Loss is universal, and yet individual loss is personal. It's hard to talk about loss without injecting yourself into it. We can share, we can feel and understand and extend empathy, and sympathy. We can never truly know the loss. When Steve Backstrom brought a pair of brand new skis to the shop for me to mount, the loss he felt was palpable. Steve and Betsy's son, Arne, had designed the skis. He didn't just draw some art for the topsheet, or provide feedback on what the Austrian nerds drew up in Solid Works, he conceived the ski whole cloth, including some of the manufacturing processes, and helped shepherd the ski into production. Arne passed away in a skiing accident that summer. Details were scarce, but for those of us who didn't know him, they weren't important. Another light blinked out. An older sister and a younger brother lost their middle sibling. Two parents lost a child. Arne was 29. From a distance, we all saw a rising star disappear. Blizzard released their Anomaly series, replacing the bullrider series and their three sheets of metal a couple years ago, and the last nod to Arne's original idea quietly disappeared.
Loss isn't meted out in tidy batches. Nor is love, or joy, or anything else for that matter. Neither are loss, or joy, or love, necessarily recognisable immediately, especially when presented with an abstract, a small swatch of canvas with a few colours and shapes, a part but not always representative of the whole. Sometimes you see it looking back, sometimes you don't, or maybe you don't look back at all.
Kelci Cook dropped in on me from time to time my first year in Brad's shop at Crystal. I never really knew her, probly eight years younger and certainly in a different phase of life. She made jewelry, and came running through the door one day when she heard me using the Dremel on something or other, a boot fit or toe riser, or just cutting of an old broken basket from a customer's pole. I can't remember her face, really, some vague impression of a young adult, blonde hair and dreams. She loved the Dremel.
Kelci flipped her car one morning right by Kastner's house on her way to work for Gerry in the rental shop. Nobody knows what happened, but there are always elk around the Villages. I think of her every time I drive by her memorial sign, not surprisingly since that's the whole point. I feel her presence as one of many spirits out in the trees, watching us, hopefully benevolently. I never really knew her, nothing more than a flash in the sweep of time, but each flash represents little chip off the veneer. It can be a single leaf fallen, or a major limb, or sometimes the whole tree.
I still reach for my phone to send my buddy Jake Sawyer a picture of some broken bike or a coworker's home-customed Trek Sawyer. It still hurts knowing he's gone, that there's no one there to smirk and chuckle a little under his breath. If I am at the grocer when I can't find something, or at my eye doctor when I get a new prescriotion, I still joke with Amy's cousin Adriene, gone two years now. She was in grocery analytics, the sort of field responsible for all the seeming randomness you find instead of finding the capers that are the specific reason for visiting the store in the first place. She and I had a friendly competition of who could see worse. She won every time, always at least a half correction ahead of me.
We can only guess at this life of ours, given and taken by chance or fate or by the divine. Some among us have immense faith in their version of things, that an omnipotent and omniscient God holds His hand above it all, or that it's all a stew of random change, that we've somehow crawled out from the ooze to become The Destroyer. As in all things, I'm stuck in the middle somewhere, tearing up a little hearing Keith Whitley sing a Christmas song but not sure there's anything more than the things we carry along in our little baskets of the past.
Sometimes loss is just the things we've never done, or never seen. The Christmas Eve service at Frikirke in Alta, Norge. A line we might coulda skied if we'd ever learned how to travel. The way the wind feels in Ushuaia, or the feeling of being home for some important moment that's long past.
When I was 20, I tried to get a patrol job at Crystal. Baugher wouldn't hire me because I wasn't 21. He never explained it, and it always felt like a cop-out, an assessment which was bolstered by two subsequent rejections made all the more frustrating by my having references from most of his top lieutenants, including both his number two and the wife of Crystal's owner. I've done alright in the career I fell into, and I've skied my share of deep Tuesdays, but that memory always bites hard. I never wanted any sort of glory, just to put the pack on each morning and throw a few charges, to shovel my share of snow and run my share of ropelines. Pull a few people out of South if they needed it.
My buddy Tim died under a truck on Highway 16 one morning. I mean, he made it to the hospital, but there was nothing to be done other than try to ease him onto the next chapter. It hurts today, over twenty-one years later. I think of him often, usually riding my bike. It's been a long time since mid-October of 2004 so the sting is muted, but it's there. These things add up. They hurt, with very little difference between the literal aches in our muscles and the metaphorical ones in our bones. There are stabs, sometimes, or needle pokes. Nothing ever really goes away. The loss of possibility, the loss of actuality.
I don't want to trade places with anyone who's gone on. I'll get there someday, and I don't want to know the hour. I don't idolise Keith Whitley like Grady the Bullrider did back in the day, and I hope he doesn't either. I hope Grady's grown up, done whatever it is old bullriders do if they survive the years on the circuit. 17th on the NFR bulls ranking is cool while it's here, and pretty awesome to talk about, but you don't get there by takin it easy and slow, and the human body wasn't built to handle that shit anyway. Regardless of where any of us thinks we came from.
