The States of Yes
When I parked my car in the morning dark, raindrops encasing bits of ice prickled my windshield. All three states of matter existed in those drops: a triumvirate of ice, snow, and rain.
By the time I moved the drivers seat back to make space to put on my ski boots, zip my waterproof jacket, and adjust my backpack, the only thing visible through the speckled glass was the outline of a ski lift behind the nearby streetlight.
I was there, on a sleety dark morning, meet with a group to uphill ski. Some were new, some were experienced but in search of friends, but all of us said our hellos and chatted by the light of our headlamps and foggy exhalations. As we made the final checks of our skis, balls of ice began falling from the sky and collected around my bindings. They formed tiny drifts of snow spheres that could have been mistaken for the kind of ice cream served at a sports arena concession stands.
We headed up the hill trailing our ski tracks and the kind of chatter for those just meeting. Those little snow-ball-bits streaked across the beam of my headlamp. This kind of snow is called graupel, and it’s a snowflake covered in another layer of water. Seems like it doesn’t quite know what to be – snow? Ice? Water? It’s an identity crisis wrapped in a 2 millimeter sphere.
Twenty minutes later, we were sufficiently warmed to remove a layer and take photos under grey clouds - without a flake to be seen nor wind to be fought. We were socked in with the delicious diffuse light photographers use to show every expression on a face. We told the stories of ourselves in a few sentences, and chatted for longer than necessary because we were neither cold nor being pelted by sleet.
Twenty minutes later, we fighting for the top in a steep section and trying to not to lean too far over our skis (a tip we had just learned from each other). The icy rollerballs returned enough that I heard their metallic swish bouncing off the hastily raised coat hood. It was unavoidably obvious which direction the wind blew, and we raised our voices to be heard over the graupel.
It’s the right kind of scrappy-sounding word for something that transforms through two states of matter between release and groundfall. It had been through a lot by the time it pinged off my jacket.
Twenty minutes later, we met at the top. Once again, nothing was coming from the sky, as the graupel assault only lasted a handful of minutes. We chatted, again, without urgency as we transitioned our gear to downhill mode.
Having reached the end of the uphill, I was in a frame of mind and a lessening of the breath that allowed for the best kind of thinking. Transition was on my mind.
What happens at the top, at that transition point, is mechanically obvious: tighten boots, remove skins, switch bindings, shorten poles, layer up. But there’s a psychological and philosophical ones too.
My transition from up mode to down mode is more defined than the way a snowflake turns into water when it hits the ground. Or the way a raindrop becomes ice as it passes through a freezing layer in the atmosphere.
When I came back down I was a little less reserved, a little more suffused with the looseness that comes from physical work in an alpine environment. The kind that gives you cold cheeks but red ones.
The type of water falling from the sky changed configurations a dozen different times in that hour, and we moved our bodies through them all. I was myself in various configurations too – middle-aged woman, mother, athlete, friend, novice, cheerleader, resident, worker, enthusiast.
I came to understand more about the people next to me swish-swishing their skis up the mountain, our breaths coming out in visible puffs. I progressed from feeling awkward, new, and slightly lonely to belonging on the side of this mountain among this group.
We each transitioned between our own states of matter while addressing ourselves and our pasts. We each pushed our breath out into the diffuse light of the morning. We existed within the fluid states of the mountain environment we had come to play in.
And most of all, we transitioned in a slightly new version of ourselves. The version that does this kind of thing. That isn’t put off by the dark or the graupel or the wind. The kind that looks up the slope and says yes.
Yes. This is me. No matter my state of being.
All images by Elizabeth Downing