My sister has never been the adventurous sort. Not that she doesn’t like doing things: she loves doing things. She’s not a cat lady or anything. Though she did have a crazy roommate who had a cat. The first time she tried to go to college she went all the way across the country. That didn’t work out so well. Then she went halfway down the eastern seaboard. That didn’t work out so well, either. Then she went back home, or rather, the place that seemed to her to be home. (Apparently there is a crucial moment in development between 6th and 8th graders, where if you move in 6th grade you think your new home is your real home. Eighth graders decidedly do not feel that way and decide to hate all the things for a while.) Trying to explain her rootlessness—or over-rooted-ness?—to others, I often referred to her as a homebody. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with being a homebody; if I had any interest in staying in the place that was chosen for me at age 12 by my mean old parents, maybe I’d be a homebody too. I certainly hibernate enough. Maybe I’m just secretly a little bit envious that she had such a home to go to; I was never quite as content with it as anyone else.

When I went to college, I wanted no part of the home I’d been inhabiting for the past four or five years. I wanted to get the heck out of Dodge. It’s not that I didn’t like the great state of Maine. It was fine, you know, if you wanted to be bored while you were raising your kids and suffering the woes of middle age. (Having lived there more recently, and with the wisdom of the ripe old age of 25, it’s pretty great. But try convincing 17-year-old me of that.) So I went to a real city that actually smelled like piss and where you actually should carry mace. It was the best.

Fly, little bird, fly!

But my sister, for reasons I wouldn’t understand for a while, needed the things that being at home and within reach of that emotional support could give a girl. So she went back home and did her homebody thing and thrived, reborn like a pretty little springtime flower. It’s not that she doesn’t have her own life; obviously she does. And it’s a very very cool life, to be sure. I mean, she graduated college, for crying out loud. And has tattoos and friends and stuff. It’s just that she has this life down the street from the same place it’s been for the past thirteen years. That is a sedentary-ness I simply cannot abide, but this is a clear case of “whatever floats your boat.” It sure did not float my boat.

That’s the thing about it, the difference between her and me. I always wanted those hallmarks of independence more than she did, or at least differently. I didn’t feel like I needed to be close to the comforts of home. I think she did. I wanted excitement and I wanted adventure and I wanted to do cool things. She wanted these things on a different scale than I did. I guess if I had a personal mission statement, it would be “to do cool things,” and do them anywhere but here.

I tried it, for a while, at her behest. I lived “at home.” It was psychologically dreary; even when I wasn’t living under my parents’ roof, I always felt like I had succumbed to the ease of being there. I was surrounded by friends I’d had for years, nepotistic networks, people who knew me or knew my parents or knew my sister. I didn’t have anything of my own, anything I felt I’d made or earned independently. I found no challenge in life “at home.” There was something pitiable, I felt, about still being in or returning to the place of my youth. I couldn’t hack it in the big bad world? I want to mooch off the parents? What am I, some kind of scaredycat? Get out, get out, get out, my conscience screamed to me. And get out I did.

I couldn’t figure it out for a while, why it was that I couldn’t be happy in the place my parents and my sister seemed so to be. All I knew is I was unhappy there, I imagine in much the way my sister was unhappy when she wasn’t. Eventually, after months of reflection and rebutting my mother’s continued attempts to get me to “get a job” at home, I realized my unhappiness was because my parents’ and my sister’s choices weren’t mine. “Home” is where the heart is, or where the buffalo roam, but of paramount importance is that it is where you choose it to be. And if my sister chooses her home to be at home, and I choose mine to be somewhere else, well, I am proud of us both for knowing ourselves well enough to make these choices.

Though now she thinks she wants to move; I am skeptical.

In any case, leaving the Fraser Valley, the greater Denver area, and the generally-great state of Colorado simply could not come soon enough. When you need a vacation, you need a vacation. So come 4 p.m., wheels were rolling just as quick as a turbo-powered gas pedal could carry them, along with four pairs of roof-mounted skis and a roof-rack. Ah, the genius of ski bum on-the-spot engineering.