Turns out, despite some folks having their ears plugged, They did tell us, and They were right. Just wait, you'll be here too, if you're lucky. You'll be older, and yes, you'll hurt, and yes, you'll miss those young knees. You'll miss your friends if you ever made any, and you'll miss, too, the folks who just passed through, spraying you with snow while you waited for somebody else by the side of the run. Maybe you snapped a picture on a mountain top, and maybe that person melted into the distance like the snow on which you were standing. Maybe the circle shrank until it's just you and the wind. Maybe you got lucky, maybe that one lady from Minnesota found she liked making dinner with you and talking about skiing. Maybe she's still here, just as beat up as you from all the falls and shoveling snow and picking up toddlers and working for dirt pay and free tickets and access to slightly cheaper gear.
I've never had any major injuries, thankfully. I've done my share of smashems, the kind I write about and the kind that might could scare my Ma. Some things are just bumps in the road. Some things linger, dig into the tele tendon--patellar, should you not be enough of a boring nerd to know intimately just which part it is that does all that heavy lifting--and shred it until you gotta make James Beckmann's acquaintance in Covid-quiet surgery just to walk. Pain be damned, just to walk, to turn the pressure and heat of inflammation off for a minute.
There are tons of pre-season workouts out there for your perusal, and just like that day back in 8th grade when you got the cast off your arm, you should do some PT. The excuses come easily, though, and quickly. Yeah, that one-legged angular semi-squat feels amazing after doing them for a month, but it hurts now, so maybe we'll skip it tonight, just do the easy ones. Yeah, it'd be good to do a set tonight, but it's raining, and I don't want to walk in the rain to warm up after standing on concrete for nine hours, so, maybe we'll wait for a nicer day.
Here, too, They were right. The nicer day does come, and depending on location, quite often, and it doesn't matter. You can't wait for it.
The scariest moment for me, probly in all the years of being in and around the ski world, was in the Heather Meadows aid room when this kid named Carson came in. He was early to mid-twenties, a rippin snowboarder. It was Sunday afternoon, and the radio had started going crazy. Somebody had hit a tree after dropping the 542 rock wall. If you've never skied at Baker, this story's not as wild as it sounds. The highway, 542, winds its way up to Artist Point along the western edge of the permit area, and for some of that stretch is inside the ski area. A few runs cross the highway, and one, Home Run, even runs on the highway grade for a while. It snows so much up there that you don't really notice the highway if you aren't looking.
Near the bottom of Pan Face, skiers' right, is the rock wall, something folks in big storms are willing to send. Carson did, but got hung up somehow and took on a tree with his head. He was shocky when the volleyballs brought him in, and my gut started churning immediately. We needed to get him down the hill as soon as possible, but I was just a fresh EMT, twenty years old, and the patrollers all talked over, under, around, and through me. Since I had been checking vitals and monitoring Carson's condition, I kept it up while they were jostling about. I was super worried about his blood pressure, with his major symptoms all pointing to shock/hypoperfusion in addition to his obvious TBI, but they were all so loud and pushy that I couldn't hear a proper BP with a cuff. I took a basic radial BP, which gets you systolic at least, which isn't ideal when the kid is in and out of consciousness and showing all the classic signs of shock, but it's not nothing and I needed continuity. One patroller even yelled at me, telling me I was an idiot cos I was taking his pulse and BP simultaneously. I just pulled back and called the Director.
Once I got them all cleared out, Patrol Director Chris came in to check on Carson and went white. He asked me why I hadn't already sent him to town, and I pointed out the door at the last receding volunteer patroller. He just looked sad and got his emergency phone connection going. I don't know how it worked, just that it wasn't a normal landline. By then, Carson's partner was with us, and Chris had her get her car and meet the paramedics along the highway. Bellingham is 56 miles from the Heather Meadows aid room, way too long to be waiting for an ambulance that can't drive as fast through all those dark corners as a small sedan can. She and Chris got Carson in the front seat, and she put her foot in it and that was the last I ever saw of him.
I don't know if he lived, and I've spend twenty-four years hoping that he did, that he recovered well. I got booted from Baker, and while I can guess, I don't actually know why. A friend from childhood asked around, and the only answer he could get was "he knows", which, no, Ole, I do not know. The only thing I know for sure is Baker is a small, petty, beautiful, gnarly, heartbreaking place. The sky is rarely blue, and some years the snow never stops.
