White

     First we climb.  Up and up through the forest following a single track in the snow.  The  loop of time is long, measured step by step until we reach the tree line and look up.  Crossing the tree line, we enter the dead zone.  And our transformation begins. 

     Above the tree line it can be difficult to know up from down.  That is, if the weather is poor.   By poor I mean blowing cold hard snow against your body and blowing thick white fog into your body.  And then there is the whiteness of snow and the whiteness of fog and the snow and the fog swirling together in the wind until, truly, you do not know up from down.  The world is a frozen crystal you cannot see through. 

     It’s a good lesson to learn when you’re young.  I mean; that you don’t know up from down.  In a very literal way.  This is not a metaphor or other figure of speech.  This is one solid fact in a place with no solid facts.  

     The world is white and blows around you.  The snow might be fog and the fog might be snow.  Through the crystals there are phantom horizons in every direction so you are thrown off kilter.  And there is a ghostly light that dazzles the eyes.  Even your companions are changed.  You are all ghosts wandering in a ghostly land.  Your companions float away and disappear in the white and then reappear one limb at a time, or a face with no body.  And you just keep  sliding along, hiking up, feeling the contours of snow with your ski poles.  Gauging your position with your feelers.  Adjusting your balance between the high pole and the low pole.  You can lean a little on the high pole.  You dare not lean on the low pole or you risk falling into the  white.  You are young, and you do not know up from down. 

    That lesson will stay with you always, even when others make grand proclamations of knowing and claims of direct contact with the mother ship and all sorts of other fantastic stories and even when these ‘others’ gather up devotees who follow their every word and these ‘others’ place themselves on a pedestal to be revered as ‘one of those that knows’.  Even through those seductive times you understand that those pretenders do not know up from down. You know because the mountain told you; the mountain howled its relentless message into you.  

     And so we climb and climb until we reach The Col.  This is the top of the glacier nestled softly between two rugged peaks.  This is The Col.  This is The Gap.  We take the skins off our skis.  The seal skins we use for climbing.  We take them off.  We wrap the skins around our waists. We eat hard tac and ripe soft stinky cheese and chocolate and raisins.  We change our bindings from walking mode to skiing mode, so our boots are firmly attached to the ski, with the heel clamped down.  We tighten our leather boots, both inner boot and outer boot, we lace them tight.  We stomp our feet.  We snap our boots into the binding.  We loop the pole strap around our hands and push off with our poles.  We are ready to go. We are restless, stretching and milling about and peering into the fog that is blowing in and out.  We even catch glimpses of peak and blue sky, here at the top, at The Col. 

     Then down we go in the deep snow without a care in the world it is all so glorious and white and you cannot see anything at all but who cares the world is surging billows of snow we glide through.  We plunge into the waves and the waves break over our heads and the snow  blasts into our faces and fills our mouths so we can hardly breathe.  We stop to catch our breath and count heads.

     But the lower we go the thicker the white becomes and the brighter the light becomes.  The wind blasts the crystal light in circles and our eyes dance through the crystals searching for a solid shape. 

And finally, we drop out of the cloud that has enveloped us.  The cloud is above and behind us, a white swirling mass of frozen air that is picking up the snow and driving it across the mountain.  We peer back into that lost place, for just a moment, because it is like waking from a dream.  And then we turn and look out across the valley below us.  The gray sky immediately above our heads, the black trees scattered below, a thin line of smoke rising from the cabin far across the valley.  

     And now, we know up from down.  We are people again.  But we are quiet with the enormity of the whiteness we have encountered, the whiteness that has enveloped us, consumed us, battered us, confounded and confused us, spun us around and laid us gently on the snow because we cannot tell up from down and we lose our balance and all fall down and it is difficult to get back up in this deep snow. We are comical actors, clumsy buffoons struggling to stand up, drunken sailors struggling to stay up. And we laugh at each other.  Because it is funny and it is pitiful and we know we are inside This White Thing.  But our laughter is whipped away, drowned out by the roaring flapping tearing wind.  We are silent-picture comedians, blind as  bats, performing death-defying slap-stick routines, high on this mountainside, floating down through this dazzling whiteness.  We all fall down.  Isn’t that funny?  

     But we do ski down; and the sky does go up. Then, poof, we are out.  And we stop just below the cloud. And we look back and up and into this dream.  But we are quiet and thoughtful because our minds have been twisted.  The real world does not seem so real any more. 

     Or, at the very least, the known world is a bit ragged around the edges.  The fabric is tattered, there are holes where you can slip through, accidently, and never come back. 

     Or, if you do come back, you are never quite ‘right’ again.  A piece of you is left behind in that terrible, beautiful place.  You are burned by the cold.  You are haunted by the wind.