Earthbound

Yesterday I went walking. Or more accurately, wading. The snow was a little deep, and I wasn't using skis. People who were flashed merrily past, whooping and yelping. As I crossed a groomed trail, an older couple stopped to stare.

“Look, a walker!” said the husband, in much the same way Sir Edmund Hillary might have said, “Look, a yeti!' “Hello! Snow not too deep yet?”

“Oh no,” I said. “I like it.” And I waded away from the trail, into the pines, where a red-breasted nuthatch was the only caller, and a thousand little animal tracks zigzagged away through the trees.

Strange what you'll do when it counts as fun. For the last few months, until resigning just before Christmas, I worked as a newspaper carrier for the local rag. Not your stereotypical Johnny-the-Paperboy route, but the kind of second job that adults take when they want to eat and pay the rent. Every morning, seven days a week, I got up at 2 AM (or just stayed up all night drinking coffee until 2) and then went to the printing garage, picked up several hundred papers, and spent the next several hours distributing them. Vast stretches of time were spent slogging through the snow and it was not, I assure you, a pleasure at all. Perhaps because, instead of elk and great gray owls, the only wildlife I encountered in the wee hours of Missoula were cops and drunk college kids.

Fall and winter are the dark side of sexy seasonal jobs in beautiful places.

Anyway, in mid-December I left the paper behind forever and flew home to Cincinnati to spend Christmas with the family. It was a great visit. How civilized to sleep past 2 in the morning! To loll in the hot tub sipping brandy while the snow patters on your head! Or if you're my dad, to sit in the hot tub and bird-watch.

On the eve of Christmas Eve, my parents and I went on a livelier bird-watching expedition to a local state park. Funding for parks has been slashed in Ohio, and the effects on this one were striking. Buildings stood abandoned on the edge of the woods, grass was growing up through the asphalt, and many pull-ins and parking lots had been reclaimed by shrubs and trees. It was something like a miniature American Chernobyl. We passed a rusty, abandoned water tower and hiked along the edge of an overgrown field. A flock of sandhill cranes wheeled overhead, croaking their weird and beautiful song.

After the holidays I said goodbye to my family and flew back. The plane, approaching Missoula, stooped low to come up the valley between the mountain ranges. Looking out the window, I recognized the landmarks of home: Lee Metcalf, where we'd gone swimming in the summer; the abandoned ski resort off I-93, its runs untracked and inviting; the Bitterroots blue with frost; the Clark Fork slicing through town.

For a moment I wished I could keep flying, not like a crane but north, chasing winter over the mountains.