That winter was 800 inches, an absolute gobsmacker if you don't know the Cascades. It's big even if you do. When people ask what it was like, I say "my arms got bigger", cos, as they say, you just had to be there, man. And besides, the big winter was only a couple years prior, and somewhere close to an A-Basin year's worth deeper. Still, it was humbling, and terrifying, and challenging, and some of the most intense moments and memories I have. On the other hand, it was just getting up in the morning and going to bed at night, same as it ever was. Deep days, dark days, sunnybreaks, the moss, the aid room and its--mostly--innocuous injuries. I skied 127 days that winter, the last of which was on the 9th of July. The year that followed was dark, long, the strange absence of what, I don't think I knew then and certainly don't know now. It felt remarkably like getting low blood sugar and then overeating to compensate. Over, and over.
One afternoon, somewhere between January and April, my roommate Twig asked if I wanted to race. I don't really know what his motivation was, but I certainly had the hubris necessary to say yes without hesitation. He said he wanted to race top to bottom down Diehl's to Nose Dive, turning for directional purposes only. I asked, confused, if he was sure, and he said yes. I won by quite a bit. It wasn't really a contest, not cos I was the better skier, though at twenty I would definitely have been adamant that I was. Really, I just outweighed him by 50 or more pounds and had skis with 30ish more centimetres and a turn radius in the high 20s. He was on his 165 slalom skis, which get their pop from construction and loading, meant for speed in turns, never meant to be flat. I still wonder what that kid is up to, and why he was so bad at math.
My last day at Baker was a typical North Cascades day, soupy, chilly, hard to read. It snowed the next day, all the way to the water in Vancouver. Denny and I had--literally, like, actually really literally, with Dyno AP--blown up a gun mount in order to get it out of the twenty foot snowpack earlier in the week, and he'd pushed it with the D-4** from the knoll at the bottom of Gold Mine to the bottom of Chair 5. I and Sam and Sean spent the whole day trying to keep it burning. We went through probably 20 gallons of propane via torch, and uncounted gallons of diesel that we dumped with growing annoyance on the pile, which was probly 50% creasote-coated 6x6 gun mount timbers, 30% snow, and 20% dirt. Not to mention the gas driving the sleds back and forth to the shop at White Salmon to retrieve said propane and diesel. Then, as tends to happen with these things, the next day I threw my stuff into whatever bags I could find, mostly can liners, shoved it all in the back of my friend Chris' Escort, and headed back to Enumclaw. Eight months with my shoulder to the wheel and then, nothing. Unemployment, and what felt like failure. Loss, at the very least. Weight on my shoulders that I still struggle to lift.
The conversation streams in every shop I've worked roll and dip in similar ways. I imagine that to an outsider, it'd be pretty random, running the gamut from actual potty humour all the way to philosophy and psychological theory, from date-night hookups to the physics of weather and even geopolitics. I won't claim that all of our conversations--and, by extension, likely most shops the world over, since by 44 I've got way more than two plot points and am willing to draw trendlines on that basis--even those about deep topics, are actually deep. Sometimes nuggets of truth and introspection hide amongst the randomness. As I age but don't age out, the bulk of my coworkers tend to get comparatively younger, such that at one point I was the youngest by far and am now surprised when I find I am not the oldest.
I have two coworkers who are around 19 or 20, one of whom is a hirsute and stocky Yooper who is even easier to rile than I am, the other a woman only months out of high school. She was in the back shop with me and a few mechanics, and like normal, the conversation jumped from skis to life goals and the perception of success, and she said she felt she had to finish college with a degree and immediately grab hold of a career in her field, or she "won't feel accomplished". The other two mechanics, like me, do not have college degrees and are also chasing something, but nothing any of us really know. We all stopped, unsure what she meant, whether it was simply stating an insecurity out loud, or if it was a dig of some kind. Likely the former. We're all of us, all 8 billion or whatever, supremely self-centred. Her comment stung, though, just the same. I tried to ask what her comment meant about me, but she was definitely not making any sort of judgment.
I joke when people ask that those two coworkers and I have the same degree as a fourth who got his degree in recreation from Appalachian State in Boone--coincidentally the same school from which my roommate Twig was on sabbatical--the only difference being we didn't have to pay and had fun the whole time. As expected, it's a supremely self-centred joke. There's more than a twinge of jealousy, and more than a skosh of self-critique. Even in those moments, fleeting conversations among folks thrown together temporarily by circumstances we each only barely control, there's the sting of loss, of missed opportunity, of self-recrimination. I joke, or Sam or Matt do, and none of us can really finish with any gusto. I've noticed both of them, Matt in his mid-thirties and Sam his mid-twenties, stop short of laughing more than a little and change the subject. I do as well. The moments pass, and we bring up the lighter subjects again. Purposefully awkward segues along the lines of "speaking of tractor tyres, what's for lunch?" There's always skiing to keep the day moving.
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Title from James McMurtry's recent "Canola Fields", the lead song on his tenth studio record, The Horses and the Hounds. I don't have a thirty-year crush, but I seent some shit, man.
** I think, don't quote me on it; it was a big but not too too big yellow dirt Cat, not a snowcat.