Feeding My Soul
Its the middle of winter, and I'm in my
full-bore schedule which consists of a lot of work, little bit of play, and not nearly enough
sleep. My full time gig is driving a propane
truck, and my part-time one involves working for a Vail limo company. In between work stints, I try to squeeze in
as much play as possible.
"Play" in the winter means skiing, hockey, and the odd trip to
a tailwater to try to tempt a trout with a small fly. Sometimes I spend so much time working that I
begin to feel like wage slave, but that's where the play part comes in. Most
weeks I don't get to enjoy nearly enough of life's fun moments and fill my soul
with doing the things I love, but last week I did and it’s what makes me look
forward to winter.
First of, one night I finally got to do some
ice skating on the Colorado River, after
several sessions of clearing the snow from it.
In the eleven years that we've lived up here we've been able to make an
ice rink most but not all winters. River ice can be extremely dynamic and
volatile. Some winters I'll get the
surface perfect, and the river level will inexplicably rise and ruin it. Or we'll get more snow than I can clear with
a shovel, or the weather will turn warm and it will thaw prematurely. This year we had a warm fall, and no cold
weather until the Tuesday after Thanksgiving, and then it got cold and snowed
heavily all at once. This left the ice
very bumpy, and I wondered whether this would be one of those years without
skating. But even though the ice looked
very unpromising, I spent a sunny Sunday afternoon clearing it anyway, hoping
that sunshine would eventually do the work of smoothing it out. After a week or so, it was somewhat better
but not yet smooth enough to skate on, and then it snowed again. Once more I spent a couple of hours out there
getting that white, reflective powder off my rink, and it was at least smooth
enough underneath that I could wear skates as I shoveled, which gave me a lot
more leverage.
Another week passed, and I finally had a
little time after work enjoy my handiwork.
The waxing moon lit up the backyard aided by the bright white snow,
making artificial illumination unnecessary.
I laced up my skates, and made my first few strides down the black ice
surface, and suddenly felt as though I was flying. The skatable ice that I shoveled was almost
three hundred feet long, though not very wide. But the width didn't matter,
just being able to zoom up and down the river felt surreal.
My wife came out but didn't trust the ice enough
to put on her skates, so she walked around with me on it until she got
cold. At one point a train came by over
the bridge spanning the river, and we watched it pass by while almost
underneath it, feeling its tremendous power. When she went back inside, I told
her that I would in shortly, that I just wanted to do a few more fast laps.
After doing that, it warmed me up so much that I just kept skating. Finally I
was able to reluctantly tear myself away, and go back inside, happy in the
knowledge that all of my hard work shoveling snow was not for nothing.
The next day, I got my soul filled in a
different way. Terena and I drove down
to Evergreen, where I gave a presentation to the Trout Unlimited chapter there.
Not long after I began my float fishing business, I hit upon the idea of doing
Powerpoint presentations to TU chapters as a means of getting my name out
there, and drumming a little business. Not wanting it to be an overt sales
pitch, my presentation talks mostly about public fishing access along the
eastern Flat Top Mountains where
I live. Over the years, I've kept adding more and more slides and maps to it,
to the point where I could probably spend hours doing it. I love living where I
do, just downstream from some of the most spectacular river mileage in
Colorado, and the enthusiasm I have for sharing it with people seems to be
appreciated. I've now done this
presentation to perhaps a dozen TU chapters, and have also given it at the Fly
Fishing Show in Denver a couple of times, but it had been over a year since the
last time I’d given it when I spoke in Evergreen last week. I had almost forgotten how much fun it could
be talking about my beautiful backyard in front of a roomful of slightly
inebriated fishermen, with huge images of colorful cliffs and trout behind
me. They wanted me to try and keep it to
about forty-five minutes, but it ended up being closer to an hour and a half (though
no one seemed to mind). When I was done
the chapter members gave me a nice round of applause, and it was wonderful to
see my wife's beautiful face beaming at me as they did. That was another big deposit into my soul
account!
