Winter valleys by Leath Tonino

WINTER VALLEYS

AND THE WORDS THEY CALL FORTH.

By Leath Tonino

Initially, the voice is faint, easy to ignore. By the middle of December, though, it’s booming, barging into consciousness while I’m stirring the pasta sauce, showering, joking with my girlfriend.

You must forfeit the comforts of civilization, the cheery warmth of house and hearth, and go alone to the wilderness. You must strip yourself of the real world and bare yourself to the realer world, its diamond edges and severe delights. There is a single way to shut me up, the way of effort and uncertainty and spicy soup and violent gales and thermal underwear and delicate alpenglow and glittering constellations—Orion, Canis Major, The Seven Sisters.

Quite the dramatic dude, that inner voice. And likewise the voice that replies, the squirming, shirking, chamomile-tea-sipping wuss.

Oh, oh, but I don’t wanna. It’s intense. The cold makes my toes ache. The lonely beauty of huge mountains at dusk makes my soul ache. Ache pervades this existence as is—so much ache, so much ache. Why can’t I linger here on the couch where things are simple and secure? Why can’t I snuggle in flannel pajamas forever?

Because, the first voice barks. Be-fucking-cause.

There’s no point explaining that I/we reside at 9,000 feet in the Colorado Rockies and already crosscountry ski five evenings a week. Or that I/we once worked at the South Pole, shoveling Antarctica’s fathomless snows in temperatures that routinely hit -70 degrees. Or that I/we have undertaken numerous expeditions over the past decade –mile after mile, sweating and shivering, dragging a sled heaped with gear, actively choosing the suffering of the season, the burning blisters and screaming fingertips and vast white boring blanknesses of mind. Nope, no point. The logic of be-fucking-cause is unassailable.

Thus, on a random Saturday, it begins. Specifically, a pattern begins, a practice. Until the glacier lilies burst from the thawing ground, until the bears rise from hibernation and, with an astonishing hunger, feast on those symbols of spring, those harbingers of summer, those dainty yellow petals, I will brave the backcountry. One trip per month. Twenty-four hours minimum. A different local valley each time.

Declares the first voice: Winter is transient, impermanent, a fleeting challenge, a fleeting blessing, a strange power that demands immediate attention, total devotion. Giddyup, hoss!

To which the second voice, cringing, asks:

CAN THE HOSS AT LEAST BRING A PLASTIC PEANUT BUTTER JAR OF WHISKEY? DECEMBER

Constance Mahoney

Camp chores finished and rosy light blushing half a dozen encircling peaks, I grab my ski poles, figuring it’s too early for the sleeping bag, too damn frigid to stand around doing diddlysquat amid hovering breathclouds. Six uphill miles delivered me to this inhuman spot, a clearing beyond the maze of firs, and I could definitely use a rest. But rest doesn’t compete with creeping hypothermia. Best to fight fatigue and stay busy. Pump the blood, aimlessly explore.

As I’m about to push away – wait, no, c’mon. That’s precisely when the scrawny fox, all bushy tail and mystical eyes, appears at my side. I freeze, trapping the breath-clouds in my chest, unwilling to move even my lungs for fear of spooking her. How long do I hold this stance? How long do I maintain this suffocation? Long enough for the apparition to paw within a yard of me – sniff, sniff – and take a seat.

She is a monologue without words. She is a one-act play in a theater of silence. And, of course, like the rosy light, like the day, like any thought I’ve ever had on any subject other than fox, she is suddenly gone.

Forget skiing. I burrow into the tent, arrange a foam pad beneath my butt, layer on the fleece and wool, slap my arms and pinch my nose. Cracking a book seems wrong, borderline obscene, and messing with the stove to boil a glop of couscous, dehydrated peas and tuna fish is an unwanted distraction.

Fig Newtons dipped in the whiskey jar.

Starshine on the encircling peaks.

The vestibule door zipped open to the million-tree stillness.

I stare until midnight, stare at everything and the gaps between everything, my face stiffening, skin tight across the bones, her face everywhere.

ISOLATION IS MARRIAGE, A WEDDING, A UNION.

Chris Miller

JANUARY

The forecast calls for snow, a foot or three by dawn. That is exciting. That is intimidating. That is what it is.

Isness. Isn’t establishing a kind of trembling primal contact with nonnegotiable earthly reality the basic, enduring aspiration? My childhood forts dug in the driveway’s plow piles. My teenage experiments with crampons, ropes, waterfalls of soaring ice. The itch to work in Antarctica. The compulsion to camp in the dead – nay, in the alive – of winter.

Indeed, putting my body in situations, environments, places that force it to become the very place itself – that’s always been the goal. Not merger or woo-woo holism, but attunement, responsiveness, my senses reaching toward the sensible and the sensible reaching back in turn.

