Mt. Hood put on the robes of a powerful wizard and kept a puff of clouds gathered around its mystical shape all morning. I skied all the normal places, which were suffering from flat light and a deceptive fur of spindrift. I took a couple spills. A couple times I stopped in the pines to pee and to ask myself if I was really having a good time?

I responded to myself with a normal retort: “all of Portland is down there in the duff wearing awkward clothes and trying to get back into Pearl Jam and you’re up here on a crystal mountain and you have a silvered beard and a perfectly nice face and look at Mt. Jefferson over there with it’s awful sharp tooth and it’s glint of rime ice winking at you!” 

I was having a great time, it turned out, even though visibility was poor and the wind was stinging my perfectly nice face. I started putting some extra elan into my ski elan and I hummed some extra bars from Astral Weeks to help me loosen to the chore of skiing in a mild blizzard.

One time Darian and I took this east coast dude to the Deschutes to fly fish for some famous trout. Darian and I were having a fair day and had caught a few famous fish but this east coast dude was having a rotten time and catching nothing but cans and old boots. Then he took a gigantic hit from a gigantic bong he had hidden in his east coast fishing vest and suddenly the day transmogrified and he kept declaring how transcendental the day was and noticing how the river caught the light and basically saying all the normal things west coasts dudes say all day long. And his creel started filling up with famous west coast trout at an incredible rate. Honestly, it was a miracle. Darian and I ordinarily turn our noses up at medicinal plants and bongs and everything, but we looked at each other that afternoon and our faces asked each other, “should we start smoking medicinal plants when we fly fish?” 

What I’m getting to is that you can be having a rotten time and then something can happen to transmogrify it and it is as though a thorn has been pulled from your paw and your ski elan is extra-charged, at least for an hour or so. 

The pulled paw thorn or the big bong hit or whatever was the entire south face of Clark Canyon, which suddenly caught fire from the dim sun and turned the color of a tennis ball in the farthest corner of my eye. Not the greenish-yellow normal tennis balls. The orange ones.

As by wizard’s gesture, the Shooting Star Ridge was of-a-sudden jeweled with beautiful mogul moms and telemarkers and no-snowboarders-to-be-seen and the whole scene was dappled with tennis balls and the snow was soft and hilarious. There were elk bugling from a far off ridge.

I skied the bowls letting into Heather Canyon and the pretty mogul fields dappled with mogul moms on the shooting star and then I drove home and me and Max made hamburgers on the grill.