Sticky Images

A Belated TR
Southern Colorado, New Years 2004

You know those vivid mental snapshots that start sticking with you when your plans don’t go as planned and you end up remembering the little things that you didn’t think you’d encounter? Yeah, those.

A girl I know calls them Sticky Images. They’re mind’s-eye Kodachrome slides that you hadn’t intended to take, but you wind up with anyway.

Like those shocked ashen tourists faces looking at me as I cussed up a blue streak of sailor-ese after shearing off a binding toepiece first run of the afternoon, after driving to Wolf Creek from Denver with so much thrumming anticipatory electricity in my veins I levitated an inch above the seat. Or of hurtling across the desert floor somewhere west of Fort Garland, a silver streak between the sagebrush, watching that huge perfectly-hemispherical lenticular cloud descend on the two stony teeth of the Blanca/Little Bear massif, enshrounding but never touching, like a condom being slowly unrolled over a couple of upended golf tees.

Sticky images rarely involve skiing itself. Usually they involve the peripheral experiences, like getting to the hill, apres-ski, or whenever you have time before and after actual skiing to reflect and absorb. As with, say, sex or good food, it's tough to subsist on the memory of skiing itself. It's too fleeting, too much like hurtling through the plenum while living off of conditioned reflexes.

Sticky images can attach to your other senses, too. Like that moaning old presence, the wind. As a mountaineer with a predilection for hanging out on narrow ridges that are easy to get blown off of, Aeolus can blow me but for the fact that I ski, too, for windstorms often mean approaching snow. Even when I used to fly sailplanes, where wind was kind of the whole point of the game, never did I get used to just how much invisible thrust it could bear. The 50 mph headwind combined with the 90 mph cruise of Der Naziwagen combined for a higher airspeed than I ever saw when strapped into a Schweizer 2-33, bending the antennae horizontal. Big storm front, that’s for sure, but invisible: I can see for miles (and miles and miles and miles [/the Who]) amd am surrounded on all sides by mountains, the Sangre de Cristos to the north and behind, the San Juans ahead, the San Luis foothills to the side, and it’s a curious feeling to know that as strong as my headwind is on the ground, the invisible tumult above is really jetting past, as though squirting from the nozzle of a firehose a hundred miles wide. I am reminded of St. Exupery, who once took off from an airfield on the east side of the Andes on a clear blustery day, flew for two hours straight ahead into the wind, and then looked down, startled, to see himself directly above the very same airfield he had taken off from two hours earlier.

So when I stopped for gas, I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was. I looked at the odometer and did a quick division in my head: 11 MPG. Half the usual.

But the timing was perfect, and I hit ground zero the same time the storm did. Ten minutes from the Wolf, I slipped under the leading edge of the overcast and everything went quiet and grey. The antenna straightened up again, slowly, and the roof rack stopped moaning like Enya was strapped to it like the grandma in Family Vacation. Sheltered by the lee of the southern spine of the San Juan crest, it got calm.

And then the snow started.

More sticky images:

3"-an-hour lap accumulations of snow on the lift (sculpting snow boners!) and of snot-rockets and skeet shooting random snowplowing gapers from above (3-for-5!). Of avy debris across the west side of Wolf so thick and yellow with scoured dirt they used not just a front end loader as a plow, but a hulking green Terex Titan that had probably been pirated from the open pit mine at Kennecott. Of creeping downhill in a conga line of flatlanders and navigating through the one small patch of window that wasn’t white with ice. Of Texans parked in the passing lanes, putting chains on the rear wheels of their front-drive Tauruses and wondering why they still had wheelspin. Of leaning back in the hot springs later in the nights, nostrils flared from either the sulphurous poison of pizza-fueled altitude-farts or the springs (never sure which, probably both), cheeks red from cheap Western Slope Delta, Colorado cabernet, and of squinting up at the snowflakes accelerating toward us from the vanishing point, like streaky hyperspace stars as seen from the cockpit of the Millenium Falcon.

The Sticky Images I had meant to take, like of the orange alpenglow on the storm hanging over the East San Juans, slipped away quickly. I can only imagine what that looked like – I remember remembering it, but all that stuck around were some of the envisionages that were less than gorgeous.

Like arguing with the crew about where to go while we got crankier and crankier from stormbound cabin fever. Of summarily diverting to the Purgatory, winding up between the heaven of Silverton and the hell of Hesperus. Of breaking the metal toe-bar of a backup Linken clean in half. Of logging on to NOAA and CDOT and CAIC and TGR in posh Durango cybercafes and trying to figure out an open highway back to Denver that didn’t involve the detour to Santa Fe. Of resignation and redesignation of Durango as the new base camp for the time being. Of shoehorning six smelly snow people, wet wool sweaters and all, into $35 non-smoking rooms, and snapping a motel-issue shower cap over the smoke detector so the stoners could get to work on their pall of green fog. Of sucking down umpteen pints of cask-conditioned Third Eye ale at some pool hall in Durango, of subsequent unexplained party injuries, of shots of Flu Shots, designed by some fiend to be the opposite of their namesake and to make you sick instead, of pick-up attempts and immediate and predictable rejection, of stolen credit card numbers, drunken miasmas and of stumbling out of last call with wide smiles just because the moon has come out and you’re surrounded by mountains.

In bed at 3, blind from the Third Eye, and uppenattem by 7, uncrossing those eyes with thick syrupy java brewed up, in true bum fashion, on a Whisperlite hanging stove (designed for hanging bivies on Nameless Tower rather than motel-room cush) roaring at well over a whisper while perched precariously on top of the big screen TV while the A-Team intro theme flickered. In 1975, a crack commando unit was sentenced to prison by a military corps for a crime they didn’t commit. These men promptly escaped from a maximum-security stockade to the Los Angeles underground…

The minutiae that stays with you is astounding. And the faces of all those whom I hung with for a week, even Hilary’s, I have since forgotten.

But other stupid things have stayed. Of looping southward and back home via New Mex, bivying in the car on a night of -8 F, of realizing the bank account is zilch thanks to a stolen debit card being in the mix of the two stolen credit cards. Of realizing that even with the fiscal identity stolen, the other identity, that of being a skier who drives 600 miles for a crow-flown 100 miles just to hang out in that proverbial white room, is so strong it can’t be taken away.

Final tally: two pairs (the entire active quiver) of skis, dead. Wallet: empty. Bruises: many. Liver: sore. Days of out of six of lift-serve, knee-deep 5% blow: 5.

That was ten months ago. The new season is almost here. With it will come a whole slew of unpredicted new images that will stick around.

Can’t wait.