The First Church of Cross Country

I ski a lot.  Spending hours on skis gives me a lot of time to think, including thinking about skiing.  Winter is calm.  Fewer projects, fewer obligations, less daylight.  Summer is just so fucking manic.  In the winter, I have time to think.

That's where all these short blog posts are coming from: mental diarrhea from the previous hours on skis.  Then the long evenings give me time to put my thoughts on silicon.

This is something that I wrote for an unpaid spot in Alaska Magazine.  They've implied that they intend to publish it, but not for over a year.  I don't think they'll mind if six people (seven, if you count my mom as a person) see it first on my blog.  Here goes:

In high school my friend Gina’s family used to go to church on Sundays.  All of them except her dad, who would slyly tell us that, on Sundays, he goes to the First Church of Cross Country.

15 years later, Echo looks at me like she’s been waiting for a thousand years.  I’m standing motionless on my skis, adjusting layers and getting pole straps set properly on my wrist.  Echo hates this process, and, during these moments when her purpose of existence seems suspended, I sometimes think she hates me.  I finally finish.

“Alright Echo Dog,” I say, repeating a familiar refrain, “Let’s go to church.”

This is her cue.   We simultaneously bolt down the trail, both of us tearing across the snow as though recently unchained.  It’s a pace that neither of us can keep up for very long, but we do it anyway in celebration of being back on the skinny skis.  As we settle into a sustainable rhythm, only the slight exaggeration in the way I shift my weight from one ski to the other gives away the happiness in my hips.  Echo trots ahead, and only the rhythmic swish of her tail betrays the happiness in hers.

Fairbanks is crisscrossed with trails.  Perfect little ski trails are practically ubiquitous in neighborhoods around Fairbanks.  Most of them are unofficial and unmaintained except for regular use by snowmachiners, skiers, bikers, dog walkers and mushers.  And no one knows them all.  It would be impossible to know them all, since, like a braided river bed, they change from year to year due to the fickle nature of user-maintained trails.  One favorite trail might suddenly disappear one year because only one snowmachiner regularly used it, and that person moved away, or their machine broke down, or who knows why.

And, like in church, we don’t question the little miracles or the minor setbacks.  I might not believe that there is a plan, but the chaotic nature of things appears to be working just fine.

Cold snaps are the most tranquil.  It’s the time when the voices in my ADD-addled brain are reduced to a murmur as my breath struggles to find passage through my ice-encrusted balaclava.  My windproof hat muffles sounds, but the creaking of my pole tips penetrating the dry snow is loud enough to add a metronomic rhythm to my thoughts.  The cold weakens the batteries in my headlamp, and the sphere of illumination is reduced to a small space in front of my skis.  On these cold, nighttime skis I think I must enter a mild state of sensory deprivation.  I can’t see far, I can’t hear much, and my whole energy is focused on keeping moving, since I can feel the cold fighting into my layers.  It's meditation in motion, but I didn’t have to succumb to another person’s dogma.  It’s the First Church of Cross Country.

And the First Church of Cross Country is open to the congregants all winter.  My favorite pastime, something that many people regard as a rare privilege, is available to me and Echo every day, all winter.  And, like church, it’s free.

Erik and Lefty enjoy the final hours of 2012 on the Stiles Creek Trail.