A False Start

[Above photo:  The female Downey Woodpecker is having a rest between bites.]

26 February 2023

No sooner do I decide that my current life is too boring to memorialize here than it, or my mind, takes a turn and I am back noting the events of the week. Ari spent Tuesday night here. She’s driving Jon’s new pickup truck with two kayaks atop to California to meet him. Surprise, it’s snowing in Los Angeles!

After I eased into the barber’s chair, Siobhan (name altered for privacy) eyed me and said, “I wear the necklace you gave me to bed every night.” Uh oh, is my mind really going? I’ve perhaps seen her in the barbershop once before. There are 3 women shearing the men. She’s not cut my hair previously. When I protested, she persisted, “No, you know. The stone that is supposed to make me dream. It really works.” Then she proceeded to talk entertainingly about UFOs, weed trips, and so forth. It was a nice break in an otherwise unremarkable day. She was bright and quick and might, with different life circumstances, have been a physician or nurse, a pharmacist or an astronomer.

As I sit at my writing desk in the bay window of my bedroom, a Red-breasted Nuthatch is working over my suet/seed feeder. She’ll soon be replaced by a larger cousin, the White-breasted. Then the Downey Woodpecker couple will visit to feed.  Either he encourages her to go first out of gallantry or she demands it out of a sense of entitlement but that is their reliable sequence. There is a small flock (6 or so) of darling birds that don’t eat at the feeder but roost in the two trees outside my window. It’s a challenge for me to identify them. My best guess is Eastern Wood Pewee. But I may be all wet. Their feathers are fluffed out to insulate them as it was 2F last night. It is supposed to snow, heavily or heavy snow I can’t discern from the weather forecast. Since it is cold, I’d guess heavily. Harold and I shall head to the Carrabassett Valley for 3 or 4 days of cross country skiing next weekend. I love the winter and braving the cold.

Last Friday morning I drove, always an experience in my short-range EV, to Vasselboro to Lindsey’s house on Webber Pond. Pond to lake is like cottage to mansion in Maine. “Oh, my father built a summer cottage on the coast south of Camden.”, cottage here meaning a 7 bedroom waterfront mansion. Webber Pond has an island in it and although it is shallow, it is pretty big. Vasselboro as a town name is another thing. We’ve got China, Paris, Mexico, Madrid, Rome, and Berlin. With all the grand names from which to choose, why Vassalboro? A vassal is “a holder of land by feudal tenure on conditions of homage and allegiance”.  It has even been used as “servant” colloquially.  It certainly implies lesser status, if not inferiority. I couldn’t query the town fathers/mothers on its origin.

We loaded up his Ioniq, a longer-range EV, and headed to Medawisla, an Appalachian Mountain Club lodge northeast of Moosehead Lake. As we drove, the rain came down in sheets and we despaired. Later, recharging in Greenville, we munched on smoked mussels and mixed nuts and felt the temperature drop so precipitously that the wet pavement became a sheet of ice.

The rain hadn’t reached the lodge and everything was snow and COLD. The lodge itself is 5 years old and stunning, with a large sauna in which to relax after a day on the trails. It was easily the equal of any we visited on the Haute Route in France and Switzerland, albeit the views in the latter were much more dramatic, sited as the “huts” were, high above timberline in the Alps.  The meals were likewise tasty and filling, although when exercising outdoors a pine needle curry on steamed meadow grass with a side of mulched maple leaves could cause salivatory excitement.

Generally, these settings serve as a filter and most of the people you meet are enthusiastic, engaging, and in love with expoloring the outdoors.  One evening a volunteer naturalist, Jeanene, taught us to identify animal tracks and the next morning as we skied the trails we saw fresh tracks of deer, rabbit, fox, mouse, lynx and moose in the newly fallen snow. The trails were well-groomed and my stamina—for Lindsey is 20 years my junior—was adequate; my technique, with regular adjustments for the balance challenges of the aged, returned. I imagined what I might have done racing back then with the equipment I had now. My boots were work boots into whose soles (souls?) I drilled holes to accommodate the rat-trap binding pins of the day. The ski bottoms were wood and only would glide if waxed to match the snow temperature. But it was great to plow along at 16yo, passing others, following my competitive urges. I had pretty good endurance then and it wasn’t so bad last weekend. One day we covered 14 miles in 3 ½ hours, the last stretch a long glide down a narrow winding trail to the lodge. Then we took saunas. I foolishly joined some others and rolled in the snow wearing only wet underpants.  It’s a great way to diminish your self-consciousness about your spotty, sagging body. Later it was tea, chatting, and reading as we awaited supper. In short, it was a special time with fun people in beautiful surroundings.  To be repeated.

We’d have a big snow on Mercer Island (near Seattle) once a year. School would be closed for the week.   We would take our Flexible Flyers and sled all day, every day. It was the BEST! I recall throwing snowballs at our neighbors’ cars as the fathers would come home from work. All were good-humored about it and we got to feel wicked without feeling terrified of the consequences. Once as I threw one I realized just as it left my hand that the passenger window was open. It flew into the car and hit the driver. He stopped and scolded me, gently; we all knew each other, living as we did on a dead-end road in the countryside.

Then there was the time my family rented a cabin at the base of Mt. Baker over the Christmas week. My father, I think, had to return to Seattle to deliver a baby and one evening we drove him down the mountain to the bus on a snow-covered road as the snow silently fell. On the way back, for it was just we three brothers, we pretended that we were spies being pursued by evil Nazis, eluding them in the snowy dark through our stealth, daring, and craftiness. Such fun!

A most memorable experience was when Chas and I drove home from Harvard over Spring Break, kissed our mother, and headed to Winter Park for the week. We had limited funds but had some camping gear. We shoveled the 3 feet of snow covering the floor of the timer’s shack halfway up the main ski run and slept there. There were openings for doors and windows but nothing blocking the weather. We had a Primus gas stove and cooked I don’t know what. I think we may have eaten a bowl of chili in the lodge before taking the last chair lift up and skiing to our little home. The best was when it snowed at night and we would get the first run in that light-as-a-feather Colorado powder.  Our mother had forbearance and certainly supported all of our outdoor adventures. I’m so glad she moved us to Colorado after dad died, rather than to New York where she would have preferred to do her psychiatry residency.

The challenge of surviving comfortably in the snow is still exhilarating. During my year of medical residency at the University of Washington, Poki and I drove with a fellow resident, Mac Griffeth, and his wife, Hella, to the base of Mt. Baker. Mac had a Land Rover and we managed to high-center it in deep snow half-way to our destination, so we continued up the unused forest service road on skis. We were heading for a natural hot springs but never reached it. Finally, exhausted, we pitched our tents in the snow. I tried to build a fire to cook supper. Mac and Hella—he was from Tennessee and she was a delicate Danish flight attendant—got into their tent without food and fell asleep. I persisted, watching in disbelief as the fire melted the snow and gradually dropped to 4 feet below the surface. I then built one underneath the branches of a tree after scraping the snow away to ground level. Only many years later did I learn the trick: build the fire over several layers of evergreen boughs. It works like a dream.

The snowflakes are now falling in earnest and the birds have fled to more protected spots, I suspect. I have so many wonderful memories of snowfall and activities related to it, from winters in Seattle, Denver, Boston and New York, that I find it difficult now to imagine living in the tropics, although when I was in Myanmar, especially, it was unpleasant to think of having to wear coats and shoes. So fickle and so adaptable.