The Intense Beauty of Skiing through a Forest in its Coat of Deep, Fluffy Snow

     The weather was perfect last Saturday for a cross-country ski trip in the Cascades between Medford and Klamath Falls. Snow was falling in earnest as ten members of the Grants Pass Nordic Ski Club clipped boots into skis and headed down the Pacific Crest trail. The snow was deep and fluffy. The trail led through big firs and pines to an unplowed road and then again onto the Pacific Crest trail through the big trees. 

    When the snow is too soft because temperatures are too warm, as has been the case too frequently this winter, snow sticks to the bottoms of skis, necessitating a long pause for skiers to take off their skis and apply wax. That was not the case on Saturday. The snow stayed silky under the skis after trail was broken. We had good glide and smooth, fast downhill rides. The snow stopped falling early in the day, and in places where the clouds had lifted, the sky behind the snow-burdened trees was such a deep blue you might have thought you were looking down into Crater Lake instead of up into the sky.

    At what I think now was the most beautiful spot on the trail, we stopped for a rest and a bite to eat. Two skiers, dark figures in the snow-bound forest. were a good distance in front of Jan, Judy, and me. The three of us were ahead of the others, who had stopped around the corner behind us. We stood on our skis, absorbing the beauty. I was so immersed in the scene I forgot to eat.

    "It's so beautiful," I said, sotto voce, not wanting to beak the spell of the snow-bundled forest with its snow-dotted dark trunks and white-burdened limbs bowing to the earth. 

    "Strangely, it reminds me of being at the beach," Judy said, "that same sense of expanse and of solitude."

    I understood the analogy, though mine was different. "I have the same sense of immersion here as I have when I swim in a very cold high-altitude lake," I said, "the same oneness with the environment around me."

    "We are lucky to be here," Jan said, expressing what we all felt. 

    No more was said as we absorbed the silence, the immensity of the forest, and the beauty of the snow, feeling deeply our gratitude for being there.   

    The temperatures have been just at freezing on ski trips this winter, sometimes just above, sometimes a few degrees below. It used to be we would ski in temperatures in the twenties. One year, riding to a ski trail in a car with a thermometer mounted above the window, I watched the temperature drop steadily as we climbed higher towards the sno-park: 20 degrees, 15, 14, until it stopped at 10 degrees when we arrived. It was ominous and thrilling, and the skiing that day was superb.

    There has been nothing close to that for the past few years.

    We who ski together in the Nordic Ski Club frequently talk about how lucky we feel to live where we have such close access to excellent cross-country skiing. But this year I have been reminded that it will only take the earth warming two degrees to destroy that enjoyment. 

    I would be deeply saddened to lose the privilege of skiing through such landscapes as the one I experienced Saturday. The loss would be more than that of a favorite activity. It would be to lose a quiet ecstasy that helps keep my soul alive.

Masks

     Masks serve many purposes. When I was a child, in elementary school, I wanted to mask my face with my hair, but my parents kept making me pin it back. They knew it wasn't good for me to try to hide myself, that I needed to learn not to be afraid to let people see my face, which would tell them who I was.

    Though a mask always hides the face, its purpose is not always to prevent knowing who is behind the mask. A bank robber will wear one to prevent recognition, but a skier wears a knitted ski-mask for protection from the harsh elements. A Halloween trick-or-treater wears a mask simply as a part of the costume. These days we wear masks not to hide our identities or protect our faces, but to protect each other. Wearing a mask to protect you gives me a pleasant sense of fellowship and caring for my fellow-beings.

   People (grocery store clerks, barristers for drive-through coffee) tell me they like my mask. "Cute mask!" they'll say. I made it from some South African fabric my friend Maren brought back from that country, lime green with tiny zebras. I like it that my mask, a symbol of such dark and difficult times, can bring a smile to someone's face. I can't see it, but I can hear it in the voice and see it in the eyes.

    I'm not much of a collector, but I do have a small collection of masks, displayed above the bookcase in my library.

    I bought the mask on the far left—the gold-faced woman with a mass of black hair—

years ago in Denmark, or maybe Sweden. I wore it one year as part of a Hallowe'en costume: the gold-sparkly woman's face with a large bush of black hair, dark red lips, and black-lined eyes, along with red high-heel shoes, a black leather mini-skirt, a gold lame blouse, and a red feather boa. It wasn't hard to step into character in a costume like that! 

    The next mask in the collection is a leather face my nephew brought me from his trip to Haiti. It is the kind of mask that is the likeness of a face rather than the covering for a face. Such leather masks are a craft in Haiti. I don't know anything about their origins or purpose, only that this one is beautiful.

   Next to the Haitian mask is a Venetian mask, made of papier maché, gold paint, glitter, and decorative braid, given me by a friend when we were in Verona to see Aida. In the heyday of old Venice, masks were used to disguise identities, giving people anonymity in their amours and shady business dealings. The concealing of identity in daily life gave license to all sorts of moral decadence. Underhanded transactions went undetected. Promiscuity was rampant. Gambling went on day and night. Society grew more and more decadent, until finally masks were banned. Today tourists buy these beautiful, bejeweled masks not to wear but to hang on the wall as art. Stripped of their original nefarious context, the masks are mute reminders of what happens to a society when it becomes masked for reasons of anonymity, not for reasons of protection.

