Alpen flashback fills a southern Ontario coffee


	Outdoors
		Alpen flashback fills a southern Ontario coffee mug Mountain Culture
			by Scott Mackay I smell the spicy aroma of stunted, snow-laden alpine spruce; the burnt odor of snow melting over my camp stove in a pot I forgot to seed with water. My furious little stove is producing a persistent hiss as I coax it awake, gloved fingers fumbling on the fuel pump. There’s the sound of ravens flapping overhead, the dog barking as gray jays make bombing runs on my breakfast. The nylon of the tent flaps in the breeze to the beat of birds’ wings. Across the valley, the mountainside continuously changes color as the sun rises. First gray-blue shadow, then deep blue sky, then red-gray rock, and finally white-yellow light. Meadows and glades and gullies emerge like a sleight of
.hand. I can’t help painting mental ribbons of 'skiability' across them This is the movie reel spinning in my head this morning as I water instant coffee and oatmeal in my kitchen in southwestern Ontario. As the boiling water hits the bowl, thought bubbles burst forth like molecules. In the vapor trail of that chemistry, something in me shifts. Suddenly, I remember that that this is the same food that had been my mainstay for breakfast on many backcountry ski trips around Smithers. For months my mind has been returning to a nagging question - what aspect of the trips and those mountains has captured my heart so deeply? What makes me pine for them in the midst of Toronto traffic jams, or even in the wilderness of our Canadian Shield? Aesthetics perhaps, or the perpetual motion of nomadic journeys, but neither of these fully explain my alpen-flashbacks. This morning, smell, that powerful memory trigger, brings a grain of insight. Allow me to indulge in my movie a little longer… It all seems still, but everything is moving under the guise of sluggishness. Vapor creeps across invisible gradients of temperature and pressure in the snow beneath my feet. Rocks, frozen together by night, fall with a clatter as the first rays of sun dissolve their tenuous bonds. Glaciers buckle and flow downhill in geologic time, tossing aside Seracs. Their demise comes across the valley toward me as muffled explosions. I used to think winter was deathly quiet - before I set foot in the mountains. But even light makes noise here. I remember once leaning on my ski poles in a snowfield, watching the first light of day rush towards, and then over me. The air began to ring with life! That’s the only way I can explain the feeling in my inner ears. In the mountains (on a calm day) there’s a certain quiet which allows the primal noise and energy of everything that’s going on to seep further into my garbled head. It’s beautiful, but also slightly unsettling. In such a place, I am more on my toes, less distracted by perpetual mental chatter. I’d say I feel more alive. For me, the mountains spawn a kind of ultimate reality, a togetherness-but-aloneness. Although I venture out on ski trips with good friends, danger (real or perceived) often colors our relations with a heightened sense of self-reliance - an unlonely aloneness. You can help or be helped with words of encouragement or caution, but the person hauling the pack and the person stepping off the top of the ridge is first person singular. Once I began to learn this truth, my whole way of relating to myself and to life also began to change. I started to think more about how much I looked to outside influences to support my actions or motivations, how much they inadvertently affect them. In the opposite way, I began to look inside myself more often for guidance, strength, and knowing when to stop or go. Acknowledging my aloneness helped me to act more skillfully, and to appreciate (rather then rely on) the company of others. That same aloneness can also lead to an unbelievable sense of giddiness and collective accomplishment when you make it through something nerve-wracking, or exhausting, and come out the other side. I remember once pulling a friend out of a crevasse, having just learned the practical aspects of crevasse rescue the day before. When he finally was safely on the surface, we both began to shake involuntarily and we talked animatedly all the way back to camp, despite our exhaustion. I think he began to get a bit sick of how happy I was, but I simply had never felt so, well, useful in my entire life. Our responses to the situation were formed as individuals, but our shared action allowed us to overcome something quite serious. There are also plenty of less dramatic events that help to shape the together-but-alone dynamic: cooking and cleaning up at -30º, finding a little pocket of powder to ski in a sea of aggravatingly breakable crust, and (my personal favorite) walking back to the truck for hours through thigh-deep snow because one of my bindings broke. These kinds of events have shaped some deep friendships and a deep sense of independence, and each one is made more memorable in the fine company of others and in the fine company of the self. The essential quiet and primal energy of the mountains, the ultimate reality they hold, and the way they have influenced my relations with myself and others, have left me with both a sense of knowing and a pesky sentimentality. I keep remembering them; they keep reminding me they are still there, far away from where I am now… In busy southern Ontario, there is always a clamor, always a message. Reality spills out in platitudes or hides quietly in valley bottoms; it is too varied and too polluted to grasp. Too ripe with the monkey wrenchings of advertising! I thought I might have let reality slip through my fingers, that I might be destined to only visit it on two-week vacations. Now I know it’s inside me, perhaps waiting for the right food to come along. I just wanted to take this fine opportunity over a mug of instant coffee, a bowl of hot cereal, and my computer, to give thanks for the living of it. (Scott Mackay lived in the Bulkley Valley for four years, left to travel around the world, and has ended up back in his native Ontario.)
Next Outdoors Article				Home
Back to Fall 02