Same as it ever was…
Sara is holding my hand as I roll into heart surgery. “You haven’t changed The Will have you?” Uh, no, its minor surgery, it’s like the toe-nail clipping of heart procedures…baby please, focus, healing energy. Her questions continue until the anesthesia kicks. “Who would you like to read your eulogy?” James Earl Jones. Can you think of anything cooler than Darth handling the show? “Where do you want your ashes spread?” Ideally there’ll be no ashes…but she’s onto an interesting question. Easy answer, off the top of Wolverine Cirque, full on paddle-out, everybody hoofing their own way up and taking their own line down, but with prizes for biggest huck and best line, and somehow…somehow Sublime playing really loudly across the whole cirque. These are my thoughts as I drift off.
I wake imagining a list of favorite places and realize I don’t have them as geography but instead as a fusion of locations/times/people that create that perfect, y’know, Zen thing. And sitting by my hospital bed, patiently (for days), is Sara, a storm of tears and bewildered upset trailing across her face.
The moments that I most often try to recreate are the deepest powder days when people stream like ants away from the mountain and the blizzard rages sideways and upside down. On the stormiest days, I like to stop, plunk down trailside in the snow and just hang for a bit. I watch freezing people race home as I sit toasty, layered perfectly with a warm core, clear goggles, wriggling hot fingers. And then I get antsy, because instead of lamenting the intensity of the storm, I soon get to rage right back at it as hard as I can on ungodly powerful skis, busting a track viewed by no one through the deepest snow. Rinse, repeat please.
During the fall equinox I biked the Crest trail with a friend, a pure freerider who descends like mercury and has little patience for “hippy stuff.” A hard snow squall blew across the Solitude ridge-line, heading fast toward our path; we decided to cross back down in a hurry. The fusion of white graupel on brown trail and yellow aspen leaves was intense as we pedaled our legs off. Being at-speed on my bike in bitter weather, yet all of my gear working seamlessly, chasing a ripping rider through epic fall colors, sliding the banks, trying to beat the weather was, well, perfect. The anti-hippy wanted no part of my faux-Zen musings and forced me to chase or be left behind.
Yet if forced, if I just had to choose just one best place/time, I guess I’d go with 6(ish) a.m., September 1st, 2007, Black Rock City, Nevada, sitting on the hard alkaline soil of the deep playa as the sun rose pink. I wore the perfect piece of gear to sit and watch a cold Burning Man dawn; a GlowFur* jacket powered by sixteen AA batteries, glowing kryptonite green as 47,000 neo-hippy’s dance in the foreground to a thousand different beats, weaving endless fluorescent trails in the desert sky. It’s a very different kind of storm and it’s just too cool. –John Bresee
* www.glowfur.com; courtesy of the king of the playa, David Lee. Respect!
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