Fast forward something like eleven or twelve hours later, we were somewhere in the nether regions of Eastern Montana. Although, it really could have been Wyoming for all we knew. It is dark, after all. Really dark, and the wind is howling, as it will do in the great plains, and we’re speeding along at a steady clip of 144.8 kilometers per hour (give or take…Montana is close to Canada, so I thought I ought to use kilometers–kilometres?–instead of miles) while all but the driver are catnapping their way through the dark, forsaken hours of the wee night.

POP.

I sprang awake. “Is that what I thought it was?” As we zoom down I-90 I slide open the sun roof, staring straight up at a dark night sky. I think it’s a trick of my eyes, hiding what I know HAS to be there. Where are the skis? The rocket box? Holy. Fuck. Fuck.

Kudos to the human body for a moment, here, for allowing adrenaline to course as effectively at three in the morning as it does in three in the afternoon.

We pull over in complete bewilderment; where are the skis? What do we do? Where in hell–and this is hell, to be sure–are we?

I don’t see snow on the ground but I’m sure it’s cold. It’s obviously windy, and we are in the Northern Great Plains. It has to be cold. I pull my scarf out from behind me, wrap it around my face and neck, and jump out of the car. I run. I’m running down the highway, but I’m not sure why. I don’t have a light and the night was pitch black, the insane wind is giving me a nearly-unmanageable tailwind as well as balance-altering vertigo, and even if I had footing or visibility I had no idea how far we had come, where I was going, or if a semi would come barreling down the highway and sweep me off my feet with its jet stream.

I turned around and ran, headfirst and half as quickly, back to the sad naked car.

What do we do? Why, call 911, of course. The dispatch in Sweet Grass County, Martha I think was her name, was sweet as the grass would be if it wasn’t whipping all around us and, presumably, our skis. Sitting lost out there, somewhere in the prairie, maybe being trampled by buffalo as we speak.

We pull a few u-turns while I’m on the phone and we don’t see our stuff. I ask Martha if we can use the Authorized Vehicles Only pullouts. She asks the sheriff. He says no. We pull over to wait and are joined by a sheriff of Sweet Grass County, Montana. Pumped up with adrenaline, I find a coat this time (it’s still, after all, cold and windy) and pop out of the car to talk to him. I explain our predicament, our estimated location at the time of the incident, and our earnest enthusiasm to recover our belongings and get on our way to our destination.

He pulls a convenient u-turn and we drive an excessive number of miles to the nearest exit and turn around legally and safely. We’re driving the same six-mile stretch of highway for the third or fourth time, cruising slowly in the breakdown lane with hazards flashing, high beams on, and all eyes peeled, unblinking, unmoving, into the quick-darkening expanse to our right. All we see is the tops of grass, a fence, and night time. Light and vision is sucked into the dark plains night like matter and energy into a black hole.

My phone rings. I answer it. It’s Martha.

“The officer found your rack,” she said.
“Oh, great.” Sigh of relief. But — “was everything there?”
“He didn’t say, he just said he founded the rack and I wanted to let you know.”

Around the next bend we see the cop lights stopped on the side of the road up ahead. As we pull up, our doors are open and we’re springing out before we’ve stopped moving. Skis! Bags! Gear! Twisted, tangled metal tubes! Broken plastic! Torn bolts! But…skis!

I grab my pair and I hug them. Cassie grabs one ski and dances with it. Her other ski is trapped–trapped!–beneath the upside-down remains of the rocket box. But Pat’s and Sam’s and my skis, and all our clothes in their bags, are scattered around the box in various states of disorganization but no worse for wear, all things considered. Scratched and dirty to be sure, but in our possession. Safe and sound, more or less.

At the officer’s recommendation we leave the shards of broken rack and box at the bottom of a small hill, just next to a rancher’s fence. We stuff five pairs of skis, more bags, and the poles into an already crowded car. We manage to shut the trunk, pack ourselves in (albeit barely), thank the officer, and be on our way, incredulous at our bad, suddenly-turned-wonderful luck.