Again the trusty pack rides my spine, heavy with equipment and supplies that buffer isness and, paradoxically, draw it close. Three p.m gauzy gray skies are thickening, flurries starting to fly. The burgeoning storm hides up there in the overcast, as do lofty ridges, precarious cornices, steep loaded slopes. Avalanches kill with a grim regularity in this range. Solo is judged dangerous.

So be it. Nobody claimed the quest for isness was safe or, for that matter, sane. With companions, god love them, chitchat reaches toward chitchat, superimposing a topography of language on the raw terrain. Solo is necessary. Solo is vital.

I keep to the valley bottom, weaving with the weaving creek. Four p.m. and I’m searching leafless aspen groves for a sheltered site. Five p.m. and the tent is taut, anchored to snapped branches staked deep in powder. Six p.m. and the flurries are fat flakes, a speedy slant. Seven p.m. and the mac-n-cheese is bubbling, drenched in Tabasco. Eight p.m. and the storm is rowdy, a drunken party, frat boys and cheerleaders, the dance floor a chaos of swilly cans and crotch-to-ass grinding. Nine p.m. and I’m toasty in my sealed chamber, afloat on the weather’s surging energy, nodding, nodding, nodding off.

Night at this latitude, at this time of year, lasts 15 hours. I sleep fitfully, skittishly. Two a.m. and I’m rolling onto my hip, punching the tent’s sagging ceiling, listening to the whump of sloughing snow-weight. Three a.m. and it’s deja vu. And four a.m. And five a.m. In my scattered dreams, that weight, that whump, that accumulating isness remains near, a millimeter of nylon separating my cozy fetal curl from its gentle crush.

Writes Czeslaw Milosz: “Even asleep we partake in the becoming of the world.”

FEBRUARY

Travelling overseas – departing Antarctica actually, a six-week “layover” on New Zealand’s South Island – I fell in with a crew of Israeli hippie-bros fresh from their stint of mandatory military service, comrades in dirt-cheap vagabonding. One morning, pooling breakfast scraps, the caffeinated conversation swerved to mountain climbing, and I was told, with lots of gleeful cursing and enthusiastic gesticulating, that hiking isn’t about hiking – it’s about brewing good strong bitter coffee on the summit.

Though the hippie-bros were certifiable goofballs, this struck me as shrewd. In darkness, the amber glow of whiskey. In sparking, blinding brightness, the blackest, fiercest, chewiest joe a stomach can stomach.

A third round?

Generous of you to offer, sir.

A dash of organic cocoa?

Please.

Are you enjoying the hints of refried bean imparted by the cookpot’s crust?

I noticed this intriguing flavor, yes.

The pot sits between my thighs and I sit in a meadow under infinite blue, a hundred-acre basin brimming with absence, with possibility. Yesterday was sad, something to do with the muted sunset and this exposed camp’s pin-drop quiet, but today is a new day, an inspiring day, a phenomenal day for reckless imbibing, vigorous skiing, and frequent pausing, observing, appreciating.

Creation! Our planet’s tilted axis and the four sacred seasons! Mouse tracks! Sculptural drifts! Israeli hippiebros! The tingling spirit of gratitude is awakening, gulp by gulp, my every cell.

And that’s not all. In my gut a prehistoric mammalian need is also awakening – a need for which no honest creature ought to feel shame or embarrassment – and it is awakening with disconcerting rapidity. I pound the pot’s dregs, survey my options with a hasty scan. Besides my tent, the meadow is essentially featureless. Okay, whatever. I’m miles from any lifeform that might take offense.

Time to get in touch. Time to shit out the toxins, the computer screens and dollar bills and egoistic cravings. Time to steel my nerves, scoop a gloveful, and wipe with winter – the cleansing wild!

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MARCH

Shy of the beaver ponds, I quit my huffing and puffing, plant my poles and nudge my ears free from the jacket’s hood. Ah, the perfect hush of a full moon ascending in the east, tiptoeing a distant crest, stepping into purple emptiness. Suspended, solitary, it reminds me that this valley is home to a hermit, a legendary recluse. Scraggly beard and baggy sweater. Blizzard for a brain, tender chickadee for a heart.

Well, I assume. I don’t know the man – his brain, his heart, or the exact location of his cabin. I just know that tonight, pressing onward, breaking a trail, I will temporarily outdo his isolation, meaning his connection, meaning his bond with the elemental. Isolation isn’t divorce. Isolation is marriage, a wedding, a union. Isolation is a micro-hush embedded in the perfect hush.

Twentyish degrees, zero wind. A headlamp shrinks the land to a pale orb, a battery-operated sphere of comprehension, whereas skiing by moonlight fixes the land in a cosmos, a mysterious immensity. Snow gleams. Rock gleams. Water gleams. I should stop and build my camp, change my outfit, eat a meal, but the gleam won’t allow it.

And then a question mark in my periphery does stop me, a gliding anomaly, a squirt of ink on the gleaming page. It’s the hermit, the legendary recluse – across the valley, past the beaver ponds and frostsparkled willows, perhaps a quartermile off – and he’s skiing with a partner, no headlamps for them, either.

