Night Skiing

The temperature was eerily warm for late January, but I was determined to ski at the resort and so set out for Girdwood.  I had been spending all my ski time on the cross country trails in Anchorage.  Along the highway I could see little piles of rubble loosened from the crags above by the earthquake and its aftershocks.  Note to self: let someone else test the rock before rockclimbing in the spring.  A sign flashed avalanche work closures on the highway but I blew by it too quickly to read the dates and times.

The snow was wet at the base, as was expected. I managed to make the last run up Chair 6 and as the chair approached the end of the ride I could see the liftie ahead  folding up the seats of the benches as the skiers disembarked.

It was pretty dark up there at 4:35 p.m. and I felt a little disoriented, noting that even though I’d skied this run dozens (hundreds?) of times this was my first day out this season, my latest ever, and the shapes of the drifts and lines vary a little bit from year to year.  I am going solo, not unusual. I ease my way down Mighty Mite, the easiest line down to the tram station.  After that the lights are on and ironically this provides much better definition than the flat light of the sun.

There’s not much evidence of any grooming and some of the lines are mashed-potato-ey and the effect it has on me is that I’m tentative and easily worn out.

So few people on the tram that the operators don’t bother to give the tram speech, which hasn’t changed in years, though can be useful for tourists to be warned of the tower swing.  The operator has the Marley cranked:

Cause it's news (new day) news and days
New time (new time), and if it's a new feelin' (new feelin'), yeah
Said it's a new sign (new sign)
Oh, what a new day

He is singing along, expertly timing every pause and intonation.  Actually, about half the tram riders are singing along: Oh, what a new day.

A few tram rides later the operator says, “It’s like the same 15 people in every tram.”

On many of my runs I can’t see anyone below or above me.  As if I have the whole mountain to myself.

I ski until my legs are about to buckle. I am reminded on an on-line training forum someone asked if downhill skiing counts as “training.”  I chimed in: I don’t know what kind of skiing you do, but I pretty much ski until I cant even stand up.  So yeah, I count it as training.

I know my wife is entertaining friends at home, so I’m in no rush.  I stop by Chair 5 for a cheeseburger and glass of Broken Tooth IPA.  The highway is dark as hell and there is some new rockfall–new since the drive down– to skirt.

The next morning our friend Sarah who early-morning commutes back and forth from her bakery in Anchorage to her cabin in Bird will be just behind the car that gets crunched in rockfall. Mile 113.  She has to call the ambulance and wait for the road to open.  Last I heard the guy is critical and Sarah is staying in town for a few days.

Roma, Mexico, Me

Though I admired the earlier films of Alfonso Cuarón I didn’t know anything about Roma going into it.  Within a couple minutes I knew I was in Mexico City in the early 1970s.

I knew this because in the early 1970s I was twice in Mexico City, the second time for about three months.

Roma is loosely autobiographical and much of it takes place behind the gates of an upper-middle class family home.  Most of the residences in Mexico City lie behind these gates and when I was there I was acutely conscious of having no access to the lives inside them.  Thus the intimacy that Cuarón reveals now felt like a late and unlikely gift.

The Mexico that Cuarón shows us outside the family’s gate felt very familiar: the strange random musical paramilitary parades in the city streets, a casket business on a roadside, the vague threats of violence from protesters or policia, the low lying fog below the mountains in the countryside.  These details might have been drawn from my own memories.  I look forward to watching the film again to absorb more of its rich atmosphere, now that the story is known to me.

Thinking about my own time in Mexico, the winter of 1973–’74, I realized that I was only inside of two homes.  One was the home of the long-time ex-pat and mountain explorer, Otis McAlister, the other was the home of a young American couple who worked as teachers.  They kindly invited me to spend a few days recuperating at their house after I became sick high on Iztaccihuatl, the eighth highest summit in North America, an occasion marked by severe dehydration, mild frostbite, and brief hospital stay.

The rest of my time there I stayed in one-star hotels or slept in the mountains.

The occasion for me being in Mexico was my idea to write a guidebook to climbing the volcanoes of Mexico.  This plan was foiled by two facts, not the least of which was that I did not know how to write.  The other consideration was that the pleasure of my travels was precisely in not having a guidebook on which to rely.  If future mountain travelers needed a guidebook, maybe they should go elsewhere.  Or so I thought.  A guidebook in English would be published about ten years later.

What I never lost was the feeling that I wanted to write about the experience.  But I didn’t know what I would write and I would wildly underestimate the amount of time it would take to shape the experience.  And, when the book, Forty Crows, actually got written, almost forty years later, it was not a book I was capable of imagining when I was twenty years old.  It’s as if I shot a few rolls of film and they sat for decades in developing trays waiting for resolution that may or may not . . . develop.

Roma is described as loosely autobiographical.  Who knows what that means, exactly?  And whether it matters.  My own novel is probably exponentially more loosely autobiographical.  About twenty of its 400 pages might have been written as nonfiction.  And certain details of the protagonist’s past, told in flashbacks, are stolen from memory.  It’s not me in any literal sense.  In a figurative, what if? sense, it’s all me, in the way that all fiction is an answer to the question what if?

I look forward to my next viewing of Roma.  Forty Crows is not my Roma, but it is my Mexico.

Shameless self promotion:  https://www.amazon.com/Forty-Crows-novel-David-Stevenson/dp/1985082683/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1546290372&sr=1-1&keywords=Forty+Crows

John K. King Books, Detroit 2018

I check the mountaineering section first.  Often it doesn’t change between my yearly visits. I find a copy of Scrambles Amongst the Alps, sixth edition, hardcover. Sixth edition is 1936.  The book had been in print 65 years at that point.  This edition has a dust cover (tattered) and the six foldout maps.  Since my only copy of this is cheap paperback, it’s a no-brainer to pick it up.   The story culminates in Edward Whymper’s tragic first ascent of the Matterhorn, its last paragraph remains among the truest observations ever made about climbing, oft-quoted and easily found, if you’re interested.

