EVERYTHING ZEN

GRAND TETON NATIONAL PARK, WYOMING

Enough snow had come in overnight to make the original plan irrelevant. I was supposed to spend the day on horseback. Corbet's seemed more important.

Left my skis in a different state. My buddy's were right there. He hadn't technically agreed to lend them to me, but he was there and I needed skis, so the negotiation was brief and one-sided. Overalls. A hoodie. Boots two sizes too small. Edges catching at angles not meant for my stature.

God, we were ripping it.

Skied until my legs gave out the polite way, not the dramatic way. They just quietly stopped bargaining.

A friend had a connection at Triangle X, over in Grand Teton, so the afternoon went from skis to saddles without time to sit and break the news to my quads. Same muscles, same cold, same clothes. Luthor. Palomino. We rode out into the kind of landscape that makes you understand why people who live here get a little proprietary about it.

It was late enough that the drive back felt longer than it was.

Heater on full, or as full as I could manage given my coolant level. Hands still numb enough that the steering wheel only existed when I looked at it. Blue Monday came on. Then Everything Zen.

For a second the truck smelled like my parents' basement.

That basement was a dive bar in every measure apart from a liquor license. Boots and jackets dripping in the mudroom. Adults louder and looser than they were anywhere else, replaying the day's runs like sports highlights, talking about lines and conditions and somebody's powder day from a decade ago with the specific reverence other families saved for church.

We didn't go to church on Sundays. We skied.

There was a pool table down there that, as far as I know, never hosted a game of pool. I used it as a Lego table. I'd sit cross-legged on the felt with half-built sets spread around me while the adults argued good-naturedly about whose route down what had been gnarlier. The carpet smelled like wet wool no matter how many times it got vacuumed.

I was getting raised on a vicarious nineties. Bush. The Offspring. Horses. A pool table I used for Lego. Mountains that were just there, the way weather is there.

The parking lot at Solitude had the F.O.G.S. F'ing Old Guys. A loose crew that showed up every single day, cooked breakfast off the tailgate, drank at eight in the morning regardless of weather, then skied all day. Like it was the only appropriate response to clawing your way to seventy and still having legs that worked. Nobody was filming them. Nobody was writing a check. They were just there, permanent fixtures, the way the chairlift was there.

I didn't think about them much at six. I think about them constantly now.

Other kids were doing other things. I don't know what, exactly. Birthday parties, probably. Church.

Later I was leaning over a pool table at the Million Dollar Cowboy Bar when it finally bothered me.

What's changed?

Went back the next morning. Clear, finally. The kind of sharp blue you only get about six thousand feet up.

Luthor was still there. More or less the same spot. White against the snow. The Tetons doing their thing behind him. Hadn't gone anywhere.

Camped that night with the cold doing what it does in Wyoming, which is mean it.

Everything Zen, Everything Zen. I don't think so.