Primordial Good Fortune

I didn’t realize it at that moment, but such an extraordinary experience had indeed become ordinary—not ordinary in a ho-hum or yawning kind of way, just, like, yeah. Photo: Pete Vordenberg

It was a day that was already ordinary in the best way. The skiing had been very good.  We skied a narrow shot dubbed Room for Two. Snow was good. Line was fun. Stoke was high. Sun was out. Life was good. We skied an exit, which, if you were an inbounds skier, would have been the most fun run of the day but which, for us, was an afterthought. We fist-bumped, and I began driving home.

I didn’t realize it at that moment, but such an extraordinary experience had indeed become ordinary—not ordinary in a ho-hum or yawning kind of way, just, like, yeah.  

A few miles down the road, I picked up a backcountry hitchhiker who needed a lift to his car. He described the lines he and his partner had done, the schwacky approach, the once-a-year nature of their descents. We looked off the road and up at where they’d skied as we drove. The world whizzed by the windows. It was a good day. 

The old car I was driving starts to wobble at over 55mph, so I was going 54. Cars were whizzing past me as I, too, was whizzing down the road, peering through the dusty and cracked windshield, toward home from skiing, past road signs, Silver Alert, Exit 129, past junk in the breakdown lane, an entire bumper, a bag of garbage, a bloated raccoon.

After dropping him at his car, I mindlessly turned the radio on and descended into the dry expanse of valley just as the radio program began to describe freaking primordial black holes. Primordial black holes were new to me, and I won’t pretend to really understand what I was listening too, and I am not alone in that. Scientists aren’t sure they exist, but their existence would go a long way in explaining certain phenomena, including dark matter. And I was like, whoa, what? The old car I was driving starts to wobble at over 55mph, so I was going 54. Cars were whizzing past me as I, too, was whizzing down the road, peering through the dusty and cracked windshield, toward home from skiing, past road signs, Silver Alert, Exit 129, past junk in the breakdown lane, an entire bumper, a bag of garbage, a bloated raccoon.

The foothills were decidedly brown, the sky a completely unremarkable blue. And primordial black holes, some just the size of an atom, were born at the outset of the Big Bang. And in that instant, a sentence meant to impart some knowledge that was way beyond my comprehension ripped the gauze from in front of my eyes and wiped the windshield of perspective clear. And Holy Shit. To say it was a jolt, a shock, would be to undersell this tiny electric moment in which everything upon everything was revealed to be completely miraculous. For an instant, the brown foothills were a tapestry of shape, texture, and color. The warmth of the sun was luscious on my skin; the ‘98 Subaru was such a brilliant feat of human ingenuity; its oil and gasoline smell exquisite, my fingers on the wheel, the tendons, joints, and nerves linking the brain to muscle, the skin, oh the skin! The functional intricacies of the skin, the follicles, the lines at the joints! The new sag, the looseness of the skin on my hands, they were my dad’s hands on the steering wheel, and his dad’s and all the way back, all the way.

This tiny electric moment. Photo: Pete Vordenberg

This tiny electric moment. Photo: Pete Vordenberg

I could somehow feel the few tiny hairs on top of my head standing up. Even in this moment, I knew it would fade, that I’d forget all this, forget to see it, forget to kiss my wife good morning, that at some less mindful future point, I’d be an asshole to someone, that even in the truth and scope of this incredible good fortune I’d worry over something inane, be antsy and agitated in traffic—even knowing how utterly insane it is to be in a hurry, how ridiculous it would be to speak harshly to anyone, ever, to be, in this miraculous situation, anything but utterly kind to everyone, always.

But knowing it would fade didn’t ruin it; it was, in fact, part of it, just like everything, all of it, the failure, our fallibility. In a similar way, there was helplessness and dumbfoundedness in it all. I’d like to say I’d gained some sort of cerebral understanding from that sentence, that I understood the unfolding of all of this from the moment the universe was born and everything from primordial black holes, and my dad, my kids, and near-sighted raccoons, snow and sliding on it, plate-tectonics, mountains, the color orange, stars, and old Subarus, art and love and death, all came in to being, but no. I don’t get it. Yet as I type, I remain in this quiet glow from that quick second when I truly and completely understood the ecstatic primordial good fortune that we are here, that all of this, that any of this, is here at all.