            In the “new” introduction, added to the original by Whymper in 1900, he observes: “The pleasure they [these scrambles] cannot be transferred to others.  The ablest pens have failed, and I think, must always fail, to give a true idea of the grandeur of the Alps.”

I wander around, aimless. John King  holds over a million books on its four floors, an abandoned glove factory in its previous incarnation.  A clerk sporting a black leather jacket adorned with patches and messages which I can’t casually inspect well enough to actually read, asks if he can help me.  I ask if he has any Wittgenstein, realizing immediately that I had meant Benjamin.  He strides ahead vigorously toward the Wittgenstein, as if to demonstrate that, of course, Wittgenstein is always at one’s fingertips.    

“We have Zettel,” he announces victoriously.

"You have Zettel,” I parrot back, as in disbelief.  I have never heard of Zettel, but try not to betray this suddenly embarrassing fact.

“Yes,” he says, “Zettel” and he takes it from the shelf and thrusts it into my hands in one quick motion.

I cannot hide my admiration for a person who in a building holding one million books knows the exact location of Zettel.

Zettel contaiuns the collected fragments found in a “box-file” after Wittgenstein’s death.  The text is in German on the left pages, translated to English on the right.  I turn randomly to entry 160: “The way music speaks.  Do not forget that a poem, even though it is composed in the language of information, is not used in the language-game of giving information.”

I decide instantly to acquire Zettel.

“Do you have any Benjamin?” I remember to ask, remembering also to pronounce Benjamin correctly.

“No,” he says, “we cannot keep Benjamin in stock.”  He pronounced Benjamin even more correctly than I had.

Somehow I find this a reason for hope, not just for the city of Detroit, but for the world in general.  The market for Benjamin has never been stronger!

I wander about, pausing to inspect a copy of Unter dem Vulkan.  I guess a have a strain of the German language running through my mind today, unbidden.  Even though can’t read German I desire this for some reason, even though I have five copies of it in English. I exercise a smidgen of self control and pass.

Being in John K. King Books is one of my life’s greatest pleasures. You could go to Detroit for two days and spend half your time at the Detroit Institute of Arts and half the time in John King.  Two of the richest days you could ever have. You should do it.

Notes, Marginalia, Ephemera

I am moving offices, from larger to smaller (of course).  Thus I have had to deal with books, of which I clearly have too many, even though they are my life’s blood.  Okay, moved the books.  Now for the papers, which have proliferated apace with the books.  Multiple drafts of published works, multiple drafts of unpublished works.  Notes.  Meeting notes.  Notes written on meeting agendae.  Notes written on conference programs. Notes written on the backs of file folders.  Ephemera. Marginalia. Most of this stuff I have just tossed (recycled) but I saved a few notes, because, well, once I found them to be noteworthy.  Unfortunately, some are unattributed.

•“I don’t see the difference between a flash flood and a story.”  ­––unattributed, but most likely a Padget Powell-ism, written on an MFA residency schedule

•“You are living your life and you have your pen in your hand.”  --unattributed, but sounds Craig Childs-ish, written on MFA residency schedule

•Within five minutes of meeting my surgeon for the first time, he told me I had a large cancerous tumor on my kidney. And nearly simultaneously he explained that he would simply remove it and I would be fine.
         This was surprising news because I was without symptoms, but I believed him, that I would be fine.
         I was 51 years old and just a few weeks earlier I had made a long difficult ascent of an obscure peak in the Teton Range. At the time I would have denied this, but I know now it was my unstated assumption that I was more or less invincible.
        The moment that illusion began to crack was upon breaking the news of my impending surgery to my mother over the telephone. I was casual but she broke into tears and put the phone down
       After a long pause my father picked up the phone and I realized that my attitude with my mother had been all wrong.  I realized that age 51 is a late date to understand that I was no longer 17.

––Written (unedited) in margins of conference handout, “Vital Signs” by Natalie Kucz, and pictured above

•“Headboard-slamming sexfest.” ––unattributed, on the back of file folder. 

•“She said the worst thing: “You have a novel here.” I said, “I hate you.”

                        —Unattributed, on a Kachemak Bay Writers Conference program

•“It’s easy to be sloppy when you know you’re delivering what people already want.” ––Rich “Yoda” Chiappone

•The lawn is infested with dandelions.  What’s wrong with that? You secretly wonder.

The numbers on the fertilizer bag describe the nitrogen levels, you think, but all you care about is the weed killer.
You fertilize the lawn with a spreader.  You hold the spreader open with your left hand which begins to strain and cramp before the fertilizer is all dispersed.  To make the fertilizer actually spread you spin the cranking apparatus with your right hand, similar to a fishing reel, but more precisely like the winding of a toy Jack-in-the-Box.
The fertilizer covers your shoes and you wonder how much of it you have inhaled.  You wonder if your sons will really keep the dog out of the yard as they have promised.  And then you think of the three incidences of cancer that you have survived.  And how not once did a surgeon or oncologist speculate as to their causes.

––unedited, written in the margins of an essay by Scott Russell Sanders

•“Experience is abundant.  Language is scarce.  Poetic language is more scarce.”––unattributed, on a Kachemak Bay Writers Conference program

•“Crevasses must not yawn or gape.”—note to self

 •“I was groupie, and then . . . I found out I was bipolar.” ––unattributed, how

  not to write a memoir

• “In order to embark [you must first believe]: ‘I am worthy of an exception.’”