On our return trip, along the same stretch of what had, in the darkness of the heinous hours of nighttime seemed a deserted, forlorn, desolate stretch of highway, during the day we saw animals, buildings, cars, railroads…how easy it would have been to find our skis in the daylight.

You only have to pay one cover charge for two people.

You pay two dollars for two beers (two for one!), and it’s a girl bartender.

You don’t get IDed…ever.

You understand and exploit the quid pro quo: cheap coffee = cheap alcohol, rental gear, swag, food…etc.

You go to a local boys’ homemade snowboard video screening at a bar and know half the room…and half the people in the video.

The owner of your favorite brunch spot knows your regular order, including your cheese substitution.

People know you by who you’ve lived with, worked with, or dated.

…to be continued. Thoughts/additions?

But it’s not just about front axels, rear axels, or all axels spinning: it’s about traction. Sure, it’s common knowledge that rear wheel drive is like probably the worst thing ever in the snow. Unless you’re TRYING to spin in circles all day long, which most of us aren’t. I mean it’s fun and all, but sometimes you just gotta get where you’re going. I’m all about the front wheel; get a little spin action on the corners but those front wheels will pull you up just about anywhere you want to go, as long as they have traction. And how do you get traction? Snow tires.

What happens if you don’t have snow tires? You end up in a ditch. This is the TRUTH. (Of course, you can end up in a ditch if you want anyway, but it’s easier to NOT end up in the ditch if your tires can actually grip the surface upon which they are trying to move.)

That is all.

But you know how it goes; one beer becomes three plus shots. Next think you know you’re sleeping on a couch with a sleeping bag and a comforter, waking up to two inches and it’s still snowing. And all you have are sparkly pink Chuck Taylors and a light cotton zip-up hoodie, and there’s no shovel, just a couple brooms. So with soaking socks and freezing toes, you go outside and start sweeping–sweeping, I tell you!–the inordinately substantial plow line off to the side, piling it around someone’s tarp-covered motorcycle. You try to boot-pack, or rather Converse All Star-pack, the snow behind the car, because even though it’s only two inches it’s the first two inches since last year and procrastination dictates you obviously don’t have snow tires on yet. Every little bit helps, right?

So with wet socks, wet pants, and snow-filled hair and shoes, lesson learned: it’s time to always be prepared. And, in consequence, a declaration: It is officially winter, therefore I shall wear nothing besides Smartwools and snow boots outside. Ever.

The new people—freshmen, if you will—are starting to roll into town, and I find myself being the self-important local who prides myself on knowing things about the place I live. Where to buy liquor. Where the good happy hours are. The poorly-kept-secret parking lots. The Sunday hours at the pharmacy. Where the shuttle bus stops are. Who is dating who and used to be dating them and who they used to date. We “upperclassmen” already have our friends, our cliques, our enemies, our frenemies, our exes, our futures, our grand schemes and expectations, our routines, our roles. The ultimate fear is that the new kids are going to come in and mess it all up. Take our place. Be better than us. It’s the classic seniority power struggle.

Maybe they’ll come in with their own preconceived notions of what high school–I mean the mountain life–is going to be like. These are the ones who are going to walk around like they own the place, trying to make things fit to their expectations, not realizing that this community and these relationships existed far before they got here, or that this is real life, or that it takes a hardy, or hearty, breed of human to thrive in the mountains. Or maybe they’ll come with an open mind, chasing powder and abiding by the tenets of work-to-live-to-play.

It’s not like we intentionally ostracize the freshmen, but it’s up to them to be up to snuff. And it’s up to us to show them what snuff is. To like the cold, to be thrilled by the snow, to keep up with our lifestyle (and our skiing), to embrace the mindset of this culture. The devil on my shoulder wants me to be the bitchy lead cheerleader, making them feel like they owe us something and that they don’t fit in until they prove they do (this is why I have no friends), and the angel wants me to be…well…there’s no high school archetype for it, but the keyword is “nice.” After all, the more the merrier.

