Vail is sometimes called the summit of North American skiing. I spend four days there and find it beautiful, though not in a way that can be ranked. A Michelin meal may be exquisite, yet an unidentifiable late-night street dish can remain more vivid. Different pleasures resist a single scale.
My older son defects from skis to a snowboard. Years of sport carry him quickly: after two days with an instructor, he links turns and draws a clean curve down the white slope. Watching his tall figure descend, I suddenly wonder whom he may one day love. The thought rises without reason and drifts away like a seed on the wind.
After skiing, we soak at Glenwood. Snow and hot springs belong together. When a frozen body enters the water, fatigue and insistence seem to leave through the skin, making room for an almost blank peace.
We drive deeper into the mountains through heavy snow. Flakes land on the windscreen and the wipers clear them, over and over, like an old ritual. We stay among the peaks partly to forget what does not need to be remembered, away from city light and the hum of notifications.
In the morning I step onto the balcony. The mountains are simply there. They say nothing and do nothing, yet they have endured from sunrise to moonset, from time beyond memory. Mist hangs at mid-slope and snow catches a little gold. My mind becomes still, like water when the wind stops.
The first half of life's journey has passed. Fate has allowed joy, pain, meetings, losses, and nights that can still draw a sigh. What once seemed impossible to cross now resembles a small stone on the road. Beside the mountains and the deep sky, old anxieties recover their true size.
To love another keeps the heart warm. To care for oneself makes it free, yielding like mountain water. I stand in the cold air with nowhere to arrive and nothing to complete. Simply here. Simply alive. Quietly present, as the mountains are.