I squint, trying to tell, and failing to tell, which is which, who is who.

The man. The shadow.

Tiny bonfire. Tiny portal leading nowhere, leading here. Another camp, another night, another session gazing, spacing out, spacing in, spacing every direction. I feed the bonfire brittle twigs and feed it supple awareness. I listen to the hiss and pop, listen to myself listening.

That stubborn, bossy, won’tbe-dissuaded voice, that inner voice running me from the couch and my flannel pajamas, driving me into pillowed spruce and howling coyotes and spindrift, strange power, numb digits – it didn’t lie. There is a single way to shut me up, the voice said, and true to its promise, I haven’t heard a peep since December. Ditto the second voice, the wuss-voice that bows to inertia and luxury and unfounded worry, neglecting winter’s invitation, shunning winter’s gift.

Hiss-pop. Another collapse, another twig. The bonfire is simultaneously a miniature cathedral of flaring radiance and a grand edifice in ruins – charred wood, fading embers, fluttering ash. Balanced, I’m thinking. Complete.

I unscrew the whiskey jar – mesmerized, hypnotized – and wince as the liquor kisses my chapped lips. A few lines by Robinson Jeffers emerge from the flames, lines about the bed downstairs, beside the window, that the young poet has selected in advance for his inevitable, eventual dying: “I often regard it, / With neither dislike nor desire; rather with both, so equalled / That they kill each other and a crystalline interest / Remains alone.”

Is that enlightenment? The equalization of binaries? The crystalline interest that remains alone? Jeffers disappears in the flames, refusing to answer, and a big wet snowflake brushes my cheek, signalling the end of a two-week dry spell. Ribbony scarves of snow follow, billowing sails of snow, ballooning universes of snow.

Another collapse, another kiss.

Shoulders hunched, I feed twigs, feed twigs, listening, listening, and ten minutes later the squall abruptly fizzles, leaving me coated, fuzzy, white.

Constance Mahoney

APRIL

MAY

Done? Pshaw! Herons are beating upvalley, broad wings spread over the electric springtime river, the river of aluminum foil, hammered tin, molten silver, and I am pursuing, traversing the sun-averse pitches, the northern aspects where snow hangs on – mushy, stained, littered with bark bits and pine needles and splinters, crappy by normal standards, plenty skiable by mine. Lowering standards is awesome, highly recommended. It’s a spiritual exercise of sorts, a battle with entitlement and expectation, an art of accepting the world and what the world provides.

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Ardea herodias. Today the world is providing great blue herons, sticks in their beaks, nests in their minds, evolution in their elegant necks and legs. And geese and ducks. And warblers, swallows, snipe, the rushing tremolo of vibrating feathers, the racing whistle-whir of migrants arrived and arriving.

Somehow, despite having no particular destination, I manage to arrive, too, today’s world providing a patch of damp dirt and flattened brown grass, a site by the water to unfold my tarp and explode my pack. The plan is sky for a tent. The plan is this sweet golden hour before night. The plan is trancelike exhaustion. The plan is wandering inside my binoculars, watching the birds, welcoming them home.

As I peel off soggy socks and recline, a fairytale unspools in my imagination, requesting that I abandon the plan and scribble quick, catch the ephemeral sentences.

I obey.

Guy goes alone to the wilderness – that’s the premise, the setting and scene. Guy goes alone to the wilderness and guy keeps going. Guy isn’t made happy or healthy or wise by his going. Guy isn’t made glum or unhealthy or stupid by his going. Guy isn’t rewarded. Guy isn’t punished. Guy isn’t transformed or renewed or destroyed or anything fancy. Guy goes and goes and goes, nothing more, nothing less, and slowly, subtly, almost secretly, his going becomes a habit, the habit a ritual, the ritual a rhythm, the rhythm a life, the life a steady soft hum. At the age of ninety – I scratch that out – at the age of one hundred and eight, this guy, this character, this figment, he heads upvalley again, pursuing herons, and it is the thousandth consecutive month of his going, and it is the final month.

Knobby knees, tear-blurred vision. A lump in the throat. He unfolds a tarp. He peels off socks. He reclines. He dozes – the river flowing through him, the birds doing the same – and wakes to the gloaming, confused, unsure if he’s really awake. Frogs are chorusing and the mountains, his old dear friends, are harmonizing. The music is a color, a song of yellow, glacier lilies, symbols of spring, harbingers of summer, dainty yellow petals begging him to join, to hum along.

Inhale, exhale. That rich scent of soil recently uncovered. I stretch my back, sharpen my pencil with a jackknife. Sneeze. Friggin’ allergies.

“And the bears, roused from hibernation, are hungry as ever,” I write. “Hungry with an ancient hunger, an eternal hunger, an insatiable hunger for blossoms and the thawing ground that gives blossoms birth.” b