On Saturday, I had to deliver some propane in
the morning, and delivered an entire truck full of gas to a single customer
with multiple tanks. This left time in
the afternoon to run up to Beaver Creek to do some skiing. In the winter, I leave my skis and boots in
my car just in case the opportunity arises to get out for an hour or two, and
this was one of those opportunities. Even though our winter was off to great
start in terms of snowfall, it had been a full week since had gotten any fresh
powder. Nonetheless, there are plenty of places to find untracked snow at Beaver
Creek if you know where to go, and I do. Mostly that involves skiing in one of
the many aspen glades that abound between the main mountain and Arrowhead. Most
of that terrain is in-bounds, but some of the runs I do were shown to me by my
good friend Ted Duckarope.
It was a beautiful day to be on the
mountain, with mild temperatures and the cobalt blue skies Colorado is
rightly famous for. I parked at the free
Arrowhead lot and began my afternoon there. From the top of the lift, I
skate-skied straight ahead into the trees and could see the single set of
tracks I had made a week earlier. For the next three hours, I made one run
after another on virgin snow that the thousand other skiers who had been here
in the last week had missed. How this is the case is a bit of a mystery to me.
A lot of people are terrified of skiing in the trees, and as I can personally
attest the are quite painful to run into. But I think that groomed runs full of
other skiers are much more dangerous than trees, for as hard as they may be,
trees don't move and won't run into you!
With each run I took I grew happier and
confident, until I was in a completely blissed-out state. At one point I came
upon a steep bump run while traversing the mountain to get to another glade,
and barely paused before dropping in. I began skiing bumps rather late in my
career, not until my late thirties, and I still stop and check them out
thoroughly before plunging in. But on this day I was skiing with such a high
level of confidence that I tore right into them. Halfway down the steep hillside
I had what was almost an out-of-body experience. My head seemed to be
unconnected to my body, and it was like I couldn't feel my body or even control it. I flew down
the hill but didn't seem to be touching it at all, it was like I was flying. My
fifty-two year old body just performed like a well-oiled skiing machine, and I
was just along for the ride. I had experienced this state of grace before in
powder, but not in the bumps. It might be how a skier in a Warren Miller movie
might feel like, watching themselves projected on a large screen, but the
screen was completely inside my head.
I finished the day as I usually do, by
catching the Strawberry Park lift just
before it stopped running at four
pm. This gives me one a long, last run along the spine of the
mountain and back to the top of Arrowhead.
I was the last one down off the hill, and felt like the only person on
the planet. Days like this are why people make the sacrifices they do to live
in the mountains they love. Careers and relationships can take a backseat to
getting that narcotic-like fix. I work
twice as hard as I did in my twenties and make half as much, but I get to live
beside the Colorado River with a
beautiful woman surrounded by the mountains that prompted me to move here
twenty-eight years ago. How long my aging body will allow me to keep pursuing
this rigorous and active lifestyle is an open question that I'm not sure I want
to know the answer to. But I intend to ski and fish and skate and row until I'm
physically unable to do so, and maybe even a little past that.
Maybe heaven is a place that people with kind
and benevolent souls get to go to once they shake off their mortal coils, but
I'm not sure I want to put all of my eggs in that basket. I think that heaven
is inside off all of us, and can be
found in those moments of sublime perfection that occur when we make an
effortless turn in the powder, or in a perfect cast to willing trout, or when
making love to our life's partner, or in making a perfect pass to a teammate’s
stick in the blinding blur of a hockey game.
To do something right and well in the moment
is to be in state of grace, and to create as many of those moments as we can in
this lifetime is as close to heaven as we can reasonably expect. If a bearded
and berobed St. Peter is waiting for me someday like a bouncer for the world's
most exclusive nightclub, I hope that I'm not found wanting. But until then,
I'll just keep feeding my soul every opportunity I can get, and try to enjoy
this daily miracle we call life for as long as I can.
