Last Day

Photo by Peter Stravlo

It’s thirty degrees too hot as I slide off lift one and skate a sugary white strip to Porcupine. A week earlier than planned, and a week after my old-timer partners in crime called it quits. Below me two Spring Breakers make wide thigh-quaking loops as if they’ve never skied groomed ice, afraid the maze of dirt and trees on either side might do them in. I tilt my tips straight down, gain speed, washboard hard—then carve a howling, icy turn, curt as a Hemingway sentence. No stopping now as the punctuating ice chewing up my skis envelopes like the freight train roar of an approaching tornado I remember as a kid in Oklahoma. I tilt and carve and inhale the roar as I speed past both looping partners in crime and shhhhhh…I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else but here on my last day of skiing this majestic mountain.

Because this season I’m stealing something rare. Rare, because despite the record dry heat, there were days of steep, forever champagne powder, and I never waited more than two minutes in line. A crime, because in any season not as crazy as this, there would have been seven feet of snow when the lifts stopped spinning.

When my tireds hanging out, in a dream state, I buy my pass for next season.