A good crop of freshman is the group that meshes with and enhances the overcomplicated relationships we already have with each other. It’s the group full of new best friends or boyfriends or Tuesday drinking buddies or favorite coworkers. Ultimately, the good ones are the ones who want to be here, who get what being a ski bum is all about. These are the freshmen who get the date the seniors (i.e. the ones we let into our secret clubs). A bad crop of freshman are the ones without school spirit. They are the ones who are unenthusiastic and passive, the ones who are critical and judgmental, the ones who just don’t understand the mountains (it’s so cold, we’re so far away from civilization…). The ones who don’t want to be here. Don’t worry, we’ll make sure they figure this out: there’s nothing like being ostracized from a small town to make you get the heck out of Dodge.

Come the end of the season, the faint of heart will be off, as usual, and the worthy few will join the ranks of the mountain men and women. Let the hazing begin.

Neighborhood beach access at Maine home.

The night before I left I had some sort of crisis, or breakdown, or panic attack. Though as my sister pointed out, I didn’t feel like I was having a heart attack, so I didn’t have to worry about feeling like I was going to die. I’ve attributed this sudden onset of psychological upset to a combination of factors: work stress (INORITE), quarter-century crisis stress, real-world-expectation stress, and probably some pre-travel melancholy. In any case, I remained unenthusiastic and dejected until driving back from the Denver airport, aiming west on I-70, and seeing the mountains framed against an all-too-stunning sunset. And it struck me as I was trying to pick out my peaks among the many, the same way it struck me in May, weaving westward across South Dakota and southward through Wyoming and Colorado: home. At last.

I have resisted calling Colorado home, assuring my latent nomadism that the inevitable time to leave would come in a season or two or three. So when a friend asked me the other day if I was excited to come back home to Colorado, I was unsure how to answer, unsure if I considered Colorado “home.” My inclination is still to call Maine “home” for a variety of reasons (family, primarily, though I’ve also been known to refer to the entire east coast as “home”). I’ve written quite brilliantly, if I say so myself, about this before.

Back then I had no idea who or, more relevantly, where I was in the world. Simple questions about where I was from threw me into a tizzy and to some extent they still do. But I’ve finally gotten my head around the “where do you live” question: once I realized I wanted to stay in Colorado for more than five minutes, it got a lot easier to admit that I live here, live ANYWHERE (expressions of permanence are terrifying), to complete or relative strangers. This whole living somewhere thing is a decided benefit of giving up truly constant nomadism. After all, being from or living everywhere just sounds douchey and new-agey. Now, of course, the dilemma stems from “what do you do?” but this is not the moment for such angst.

To return to home-ness: my snap emotional reaction to the sight of the mountains belies the fact that I feel Colorado to be my home. To be fair, I had a similar excitation when driving from a new property acquisition in Massachusetts to Maine, getting closer and closer to the house where I spent not all but the most recent of my formative years; the house I returned to during college breaks and after stints in Colorado and Israel. These are both my homes: I’ve long been of the opinion that you can have multiple homes with different roles and relevancies. But I can’t recall being ever quite so comforted by a second home, even overtaking first home in its initial emotional impact. Is second home winning? Is–I shudder at the thought–Colorado more home to me than Maine? On a related note, am I losing my New England-ness?

I suppose this is one of those inevitabilities of growing up. I am, after all, registered to vote here, and it is where I have spent the majority of the past year. I lament the loss of the relevancy of [the homes of] my childhood, but I suppose it is being supplanted by something new. I hesitate to say better–what is it they say about change?

Now we bide our time, consider our bank accounts, travel or contemplate traveling, catch up on TV and politics, and purchase unnecessary, frivolous, but exciting and probably useful attire and equipment for the upcoming, six-month-long festivity that is ski season. It’s an exciting time: the snow on the mountains finally seems melt-proof and the nights have dropped below freezing. In some places, “winter” has “officially” begun, by which I mean other resorts are open and some high-high-alpine backcountry areas are marginally skiable. We are not yet lamenting the passage of summer, nor are we cursing the short days, long nights, (hopefully) unending snowfall, the generally perpetual winter. We still have our summer tan lines and our cuts and bruises from summer’s outdoor activities and the summer tires on our cars (it’s on the to-do list).

