Tempering Expectations—Time to Meet Our Own Gaze

Talk to the old timers and they’ll tell you the big years come in twos and threes. Remember ’82-‘84, they’ll say, I’m still shoveling my roof off from ’84. Same with low years, they stack up like tumbleweeds against a fence. Dry and sharp. Until, once again, the jet stream turns just so and storms start lining up off the coast, the powder buoy is bobbing with the promise of a fat, fat winter. One just like last winter, the winter of ’22-’23, a winter so fat people started getting pissed off. Even ski bums as die-hard as your mom warned you about were driving to Moab just to see the color brown.Even if it was once true that the big years come in sets, is it still true?

On the one hand, optimism is a nice way to face the uncertainty of life. Might as well smile every chance you get, and you get the chances you make. As part of my crafting here, I was going to mention the other hand—let’s put that off for a moment.

As I type this the season isn’t over. There is still snow to ski. But. Let’s say you’ve stuck a fork in it, if only to recover from some aches and pains, how then should we think about next season and the future in general?

The Buddhists may say something like, go ahead and have whatever expectations you want, but don’t hold too tight. It’s the holding on that hurts. That’s easy to say, but I’m willing to bet the Buddha never cut a fast arc through cold smoke, an experience so fantastic that you and I both have and would suffer whatever we must and without qualms to do it as often as possible. And you know where I’m coming from. Winter is joy. And skiing is life. Or you are on the wrong webpage. The ‘22-’23 season had so many good days I can’t remember them all. I was that guy that always wins the hotdog eating contests (Joey Chestnut) and skiing was my hotdog. Wait. Let me rethink that last line. Gobbling ski days like hotdogs. No. Anyway, I wasn’t skiing like it was my job. I was skiing like it was my religion. And I am a zealot. Chock full of zeal. I do remember this one ski in particular. It was way back in December. My wife and I got out together, and ate some freaking powder. Choked on it, laughing and coughing and swooping downhill in great clouds of joyous glory. And that was December. It. Kept. Coming.

Month’s later and I haven’t quit for the year, but life’s obligations have made the time I have to get to skiing shorter and the distance to snow longer. This, I will admit, has brought on the blues. I was able to almost single-mindedly ski from mid-October until they let the freaking elementary school kids go for the summer. The true end of ski season. The Rug Rats want to go to the pool, and… look, I am their father. Dad joke.

So, I woke up this morning, and I couldn’t go skiing

I said, that I woke up this morning, 

and I couldn’t go skiing

And it gave me the blues.

According to the great singer Todd Snider, That’s how you know it’s really the blues, when it starts in the morning.

I adjusted to the change in circumstances, as adults are supposed to be able to do, and am now enjoying life in mostly non-ski ways. Though every now and then I get the chance to shoulder the skis and take them for a long walk through fields of wild flowers, over jumbles of lichen covered stone just to lay white marks like a snake’s shape in what is startlingly dirty snow. 

Now, about this summer snow. The biggest snowpack in history went very fast. Wind blew, dust flew, the snow turned brown, the sun heated the brown snow and melted that shit right quick. It is also very likely that brown dust is highly toxic. See it blows off what was the Great Salt Lake, whose imminent drying demise caught a slight hiatus with this huge snow year, but nevertheless, a lot of toxic dust has been exposed by the drying lake and this makes up a good bit of the dust hastening the snow’s melt. Now this cyanide laden dust is flowing back down stream toward the lake and into our water supply. So what we didn’t already breathe, we now drink.

There’s your teaser about the other hand.