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By Jonathan Gibbs
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I am starting a new newspaper column as of today, right now with these first caffeine-fueled stabs at my laptop. In it I will seek to combine my old-timey newshound self with my new modernized news self, mix in the blogosphere’s self-indulgent tendencies and spew forth the jumbled thoughts in my head straight onto this page in one furious blast, one take as it were, as if I was actually blogging. I will attempt to wed the Web with the printed word by dumping my random thoughts once a week no matter how ludicrous or cogent they may be. Absurdity will get equal treatment with profundity. And I can’t cheat by using a real, actual book as a reference; I have to rely on SpelCzech and Wikipedia in lieu of a dictionary and encyclopedia. And if I need a word – or fact – and can’t find it in my memory or online, I will make one up. And as for rules of grammar, syntax or order of events depicted, I will go with the spirit of most blogging: I break a rule, I’ll just make up a new one.
It snowed today. As a thoroughly modernized human I usually get my exercise by taking an hour to walk nowhere on a treadmill and lift bars of metal that end up in the same place as they started, on a rack with other bars of metal.
So when I saw the snowfall this morning, I thought, ‘Oh, look at the fortuitous opportunity with which I have been presented so that I may get my exercise – and help my family proceed along their daily comings and goings in the bargain!’
Uh, yeah . . Okay, I didn’t think that. I thought, ‘How can I get to the gym in my car by backing out of the driveway without packing down the snow my pregnant wife and three-year-old son (well, almost three) are talking about shoveling while I go to Workout World to watch ESPN while impersonating a caged gerbil getting its daily dozen.’ I have a conscience, after all, and so I didn’t want to make it harder for them to remove the snow from its substrate.
Self-centered thoughts and intentions aside, I did the right thing. We all went out and shoveled until they got bored and drifted off for a walk. One of our Bernese Mountain dogs had eaten Nathan’s glove and so he was banished into the backyard so he could begin the magical process of making it reappear. I continued to shovel.
Working through the resentment I felt about the fact water sometimes comes in a form in which it doesn’t just go ahead and take care of itself by conveniently finding its way to where it belongs (i.e. in a bay, river, brook, pond, lake or ocean), I had a realization: I was making a difference! Maybe not quite on the scale of building the Great Pyramid, but a difference. Actually lifting a mass of material from one location, transferring it through space and depositing it into another, more out of the way location, I feel a sense of accomplishment, kind of like Superman boring a hole through to the center of Earth to deposit a Kryptonite meteor where it can do no harm to mankind.
Finishing the driveway and walk with blood-engorged muscles in my arms screaming silently of my new-found powerfulishnesshood, I decided to ride this wave of exhilaration and take out after my family with a pair of snowshoes.
I trudge into the woods near our house feeling like I’m tricking the forces of nature. Modeled after the snowshoe hare’s natural physiology, snowshoes spread the weight of their wearer so one can nearly float on the snowpack. As a sore-hipped, bad-backed overweight klutz, the opportunities for me to to feel as if I am floating are scant. (Actually they are nearly non-existent.)
My wife and son are coming out of the woods as I go in. He is ruddy-faced in his sled and my wife is in need of food, in this case a pregnancy-inspired menu choice consisting of a salad, chicken and bean soup, sour dough bread dipped in hummus and tabouli, ginger cookies and chocolate chip mint ice cream – all consumed in rotation at roughly the time. Tibet, the dog who did not have a glove in her stomach joins me as we forge ahead into the wild. Well, mild wild, maybe, but definitely vaguely threatening in a benign sort of way.
Passing through an area of secondary forest and entering a grove of Red pine, I am struck by how still, quiet, wonderful and strange these familiar woods are. It’s hushed, save for the for the barely perceptible whoosh of my aluminum shoes passing through the powdery snow and the satisfying crunch of their cleats as they dig into the frozen crust of a previous snowfall.
