Time to garden

by Susan Anderson
Tuesday, April 22, 2008 9:20 AM MDT

Do you suppose that a 75-degree day means that it’s time to quit skiing?

If you like to cross-country ski on Casper Mountain, this is the time of year when you can have the best skiing experience of your life and the worst within four days of each other.

Here’s what the worst is like.

You drive to your favorite skiing spot through wet mud that splashes up to the top of your just-washed car. Once you park, the dog leaps out and happily rolls in a deep mud puddle that turns her yellow-gold fur to brown.

The skiing goes pretty smoothly until the temperature climbs above freezing, making the skis grab the snow so that it feels like you landed in taffy, sending your body hurtling forward while the skies stay still.

Then the golden retriever hovers over you as you lie in the snow, shaking mud on your face and trying to help. On the way home, the wet dog perfumes the car.

That experience would convince a normal person that it’s time to stop skiing and turn to something more appropriate for late April, like gardening, golf or walking.

The other side

But then, in a day, another six inches of the fluffiest snow you ever saw might fall, and you’re back in skiing heaven.

My husband and I happened to arrive in one of those perfect moments one night, when the evening blue light was reflected off of the snow. There is a hushed sound of a heavy snowfall that would hypnotize and calm the most anxious soul.

The only thing you can hear is your heart beating and the dog’s fluffy footfalls, while flakes drift into your eyes and onto the ground.

Gliding forward offers such a sense of floating on top of something soft that I always imagine I’m skiing across the top of an iced wedding cake.

As a kid, I absolutely loved to walk on top of snow drifts, back when I weighed less than the golden retriever does now.

It was that same sense of ignoring gravity as you pick your way along the top of a drift without ever sinking a boot into it.

I’d have to lose about 50 pounds to do that now.

When the skis are plowing through five inches of new-fallen snow, you can’t go fast enough to hurt yourself, a condition that I really enjoy, since control isn’t one of my strong skills.

Avid doesn’t mean skilled

It takes only one day to change all of this.

After that heavenly tour in the blue evening snow, the next day still was beautiful. But the protection of sugary powder was gone. And, since avid doesn’t mean skilled, I may be the only skier who can fall down while standing perfectly still.

I had come to a stop on a hillside so I could really look hard at the pileup of frost on a sagebrush branch. As I leaned forward slightly to get a better look, I was suddenly face down in the snow.

From standing still to brushing snow out of your eyes in one moment is a little humbling.

It really may be time to go dig in the garden, where at least I’m already close to the ground if I fall.

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