The Fear and the Thin Line
Alone on the mountain is usually the beginning of a survival story. But not this one.
Instead, this is the story of one evening hour where it was me and the mountain and the trees and not a lot else. Uphill ski access opens after the lifts have been shut down, thus the reduction in crowds, but in this case even the other uphillers were elsewhere.
And I was scared. Not the heart-pounding, I-have-to-get-out-of-here-scared, rather an intense awareness of my aloneness. Yes, I was on a very familiar run (although I had only done it downhill.) Yes, my brother was at base and I knew that cell signal was fine all the way up. Yes, I had a Garmin and knew that my husband was watching the tracker in the warm comfort of our kitchen on the other side of the mountain range. Yes, I had a Clif Bar and half a liter of water and an emergency blanket and an extra layer and a first aid kit and my helmet in my backpack. All things that I might need, or someone else might, if unable to move in the cold. Because when you’re stopped, your body can’t pump out enough heat and I don’t wish to find out the edge of that equation.
“I could just make out its shape between the pine trees, where the shadows were morphing into the kind of darkness where you can’t quite trust your vision. ”
But despite all those objects in my possession, I was still the kind of scared that comes from being close to the edge. The precipice of something that you know always exists but can’t identify. The edge was there, I could see its contours. I could just make out its shape between the pine trees, where the shadows were morphing into the kind of darkness where you can’t quite trust your vision.
I was in a liminal space at a liminal time, doing a liminal activity. It wasn’t daytime - the sun had just dipped behind the mountains - but it wasn’t night because I could see perfectly well without a headlamp. I was performing an in-between kind of activity – uphill skiing - which (for me) is an hour of cardio work and then a few minutes of quick and smooth descent. Most people do it in the backcountry where there’s nothing but you and the trees. But I’m inexperienced, untrained, and unskilled at reading snow, so going uphill at a ski resort is a good compromise. I get the safety measures put in place to ensure that avalanches won’t come tumbling down but I get to do it outside of the time when the resort is open.
“Fear, the thin line, and I were all having a bit of a confab up there in the forest. A retreat, if you will. A triad of which I was the weakest link but also the center. ”
That doesn’t mean there are no dangers. If there’s anything my trip to high altitude taught me, it’s that the line between okay and not-okay is very, very thin. This is true both from a temporal perspective and a psychological one. Even in Nepal, where my logical brain understood all the expected effects of being at 15,000 feet, I was still puzzled as I winged from giddy to wondering if I would even be able to swing my legs over the bed the next morning. During this uphill adventure at Solitude, I was only at 8,000 feet and would only be there for an hour. Then I would depart to my house to shower and devour dinner. The differences were stark, but but the line is thin whether home is a thirty-minute drive or a thirty-hour set of plane flights away. Whether there’s a ski lift overhead and whether it’s running or not.
I allowed myself to feel that fear for awhile. To touch its edges. To run my fingertips over the burrs on the side. It was a strange thing, being that close to fear and not batting it away with all my might. Maybe because I was in the grasp of the endorphins and therefore looser with logic.
“At base, I looked back up the hill to salute my fear friend and my thin line companions. I would be back, I said. ”
As I moved across the snow and up the hill in the fading blue dusk that’s almost pink if you squint, I nodded to fear and the line. Chatted to them a bit. Fear, the line, and I were all having a bit of a confab up there in the forest. I asked fear about a few things from the past. Laughed about the rollercoasters I always avoided. Gave the line a salute and told it about all the items in my backpack. I said I hoped I wouldn’t be visiting it anytime soon. No disrespect, of course, but that I’d be staying away as well as I could. The squirrels were our witnesses, maybe a moose or two peering down from above.
Then I reached the top, changed over all my gear, and descended. It was over in a matter of minutes. Fear and the line disappeared on the downhill, which is funny since that’s not a particularly safe thing to do either.
At base, I looked back up the hill to salute my fear friend and my thin line companion. I would be back. Maybe not here, but sometime soon I hoped I would be bold enough to walk alongside them again. Then we would dance, maybe with some repeated steps.