Tibet walks alongside for awhile as I watch the snow pass through the decking in my shoes and begin to engage in some serious natureboy escapism. I stop, catch Tibet’s concentrated gaze and a moment of man and animal silent communication ensues. “We’re having fun, now!” says her eyes. We come to a fork in the woods. I take the one most travelled by the look it but compensate for this out-of-character nod at conformity by doing so backwards.
I learn two things about snowshoeing in this action. First of all, it’s really hard to walk backwards in devices specialized for walking forwards. Second of all, it’s really hard to get up from a fall onto your back with snowshoes on. It’s roughly akin to a someone with a dozen whiskey sours under his belt trying to get off a barstool and walk to the door while looking cool and suave. And it takes about as long and involves about as many stumbles and false starts. By the time I am up and pointed back into the woods. Tibet has departed, no doubt embarrassed to be seen in the company of someone rolling around on the ground for a purpose other than to get a scent on his fur.
And it is a scent, more accurately the source of a scent, where I find Tibet. She is digging furiously and with great intent into the snow at the base of a Multiflora rose bush, pausing to inhale gasps of what I eventually smell. I learn something else: Death doesn’t smell like death, it smells like organic decomposition. And organic composition can be mushy and gross. I tell Tibet to drop the organic decomposition and we proceed on our nature walk.
My life is such that the closest I get to living on The Edge is by writing a column straight to the page as I am now. The song beating in my ears somehow morphed from Born to be Wild into Born to Mild about 15 years ago. But I still like to imagine living close to the sort of danger in which I must accomplish a complicated task in the face of unfathomable perils that bear unspeakable consequences if I fail to accomplish said task.
At this point I begin to pretend I am Kit Carson and I am forging a trail through the desolate wilds of Colorado. I am reading a book called “Blood and Thunder” about his life. It’s a life in which a simple, unassuming man negotiates his way through an uncountable adventures and dangers – and did so all before breakfast. A sort of McGyver in buckskins, Carson could find a man who had walked over a desert floor and across a talus slope by spotting the minute indentations and the few pebbles that were out of place in a 100-square mile area.
Leaving aside the fact I could not even track the Sunday paper half-submerged in the snow in in the driveway this morning even though it was wrapped in blue plastic bags, I set a goal for myself: I have to track where my son and wife went, what they did, how long it took them to do it and where they turned back. They are not actually my family in this particular tracking fantasy, mind you, they are marauding horse thieves who I have to find while remaining undetected by other unfriendlies who are trailing me with evil intent. In Carson’s day, according to “Blood and Thunder” these unfriendlies were wont to stake down and slice open someone’s belly and poke around with their organs while keeping their victim alive.
So while I keep an eye trained on the parallel tracks in the snow ahead of me, I drag a pine bough behind me to cover my passage. Feeling smug and stealthy, I turn around to see how indiscernable my journey has been. I see huge indentations in the snow with a furrow in between each hole. It looks like Bigfoot would if Bigfoot had a tail. A very long and brushy tail.
Okay, so my strategy is now to appear to be such a fearsome creature that whoever is trailing me makes offerings in my name rather than offering to eliminate my name. I forge on, following the two narrow furrows left by an L.L. Bean sled with a 40-pound human inside it. I briefly wonder why there aren’t gaps in the snow left by the sled-puller’s snowshoes, but I dismiss it as an old trick that might work with some old hack tracker, but not with me.
I eventually find where the tracks I have been following depart the woods. I find it odd that they at the beginning of someone’s backyard. Then it dawns on me the tracks only go one way, and that is not in the direction where I last saw my family before they left the woods. I turn around and hurry home as fast as my aluminum feet can take me, fearful my family has been kidnapped. Coming out of the woods into the clearing at the side of our house, I shed my snowshoes and circle around to the backyard, bypassing the dog with a glove probably somewhere south of his duodenum. I burst into the house, smell the tabouli and see Nathan and Hillary at the counter.
Affecting a calm demeanor, I ask how their afternoon is going. “Good,” I am told. “And we saw Caroline, our pediatrican nurse on cross country skies. She was on her way home. Maybe you saw her tracks?”
“Nope,” I say. “I must have been looking at something else.”
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