Soon enough, they’ll all be gone. But until then, we’ll look forward with childlike excitement to the beginning of winter, hoping for yet another year that ski season never, ever, ever, ends.

Today is Yom Kippur, and I just did tashlich with tea.

Let’s not talk about why I’m drinking tea on a day of fasting (I happen to be coming down with a cough), or why I’m doing tashlich at the last possible minute (because I’m forgetful and lazy), or why I’m doing tashlich with tea instead of bread (again, forgetful, and I happened to be walking along the river drinking tea).

The point is, I finally did tashlich.

Tashlich is a beautiful tradition in which we tear up pieces of bread, throw them into flowing water, and repent our sins; one torn piece of bread, one sin. It is supposed to be performed during the Days of Awe, the just-over-a-week nestled between the High Holidays Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.

As a kid, I would tear my bread into a few pieces to appease the Hebrew School teachers, throw most into the Raritan River (sorry, little sister), and shove the rest in my mouth. As I got older and stopped going to synagogue every week, which bizarrely coincided with my Bat Mitzvah, I haven’t stopped performing tashlich, no matter the inconvenience.

When studying abroad in Jordan I waited an extra week out of both necessity, it being a desert and all, and profundity, as we were going on a trip to the Jordan River. In college I would tuck a prayer book into my bag and wake up early to go down to the Schuylkill before class. I’ve even left synagogue early during High Holiday services in order to make it back home in time for high tide. Today I used tea instead of bread, determined to perform this ritual before sundown and time ran out.

Tashlich is one of the only traditions in Judaism that I feel is of critical importance for my own Jewish identity. In the Judaism I grew up with, there are communal rules or traditions, but in the end, each person’s learned interpretation of these is correct. I am religious in my own way, observant in my own way, spiritual in my own way, and I practice in my own way, vaguely guided by the lessons of my youth. Religion might have become obsolete for many of us in our twenties, but it doesn’t have to be: the way I practice and identify with Judaism has morphed to complement my secular life choices, not the other way around.

I usually forget religion exists at all. I don’t feel or think about being Jewish, really, until the holidays when I look around and realize I am the only one, all alone, so far outside my home planet where everyone does tashlich and whines and (mostly) fasts. It is this need to be a part of some amorphous far-away community that makes me so desperate to repent for my sins I perform this sacred rite with Earl Grey on my way home from the coffee shop (next to a pizza parlor, insult to injury, I tell you) where I was drinking the tea and writing the next few installments of my Abortion Watch series and dreaming about the seriously un-Kosher Break Fast I intend to have in a few hours.

I almost passed the creek on the walk home, actually, but generations of Jewish guilt instantaneously clouded over my head and I stopped. I can’t not do it. The water’s right here. Tea, bread, what’s the difference? I have to do it.

Do I believe throwing pieces of bread (or drops of tea), symbolically endowed with my sins, into flowing water are going to earn me any points come Judgement Day? Do I even believe in Judgement Day? Do I believe I’ll be washed clean, inscribed in the Book of Life? Do I think God is listening, that he/she is going to forgive me, or that those whom I’ve wronged are going to magically forgive my multitudinous, egregious sins against them and society?

Probably not, but that’s not the point. Asking forgiveness, however it is done, is fundamentally self-reflection and encourages us, on our own terms and held accountable only to ourselves (or God, I guess), to be better next year. In the end, being a better person is the whole point, whether the endgame is to be written in the Book of Life, to reach heaven, to experience salvation, or to attain Enlightenment.

As I was dribbling my lukewarm tea into a creek in the mountains of Colorado, I asked forgiveness for sins against my community: for not speaking up for what’s right, for being apathetic, for believing in futility. I asked forgiveness for sins against myself: for not living up to potential or expectations, for being dishonest with myself, for being afraid of failure. Maybe next year.

So what was I doing on the side of a mountain on a one-lane dirt/rock road anyhow? Why, searching for photo opportunities, of course. Aspens are phenomenally beautiful, what with their quaking and shimmering and the more so, I have discovered, now that they are changing colors — from summer’s green, to yellow, to the first hints of autumn’s oranges and reds. I proposed the idea of an aspen-shooting adventure to a friend of mine, thinking perhaps we’d undertake a short hike or frolic through the woods, find ourselves on a bald hilltop somewhere in the hinterlands of the National Forest with the setting sun’s rays reflected in momentary bursts on the twisting leaves of the aspens, and I would find the perfect fall picture.