   I bought the half-face mask that hangs next in line at the Oregon Country Fair from a booth of puppeteers from Takilma, Oregon. Like the gold-faced woman, it is meant to be worn. I wore it at the Country Fair, not so much to disguise myself—I had neither amorous intentions nor cheating tricks up my sleeve—but to enter the spirit of the festival. Masks are good for that.

    The next three are more accurately faces than masks. All are ceramic: a sun-face; an Elizabethan tragedy-mask a student gave me; and another sun-face. These faces match the large ceramic face that was my mother's and now hangs in the center of my custom-built bookcase.

 

    Maybe in a few years, I'll hang my South African zebra-fabric mask on the wall as a historical object, too, a reminder of yet another reason we might wear a mask. I'll be glad to relegate it to history.

More Thoughts on the Inauguration of Joe Biden

        Although I don't follow fashion and don't spend a lot of money on clothes, I am a sartorial person. I  like to come up with new outfits and am always pleased when a stranger stops me on the street to complement what I'm wearing. So I was particularly interested in the sartorial aspect of Biden and Harris's inaugural ceremony. It was the colors, of course, that caught my attention: sky-blue, monochrome white, deep yellow, and purples of all shades. Just about all the women in the spotlight were monochromatically clothed, so the colors seemed even more significant than if they had been mixed.

    And so, it seems, they were. The inauguration women were using fashion to make a statement about America.

        If I saw in Jill Biden's outfit—shoes, gloves, coat, dress—the beautiful blue of a cloudless spring sky, like a glorious new day, more astute fashion followers knew that this outfit had been designed by Markarian, a three-year-old brand of clothing designed and made in New York City that has a sustainable, minimal-waste policy. Thus the First Lady was saying, by the clothes she wore, not just "a new day," but also, "We will invest in American Businesses and are committed to addressing climate change." Bravo for fashion! 

        I loved Kamala Harris's bright purple dress and coat and was even more impressed when I learned that its designer, Christopher John Rogers, was a 23-year-old black American from Louisiana, now in New York City.

        Amanda Gorman's yellow coat was by Prada, a woman designer with strong feminist leanings. Gorman said that wearing yellow was a nod to Jill Biden, who suggested her as the inaugural poet and who had told her once how much she liked seeing her in yellow. The symbolism of Gorman's outfit was personal as well as political.

    Jennifer Lopez wore all white—pants, long coat, lacy blouse, white earrings—a choice fashion editors have interpreted as reflecting the suffragette moment, when women frequently wore white as they marched or made their appeals, but I haven't heard Lopez say that. She might have worn white simply because it was beautiful on her.

    Lady Gaga made a smashingly dramatic entrance in her enormous red-skirted ball gown, out of which her dark blue torso rose like out of a cloud. With her white hair and the huge gold dove pin on her shoulder, she looked like America the Beautiful. 

    Michelle Obama, who as First Lady, unlike her successor, made it a point to wear clothes by American designers, wore a rose-purple pants-and-coat outfit designed by Sergio Hudson, another black American fashion designer. Hillary Clinton wore a grape pants suit from Ralph Lauren, who was born in the Bronx to Ashkenazy Jewish immigrant parents and who built a fortune as a fashion designer: the "American Dream" story. All of this purple at the inauguration, especially by Harris, was certainly a political statement: red and blue combined, signifying the theme of the inauguration, American unity. 

    As for the men, I certainly noticed Garth Brooks in blue jeans (at an inauguration!). What I didn't know was that Joe Biden's suit was also a Ralph Lauren design.

    I won't be wearing Prada, Lauren, or Hudson, unless I happen to stumble across something in a thrift store. There doesn't seem to be any reason to pay attention to what I wear these days, anyway, since not only am I not going to, you know, a Presidential inauguration, but I'm not going anywhere! Still, clothes are fun. Today, for instance, I put on a pair of new Raggedy-Ann-style, black-and-white-striped, over-the-knee socks I acquired as a give-away at Joann's, then tried to figure out what to wear with them. What I came up with wouldn't be appropriate for Kamala Harris, and it makes no political statement, but it's fun to wear.

A Poem for Starting the New Year

 On the Threshold of 2021

                Again I begin
On the threshold of the year
To re-determin-ate the myth
                To end its past determined path
                                the year of death and isolation
                                induced by politics, disease, and natural disaster
                                Annus horribilis
                To create instead a myth of my making

                Open a door once more on promise

                                violets, not violence

                                chorus of birds not angry words

                                the intent of truth to unbend crooked lies

                                arms that hug like angels' wings

                                                without harm of viral things

But I did not choose to lose so much last year

And no matter how I yearn to turn the myth my way

                                this year

                to make it mind my kind of story

                to pen it from my yen for joy,

From this threshold

                it seems too bold to hold such hope

                it seems like pipe dreams and hype

                                mythic fantasy of a mystic type

But I can dream of miracles and truths

I can aspire to higher luck than last year's muck.

I can want

and hope

and welcome, oh,

                annus mirabilis!