The trek

(The successor trek to this trek)

Okay, okay, you got me. I'm not going to write "101 Ways to Die on the Mountain". Hell, I never intended to. Not only would it be to court a fate that is severely unwelcome, but it would also be a stretch. It would smack of inauthenticity. The truth is that I haven't daydreamed about more than a couple-three ways to die on the mountain. You want them? Here they are:

1. I am walking along an open expanse of snow in a draw or on a ridge and the snow gives way under me. I fall into a yawning crevasse, never to be heard from again. Winston takes over my blog, but everyone can tell he's an impostor.

2. I am traversing a steep face of snow. About halfway up I decide to sit down for a breather. No, it's not an avalanche. I'll leave that prosaic death scenario to the second-rate bloggers. I sit down and sip on some water, munch on some nuts, get comfortable. Then I think what would really make me comfortable would be to take off my snow shoes. So I do it, planting them securely in the snow beside me. Next, seized by, oh, what to call it--the imp of perversity, perhaps--I decide that it would be an interesting experiment to tramp around a little bit without the snowshoes to get a handle on just how difficult it would be. I walk downhill, sinking up to my waist in powder with every step. After no more than 20 paces--hard going, I might add, just brutal--I have an inkling that what I'm doing is foolish. But it's too late: There is no way I'm making it back up that snowbound slope to my pack and snowshoes without, precisely, the snowshoes. Oh--I also left my knife up there, meaning I have no way of fashioning primitive snowshoes for increased traction through the powder. I'm fucked, in a word. Thinking to allay the fears of my readership, Winston steps up to the helm of the blog but doesn't fool anyone.

3. I head up high in my snowshoes, toting my XC skis on my back. At an appropriately high point I switch foot apparel and begin to ski down. You guessed it: I haven't the foggiest about how to turn or brake, and go sailing headlong over a precipice. When they find me they conclude it was a suicide. But Winston, who knows better, launches a hopeless campaign to expose the truth on the pixels of africauntitledpartdeux.blogspot.com. Mostly because of his unbearably high-flown prose, my parents and friends view the campaign as a shameless publicity stunt and launch their own counter-campaign to have the blog shut down, may it rest in peace. With Winston out of the picture, the all too fitting executor of my literary estate is Entropy Himself. Shiver.

~

I had of course wanted Winston to step into the breech tonight, weary as I am, but he made some vague excuses about having to tend to his ailing wife and I had to let it go. Technically he was duty-bound to narrate this post, but I'm flesh and blood, so I let it go.

Why am I weary?

I'm glad you asked.

I'm weary because I executed the trek up to the Nez Perce Pass according to plan. That is to say, I got up well before the dawn was at the trailhead at daybreak. I'd packed the night before and made arrangements to have Tipper fed later that day by my neighbor Terry, bless her. My gear this time was as follows:

A huge backpack, deadweight 7 lbs., containing the following: Sleeping bag (I checked, and the piece of merde is actually rated to 40 degrees F), inflatable mattress pad, tent (minus the stakes to economize on weight), also 7 lbs., stove, a half-filled 1 l. steel gasoline canister, first aid kit, 2 headlamps, a few tealights, 2 lighters, 6 Lil' Hotties (that's a registered trademark, damn it!) chemical warmer packets, 2 space blankets, a few feet of utility rope, extra sweater, long johns, socks, gloves, reading material (The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño), a relatively useless map covering hundreds of square miles published by the Idaho Parks Service in 1989, compass, timepiece, field glasses. There may have been some more things. Ah yes, food: A small bag of almonds for refinement, a few fistfuls of raisins for pep, some remaindered Grape Nuts for fiber, 1 tin of sardines for brainpower, 1 tin of kippered herring for my ancestors' sake, 2 PB&J sandwiches for my country, and 4 Swedish oat balls made by me, for power (oats, sugar, butter, egg, vanilla flavor and cocoa powder mixed up, rolled into balls and frozen). On the outside of the pack I had a bottle of water, a canister of bear mace, and a Swedish Mauser made in 1911. On my person I wore a thermal top, a windbreaker, snowpants, two pairs of socks, XC ski shoes, and the skis themselves, which I picked up at a used ski equipment auction in Bozeman back in November. They have the old 3-prong nordic bindings and are made by the Finnish outfit Karhu).

Enough fetishizing of material. Atoms, molecules, fabrics, alloys, brand names--who needs them? Let us enter the rarefied air of pure narrative experience!

As I was saying: At daybreak I pushed off and began skiing up the road. The sun seemed to lurk behind the ridge to the south for hours, and I was a long time skiing through the shadows. It would have been cold, and was in fact cold when I stopped for water and an oat-butter ball, but the expenditure of energy while skiing kept me tolerably warm. It did not take long before I passed the farthest point I'd reached on the road until that time. The going was relatively easy, the uphill slope of it just a shade to this side of perceptibility. At around 11:30 I reached a landmark. It was a campground called Fales Flat, which let me know that I'd covered 8 miles. With only 6 or so to go, I was entertaining visions of being camped out at the pass by one o'clock. This, in short, was not to be. Shortly after Fales Flat the road shrugged off its riverine moorage (it had been cleaving to the Nez Perce fork of the Bitterroot River) to cut a path up along the side of the mountain, and my pace was reduced to an old man's shuffle. It was hard going, but not nearly as bad as last weekend, and I was not reduced to the indignity of counting paces between breathers. After a long and tiresome grade going straight up I came to the switchbacks. After the first switch I took a longish breather and consulted the map. It looked like I had less than a mile to go. By that time the sun had warmed the snow to slush, so I strapped the skis to my pack in favor of the snowshoes. From here there isn't all that much to report: As I should have expected, the last mile or so seemed to go on forever. If you've ever been on foot hoping that the next turn will reveal the summit you can't see you'll know what I mean. It was torture. I kept telling myself Look, if it's not around the next bend, just make camp and make a quick stab up there in the morning without your gear. That way you can say you've been to Idaho while saving yourself all that trouble. I ignored this sagacious inner demon and trudged on as the sun scorched me from above and below. You know how it ends: I made it at last, the view from the pass into Idaho was beautiful, damn beautiful, like something out of Caspar David Friedrich, and I camped in the snow. I had a glass of wine as I watched the sun go down and read Bolaño until I fell asleep, and then again in the middle of the night. It wasn't nearly as cold as the weekend before, and I actually managed to sleep decently. The following morning I was sore all over, and the trip down, though beautiful, was an exercise in aches and pains that I've never had before, the sport of XC skiing being new to me. There were a couple dog teams being mushed by city folk near the bottom, but there was also an older fellow on skis who turned out to be a friend of my neighbor's. Good for him.

I should mention the conditions under which this was written, the constellation of which is new to me in this place. It is late, and a heavy rain is drumming on the roof. What little snow remains on the roof has been crashing down off it at odd intervals as it becomes saturated. It is 37 degrees outside, which means that heavy snows are swirling higher on the mountain, which is good, not least because my father is arriving in 5 days to take me on a ski holiday. Part of me does wish the rain down here were snow (the arc of my personal meteorology tends toward snow, to paraphrase Dr. King in this month of February), but the drumming of it seems to have an equivalent precipitative effect on the mind which, in concert with the wine I am drinking, has been making me feel altogether alive.