around the Thanksgiving table as it did frosted around the edges. On one of my frirst weekends back in town, I went with my friend Thomas out hiking in the Columbia River Gorge, a beautiful place to go-a-walking all year round. I ran up to the top and then ran all the way back down, breathing in deeply the intensity of my fall spent climbing and running at over 3,000 meters. This feeling of bursting energy and delight to beathe in the thick air was met with a bittersweet feeling as well, though, as the cold touched my chest and bade me run faster. I thought ahead to months of rain and cold. I had been living in an extended summer that might never end, or so it seemed. In fact, I'd been training with energy and vigor in the warm sunshine since the springtime, since our bicycle ride to Montana, since our ascent of Ingall's peak, and since the top of Volcan Imbabura.

Now the sun seemed to be setting on it all too soon.

Beginning at the end of November though, my attention turned to snow. Cross-country skiing is an activity which I first started doing last year, and fell deeply in love with. With the commencement of ski-season this year, I went ahead and let the sun set on my ambitions for warm-weather hiking, climbing, and bicycle touring for a little while, in order to try my hands (and feet, and ankles, and legs, etc) at another kind of touring: ski touring. The world of quiet winter whiteness has me captivated.

So Michael and I started driving our VW Rabbit out to the mountain--we got the last dusty pair of tiny Rabbit-sized tire chains for the icy conditions, thankfully, and we set out to accomplish the training we will need to eventually try our hands at rondonee skiing, skiing up to summits like Mt. Adams, ski-camping and long-distance overnight touring. Luckily, we have some good friends that are also interested in the great health benefits and adventure of cross-country skiing, so we've been in good company so far, carpooling up to spots on Mt. Hood, Mt. Bachelor, and Wind Mountain to get in lots of experience every weekend. And I'm hooked!

What at first may seem like an inhospoitable yet beautiful landscape of ice and snow, when skiing for long pushes at a good pace, can become an almost intoxicating dance that heats your body and soothes your mind. Each step--slide, hold, slide, hold or downhill poling motion becomes a beat that helps to measure out and synchronize breath, thought, and action. And the still and frozen world around allows for plenty of clean, uncluttered, and inspired thought-space, too.

The weekend of New Year's Eve, I had so many reasons why I felt an overnight camping cross-country ski trip was a choice I wanted to make for bringing in a new year. Symbolically, the white fresh and cold snow, like death or sleep, seemed to be just the thing to wipe the old year out and leave room for a new and vital spring. With all of the cakes and pies I ate over the holidays, as well, I found myself yearning for the opportunity to stretch my body in a clean, austere environment, become a part of the winter landscape of silence, endurance, and strength, and slide along like a streamlined glider on the ice.

When we woke to a New Year's Eve under our picnic-shelter roof on the side of Trillium Lake, we opened our eyes to a renewed day of skiing, laughing, and turning our noses toward the sun and what happened to be perhaps the most beautiful, sunny day of the winter so far.







It made me think: What is an old year, or a new year, but time freezing and then flowing, breaking free from solid coldness and dripping down again in thaw after thaw as a part of an endless rotation of renewal and decay. I am not apart from this rotation, I thought, and cannot, nor do I want to, stand aside. Even if it means I will beathe in and breath out, wake and sleep, live and die back again.


This is already the year of renewal and opportunity, I thought, even if 2007 is leaving today, even if my life is changing, I am not in the same training shape that I was at the end of the summer, and I will have to build once again on what I have accomplished. But I am ready for those challenges. I am ready for blue skies revealing mountainslopes and pretty valleys of glistening white and green. I am ready for grey mists, obscuring my vision and spitting rain or snow into my face. I know that some parts of this year will be difficult. I know some will be splendid. I don't know if I will live through it or die in it, if I will gain further bounties of love and material wealth, or if I will lose everything. But I do know that I will remain a part of this world, the quiet one that exists around me right now as I slide on through the trees and the green one of spring which brings the sounds of life into my ears. And I know already that it will all be beautiful to me, if I see it through the eyes of this quiet country I call home.