Tahoe
When I leave the madness of the city, Tahoe always welcomes me with a soothing and timeless embrace. I seek solitude in the relative wilderness, I crave exercise free from machines and yearn for shining slopes that push me down their backs like frozen waves. Don’t padel just hold on for your dear life.
Solitude slows me down from the reckless, selfish race track that is my city life. I am not depraved of human contact. In fact, I am surrounded by people, yet we wordlessly agree to let the mountain slow down our pace and stimulation rate.
I love looking at mountain ranges, as a car weaves through craters and valleys, I take in the peaks and cat walks, just a few feet shy from a precipice and yet safely cuddled in the warmth of the heated leather seats. I notice a boulder formation stretching from the top of a mountain range and lowering its rocky hook in the direction of the vehicle.
The scythe is frozen in motion, but it’s clear that only a titanic effort stopped it’s progress somewhere eons ago, as the ground moved, erupted and shuddered under elemental forces.
As I leave the city, I think of schedules, appointments and expectations. As the car starts to climb, nature grabs my mind and doesn’t let go until I come back down.
I find perspective that stretches against years and lifetimes, my own and everyone else’s. It’s the only way to relate to a wonder created before humans existed and likely to outlast them as well.
Cars travel closely together, sometimes rhythmically close, sometimes sporadic. They race each other to cabins and hotels in pursuit of a stiff drink with friends, an early night and dawn patrol. Often we crawl bumper to bumper, in blizzard, over ice, or worse stopped in LA ilike traffic. People honk, get out of the car in a pointless attempt to gather information about the reason for the delay.
Few of us know how to deal with a mountain's fury when it decides to unleash a storm right on top of your Honda. We are individually powerless against nature and can only cross our fingers and hope that today’s standstill on the road at noon will mean fresh powder tomorrow morning.
You imagine how the sun will warm your face against the wind while you stand on top of a mountain, ready to drop into fresh tracks and glide for 10 minutes at high speeds across this natural obstacle course with friends, spotify, or alone with your thoughts.
It finally snowed on Saturday morning. It drizzled on the cabin, covering the pines which lined the street with a wet, sparkly hew. We drove out to the elements.
By the time we got to Alpine, the rain turned to snow, windy, sticky and cold. I prepared for the familiar day of sunny, sweaty spring like conditions. The mountain met my gaze with an ominous wall of wind and frothy snow.
My light sweatshirt woul quickly turn into a wet, frozen sheet awkwardly framing my body and forcing the realization that the mountains are friendly and fun within a highly narrow window of opportunity, like a catwalk, filled with sweeping scenery and promise of adventure, but deadly and unforgiving with a few fateful steps in the wrong direction.
Like the Donner party, who froze to death and turned to cannibalism under the utter hopelessness of winter wilderness - just a few miles away from salvation, so did I suffer under the wind, the cold and the wet snow penetrating my flimsy sweater and right into the core of my chest. Or at least in my head, the two situations seemed comparable.
The lift brought torture as my extremities went numb, the ride down offered a welcome respite, but short in its duration and with ample opportunity to crash against the icy covers of the mountain. The visibility held only nominally and we were forced to ski down on faith alone.
You took the moguls and the ravines on your knees and hoped that every carve cut through at the right angle propping the body with momentum without catching an edge that would send you flying off to the side.
My friends got to the mountain earlier and now were paying for it. Covered in snow and thoroughly soaked, their hands were practically frozen in the wind.
We were on vacation. We were having a blast, yet we had a sober appreciation for how close the danger loomed and how quickly the a casual sporting event could turn deadly.
Early return home brought welcome repose. I crawled under a blanket in front of the TV and started writing with playoff football murmuring ambiently. Hot chocolate and a beer to sooth the tired muscles and the frozen bones. Good company, like a solid pine in the fire for a cozy atmosphere makes for a heartwarming afternoon.
“It’s all about the right vibe”, say all the hippies and stoners. It’s a panacea statement that means everything and nothing at all. What kind of physical understanding or chemical level syncing of stress hormones make someone understand, ‘relate” to another person? Is it similarities in background, something as basic as height? Similar aggression levels, looks, levels of extraversion?
We read non verbal signals to get the majority of the message, intended or not. Women confidently outperform men here by miles. We can’t control our subconscious thoughts, so the conversation on this inner level happens not between you and me but someone like you speaking to someone like me.
Our subconscious is a black box and science is only starting to scratch the surface. Very few people live consistent enough lives where they can test different parts of their “shadows” on a relevant scales.
Haruki Murakami, a Nobel prize winner in literature, talks about shadows a lot in his writing. Your shadow is a mysterious part of you and if you lose it, you change forever. You shadows is also weak and won’t survive without you
How often do we tell our shadow what to do versus the way around. Can we talk to our shadow, will it listen? Is it socially appropriate to let people know that you are talking to your shadow / having issues with it, or running experiments?
In the mountains, the shadow of our hunter gatherer ancestors straightens a bit and shows our modern personalities that although technology looks to the future, our bodies are hopelessly stuck in the past. Early people were meant to be in the mountains, so we feel re-energized after escaping the city for bit.