As the one with the car, I was obviously driving, and never having driven up Cottonwood Pass, as suggested, I proceeded as directed. Washboard gravel gave way to open range and packed dirt. At the top of the pass we turned left, heading farther uphill, into the Forest and ATV territory. I follow the obvious car road through twists and turns, along steep drop offs and through pine and aspen groves, enthralled by the drastic ridgelines along the horizons and the paintbrush splats of bright yellow glowing out of the dense pine and brush below.

But eventually the road turns rougher, the rocks on the road that were golfballs are now tennis balls, now softballs, now soccer balls. The divots and tire tracks in the road deepen and what could have passed for shoulders disappear completely. I pass the last three points of no return and, after miraculously navigating more than my fair share of what, after heavy rains, would have been dramatic puddles but on such a dry afternoon were nothing more than a busted suspension waiting to happen, we reach the crest of a hill.

And by crest of a hill, I meant crest of a hill: the drop off was so sharp, so steep, I insisted on getting out of the car, walking the next hundred yards to plan my line, and begin kicking rocks out of the way. The downhill was the longest few miles of my life; every few hundred yards I would pull the e-brake, we’d get out and move rocks, and I would get back in the car and roll down, riding the brakes, praying, sliding, bouncing, turning quickly to avoid the jagged rock on the left and then the dried up rivulet on the right, then chose between bottoming out on the left or bottoming out on the right. Halfway down I got out again, directing my friend which rocks to move as I hyperventilated and weighed worst-case scenarios against each other. What if I took the whole undercarriage of the car out? What if I broke the suspension? What if I pop a tire, or bend a wheel? What if I lose my brakes? What if I end up perched on a boulder, not a single wheel touching the ground? What if I get somewhere impassable, can’t turn around, or worse, can turn around but can’t get back up the scree field I just slid down with five inches of clearance? WHERE THE FUCK AM I?

I can see the highway off the right, but the road is curving left; all I can see is more rocks, more dirt, more troughs, more potential for disaster with every passing meter, and we appear to be proceeding into deeper depths of forest and forgotten, abandoned land.

I’m panic-pressing the clutch even though I’m coasting down in neutral. Dust is flying into every orifice in my body and every rock I bounce over ricochets through my skeleton; is this the one that’s going to end it all? I’m driving down a staircase of granite boulders buried so far underground they’re barely there. I’m sweating, breathing, my heart rate is through the roof and I’m doing rapid illogical panicked budgetary calculations for what at this point seems the inevitability of me literally tearing to shreds the underside of the car that isn’t actually mine to begin with. Thank god the insurance company doesn’t know I’m doing this, I realize.

The grade of the hill starts to level out a bit, my heart rate slows, and my friend points out my salvation; a familiar canyon off to the right, and a moment later, a maintained, graveled dirt road running perpendicular to the spawn of Satan I was tumbling down with my last, dying breaths. I stop at the end, get out, and look back up at what had, moments before, passed for a road. I do the requisite check of the underside, sides, front, and back of the car. Aside from the thick, impenetrable coat of dust and a few much-looser probably-pointless plastic pieces and the scraps along the side of the car from the high alpine desert brush I was forced to drive a little too close to (by which I mean on top of), we had emerged more or less unscathed. Lesson learned.

We stopped by the Colorado River just before getting back on the “highway” and watched some men fishing. I stalled twice starting in second. That’s how shaken I was. I pulled a U-turn in the next town to hit up the Dari Delite, the closest ice cream shop this side of the continental divide and still a solid 25 miles away.

There we sat, halfway home, dust-covered and surrounded by sunset and alpenglow, licking cones of soft serve twist, shooting the shit and discussing life, love, and the pursuit of pursuits, reveling in the last moments of late summer’s adventures. And the car still runs.