On the second full moon of the new year of 1975, there was another fateful knock on my door. Captain Goosebag was looking for a partner for an overnight cross-country ski trip.
I should tell you right away that I was probably not his first choice as companion on such an adventure.
You can readily imagine that anyone called Captain Goosebag, lauded far and wide as such a daring mocker of authority, would normally have nothing to do with Peabody, who had only the doubtful fame of cracking eggs for The Man. I was a lot steadier on a horse than I was on downhill skis, and I had nothing in the way of cross-country equipment.
But the balance was tipped by my one good trait: I was the sole person on the floor with the next two days off.
Doors were knocked on, equipment was volunteered, and before I knew it, I was completely geared up for an overnight trip in the snow. I had some heavy downhill skis hooked up with hinged cable bindings. I had boots only a size or two too big, weighty leather stompers that felt like they might have served equally well for marching across war-torn Europe in WWII as for cross-country skiing. I had some poles that were only a bit too long for my short limbs. And in accord with the inevitable prescription for winter wear, I was dressed in layers – which phrase always makes me think of a chicken-wire coat with a dozen or so Plymouth Rock hens hanging upside down from its outside.
I also had a pack full of gorp, honey, energy bars, and a banana scrounged at the last minute from the kitchen.
And suddenly, we were off. Out the ski lodge back door into the frigid moonlit night, headed for high adventure.
Seen from the air, Varmint Mountain is a sleeping dragon sprawled belly-down on the eastern edge of the Sierra Nevada mountain range. Its head points southeast, its long tail end trails off in a northwesterly direction.
The west side of the dragon is the John Muir Wilderness; the east is civilized. The ski lodge is on the settled side, down near where a hind leg would be, and while that big volcanic beast slumbers through its long winter, skiers ride lifts up to the ridge of its back and shuss down the huge slab of its snow-covered ribs.
On the wild side, near the opposite hind leg, is the place that was our destination, Reds Meadow.
Reds is a little oasis of settlement in the wilderness, a riding stable, restaurant and store that serves the thousands of hikers, campers, fishermen and horseback riders who flock to the area every summer. It’s closed in winter, buried in as much as ten feet of snow, but a couple of crew cabins were always left unlocked for emergency use.
A road connects the ski lodge and Reds, running down past the tip of the long tail and back up on the other side, a total of about 13 miles. Our route on cross country skis would bypass that long way around, taking us up and over the dragon’s hips and down its far side on an easy glide that would get us to Reds in about three hours.
Or so we thought.
We hiked on our heavy skis for a happy hour or so, puffing along and enjoying, as young animals do, the very movement of our bodies. There is a refining rhythm to cross country skiing, a stretched-out motion of arms and legs that carries in it something of a horse’s tireless trot, morphed onto the upright human frame.
We took our first rest stop. At 9,000 feet above sea level, the full moon is bright enough to read by. Shining on snow, it seems almost daylight brilliant. Sitting in the brightness and munching gorp, we gazed out at the perfect night. All around us: mountains.
Above was the dragon’s back of Varmint Mountain, the curved wall segment of a bowl-shaped volcanic crater that had exploded outward millenia ago, throwing fragments into distant states. In a different direction were the jagged teeth of the Minarets, splinters of basalt so high and steep that they escaped the rounding effect that glaciers laid on range after range of their rocky neighbors. To the east was the 40-mile-distant bulk of the White Mountains, shining in the clear high-country air. And below, mating octopus-like with the mountain, its ski-lift arms embracing the slopes in many directions, was the lodge itself.
And all of it, all of it, blanketed with snow and ice.
There is magic in the world, if you look for it. Not the phony kind where some huckster tries to sink the hooks of mysticism in your head, but the real kind, where, for a moment, the real world itself touches you and pulls you out of the sinkhole of your own small self, and shows you Something Special. All the weight of the world is suspended for that moment, and you feel like laughing in delight.
This was one of those moments: As we sat there at the top of the world, in the crisp, fresh, moonlit night, feathery flakes began to caress my face like cool butterflies. It was snowing.
I waved my arms out at the horizon. “Isn’t it great to be human?” I asked.
Captain Goosebag only looked at me. Nobody was ever sure what Peabody might be on about.
“I mean, look at it. For every other living thing, this is a frozen hell. But here we are out playing in it. We have warm, dry places to go, and we’re out here because we choose to be. And we’re healthy, and happy, and nothing in the world wants to eat us. And it’s snowing! Isn’t that great?”
In answer, Captain Goosebag snapped his goggles back on and stood up.
We hiked on, and a few minutes later, my own glee began to dim. We lucky humans had forgotten to check the weather. Those butterfly flakes were the first warning signs of a storm that was about to come down on us like a hundred-ton white sledgehammer.