“Snow, son. Nothing else in the world smells like that. I love the smell of snow in the morning. The smell, you know that snow smell? The whole hill. Smelled like … winter.”
Snowpocalypse no
Category: Snow
Psychlocross
My brother geezers were already abandoning the Monday ride on Sunday. Cold, wet, no thank you, please, etc.
I bailed too, mostly because I’m taking antibiotics and steroids to beat down a sinus infection, but also because I had my fill of cold and wet in the Before-Time™, when I fancied myself a cyclocross racer.
My interest in the activity started to flag after a few years living on our wind-whipped rockpile outside of Weirdcliffe, in Crustytucky County, Colo. (“Gateway to Gardner”).
I actually had some of my best races while we lived there, because I was living at 8,800 feet and training even higher, running a ton, riding a ’cross bike almost exclusively on the indifferently maintained and largely unpaved roads, and doing laps on my own short homemade course.
But evil weather was both my strength and my undoing. I needed a course with lots of running to have a chance against the roadies, who are like cowboys, reluctant to dismount from their steeds and proceed on foot. So, yeah: rain, mud, snow, anything to suck a few mph out of those tree-legged, leather-lunged sonsabitches.
But getting to the races in the kind of conditions that favored my limited skillset — run around for 45 minutes while wearing a perfectly rideable bike — could be something of a project. The nearest one was 90 minutes down and north in good weather, and it was the race I and my club put on twice a year in Bibleburg. The others were in Franktown, Littleton, Lakewood, Longmont, Boulder, Mead, Fort Collins, and like that there.
It got to where I would book a motel room, drive north the night before a race, eat dinner out, breakfast on coffee and energy bars in the room, get my ass handed to me at the event, clean up in a car wash, find something to eat, and drive home. After a while it began to feel a lot more like work than recreation, even if I did well, which mostly I did not.
Unless I saw heaps of snow on the deck when I got up on race day. Yay. And even then I had to drive home in it.
The travel got a little easier when we moved back to Bibleburg, but the racing never did. I was working a lot while training less, and at a lower altitude, too. The flesh was unwilling and the spirit was weak.
I could tell I was over it in 2004, when I rode my main race bike to a ’cross in Bibleburg . No spare bike, not even a spare wheel. And when I flatted about halfway through my race, I wobbled off the course, resolved the puncture (who brings a pump and saddlebag with spare tubes and tire irons to a friggin’ race?), and rode home.
And it wasn’t even snowing.
Nopocalypse
AND THE GREAT WEATHERPERSON spake unto the People, saying, “Place thy Shovels where thou canst Find them in the Dark, for I shall send a Snowpocalypse to thee, yea, even unto the Upper Reaches of the Chihuahuan Desert, wherein roam the Purse Dogs from which it takes its Name.”
“And they shall be Sore Vexed, for their Darling Little Aztec-Themed Sweaters and Tiny Suede Booties shall not Warm them and keep their Feet Dry in this, the Hour of their Need. And they shall Tremble and Yap and Bite the Hand that Feeds them, which is to Say it shall be the Same Ol’, Same Ol’, only Colder and Wetter.”
But the promised Snowpocalypse failed to Eventuate, and the People grew Restless, having Armed themselves with Shovels, Snow Blowers, and Strong Drink, and endured many painful Bites from their Chihuahuas as they stuffed them into the Cutest Miniature North Face Gore-Tex Insulated Jackets with wool Paddygucci Beanies and Itty Bitty Sorels.
“What gives?” they enquired. “Where it at the Snowpocalypse?”
And lo, the Great Weatherperson answered in a Voice like Thunder, proclaiming: “Ho, ho, got you again, didn’t I? Check the Calendar, dummies. April Fool! You might get a little Rain if you’re Lucky. Gotta run; these Chihuahuas don’t make Themselves, y’know.”
Tick, tock
“You must concentrate upon and consecrate yourself wholly to each day, as though a fire were raging in your hair.”
—Taisen Deshimaru
When I awakened on the morning of my 70th birthday, March 27, 2024, my heart was still beating. Tick, tock; tick, tock. Fifty-two beats per minute, just like clockwork.
I was pretty sure I wasn’t in Hell. I don’t know if we take heartbeats with us to Hell, but if we do, I expect they’re slightly more elevated, what with the pitchforks and roasting and screaming and all.
Also, it was almost six o’clock, and it seemed I had been allowed to sleep in. I’m almost certain that’s not part of the drill in Hell. If there’s any extra sack time in Hell it’s probably spent in an actual sack, being dipped like a teabag into a giant iron mug of boiling shit that you have to drink instead of coffee in the mornings that look just like midnight, only more so, while a grinning D.I. who looks like a cross between R. Lee Ermey and Hellboy screams at you: “You gotta be shittin’ me, Joker! You think you’re Mickey Spillane? You think you’re some kind of a fuckin’ writer? Now get on your face and give me infinity!”
When I finally crawled out of the sack I was 99 percent convinced I was not in Hell.
For one thing, instead of Gunnery Sergeant Beelzebub demanding an eternity of pushups I found a sweet little kitty-cat purring happy birthday to me. Like Herself, who had slipped silently off to work, Miss Mia Sopaipilla had granted me a little extra catnap instead of yowling me up at stupid-thirty to fill her bowl and/or empty her litter box.
And for another, it was 29° outside, with a dusting of snow on the green grass.
Huh. Not Hell. Albuquerque. Some people think it’s Hell, but everyplace is Hell to someone. Especially in March.
So I enjoyed two cups of coffee instead of a bottomless mug of Lipton Shitfire Hellbroth, attended to Miss Mia, and got back to the bloggery. Tempus fugit. Tick, tock; tick, tock.
Thanks to one and all for the birthday wishes. And apologies to anyone who had 69 in the office pool. I had 30; imagine my surprise.
A Report in January 2024
There are many reasons why I do not miss living in Crusty County and this is one of them.
My man Hal Walter has been enjoying the sort of lifestyle E.B. White wrote about in his 1958 essay “A Report in January,” in which White observed that “just to live in New England in winter is a full-time job; you don’t have to ‘do’ anything. The idle pursuit of making-a-living is pushed to one side, where it belongs, in favor of living itself, a task of such immediacy, variety, beauty, and excitement that one is powerless to resist its wild embrace.”
Sixty-six years later and several thousand feet up at his snowbound acreage in Colorado, Hal has had his good truck develop a sick headache, just as he prepared to take his son, Harrison, to the dentist in Pueblo, 50-some-odd miles east and down; borrowed his wife’s SUV for the trip only to bury that vehicle up to the axles in a snowdrift on the return trip, just 50 yards from his gate; shoveled it out in a single-digit wind chill; returned to doctoring his own rig, successfully, without having to call a tow truck (“If I were to need to have this thing towed, nobody could even get in here.”); and dug a path for it up his driveway to the county road, newly plowed.
This was in addition to the usual chores: delivering hay to the burros, grub to the family, wood to the stove, Harrison to Colorado Mountain College in Leadville (slated today, the last I heard), and so on and so forth.
If, like White, Hal wonders when he would once again “get a chance to ‘do’ something — like sit at a typewriter,” or even his MacBook Air, he has not mentioned it to me.
Mad Blog Media 