self-painted photo by ernie gurney back in the day
It’s February in Coronado and I’m renting bikes on the beach. I’m in my best “beach bum” outfit as I cast the shoreline for tourists. Shorts, t-shirt, well-worn hiking boots. This is probably my third iteration as a man in mid-life crisis. Oddly I was not yet middle-aged, so a mid-life crisis (third at that) may have indicated a deeper issue. Ah well…the sun is shining. It always is.
That day I had an odd epiphany….the sort that can happen when one leaves a comfort zone to wander different worlds. I had moved to California from my home state of Maine the previous September. I had spent Thanksgiving having roast turkey on the beach and a Christmas where some rich guy piled snow imported from the northwest in a parking lot for the kids. Comfort Zone was shaking …like those little snow globes your aunt had in that dusty apartment.
Anyway…it’s 65 degrees. People coming off the ferry are dressed up in parkas and scarfs and insulated boots. Like the Ferry is landing in Antarctica or Newfoundland. Not Coronado. I say to self “wow, comfort sure is a personal thing”…then “how do I rent bikes to people who shiver when it’s below 70?”
Decades later. Now I’m in Rangeley, 3135 miles from Coronado, about as far as you can go and still be in the contiguous United States. And I hate to say this but…. “this is more like it”. I guess I’m a contrarian or something. I like winter and Rangeley has plenty of it. Winter is something you push up against, a challenge to the senses, sometimes to your whole being. Winter has rewards and demands. It’s a season that can turn on you and drive your car into a snow-filled embankment, stranded. It can leave you without power for… well… however long. It’s not gentle.
For winter folks, that’s exactly it. We run headlong into snowbanks, like a kid who just heard that school was canceled. We love it! People who come to Rangeley in winter WANT to be outside. In the bitter cold and icy wind. We’re weird katz. . In the middle of a blizzard we can sometimes have a bright idea…”I need a quart of milk…time to go downtown” In grade school, your teacher maybe wrote the comments “stubborn”, “headstrong”. Later some friend who likes to analyze will call you “oppositional/defiant”. Whatever.
In my case I hate boredom. In my 20’s I wrote a simple credo. “Never have the same day twice” I needed challenge. When going into real weather and a raw world, I’m choosing to do so. Sometimes that means dressing up like I’m going for a walk on the moon. “Open the pod bay door, HAL”, I smirk as I set about to challenge sub-zero temperatures, drifting snow and blustery weather in an evening bucketed with a gazillion stars. Dark Skies abound. I’m game for “serious pleasure”. And that’s it. It IS serious….pleasure.
Nature and wilderness and this raw Universe rolls and does not care about you. A tiny being, swimming in a big ocean trying to catch the survivable, thrilling wave. You’re “nothing much”. Here is the Dreadful Shrug of Nature, this realization that you’re most definitely NOT the Center of the Universe. If you read Thoreau, you may find this described through many observations. I like this one from his notes and essays on trips to Katahdin. Here, he and his party become lost trying to reach the top and then descend through Burnt Lands…the sudden realization is written by Thoreau
“This was that Earth of which we have heard, made out of Chaos and Old Night. Here was no man’s garden, but the unhandseled globe. It was not lawn, nor pasture, nor mead, nor woodland, nor lea, nor arable, nor wasteland…Man was not to be associated with it. It was Matter, vast, terrific…rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! the solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact! “
Now, imagine a half dozen of you (or maybe you’re alone) wandering this wild snowy earth, roughly made and raucously shaped. Not on a summer day but in the middle of a blizzard. Maybe on skis, perhaps snowshoes…or driving a snowmachine blindly across a white-out lake. Chaos…amped. Life is immediate. Thrilling. The best experiences are those you prepare for, gear up and plan ahead. This isn’t a day on the beach.
Loon Lake
That’s why eventually a t-shirt and shorts and a pair of hike-stamped boots felt casual and too easy. By then, my idea of “serious pleasure” was hiking the dunes of the Anza Borrego Desert. Dunes which at least reminded me of the shapes and contours of snowdrifts on the lake. Just a radical change in ambient temperatures.
Over the years, I noted every vacation going further north. Alaska, Newfoundland, Finland, Nova Scotia. As a kid I was a bit “homeless in the head”…comfortable anywhere as long as it was interesting. Hard to keep track of…I can’t count the number of friendly couches and popped up tents I’ve sheltered in. Many times guided by nothing more than “gee…never been there before” or “sounds interesting”. I had my first sushi in, of all places, Boulder Colorado. Has to be almost dead center in the US and as far away from where seafood begins than can be imagined. But it was honestly very good. It was the only sushi place I’ve been to where diners would share their plates so people could try out different ideas. My fondest wilderness meal was at a restaurant at Muncho Lake in the Yukon. I think that meal tasted so good because my brother and I had been on the gravel road of the AlCan, on our way to Alaska. Cold cuts and white bread out of the cooler for about a week.
Drift rift
Some years I could do “deep dives” and be away for a month. I toured Nova Scotia and Newfoundland for three weeks during a couple years pursuing my second diploma. I studied geology wrote a paper on Outport Communities and tented on the rim of Cape St Mary’s in a freezing ocean storm. Once “between careers” I flew to Finland and toured my ancestral country, meeting unknown relatives from that side of our family. My grandfather migrated to the US during the Finnish civil war of the early 20th C, when no less than four other countries were trying to “own” the homeland. I dined on traditional food, took authentic smoke saunas stayed in an isolated cabin, reading and walking. My connection to my relatives, to the somehow familiar land (birch trees and cold blue water) was immediate and genuine. Like I already knew them. I have never felt so understood.
“A few years” have gone by. I’ve lived in Rangeley longer than I expected to. Just because I never expected to live more than a couple-three years anywhere. I made that early vow to “never have the same day twice”. It worked well. And (in my head) I’m still that way.
Am I just genetically coded, like a salmon, to recall a home base? Perhaps. I was born in Maine a little west of here, close to the Canadian border. It’s river valley terrain so the peaks aren’t so dramatic. But the birch trees and the trout-filled waters of my youth, aren’t that far from here. My granddad, who sometimes took off and felled trees for a living, brought a few down in logging operations to feed the downstream mills. “We” likely have been here before. The odd thing? That familiar terrain was felt in Finland, and Alaska and Newfoundland and Nova Scotia. So maybe it’s not just the terrain, but also the temperature. I know that I’m not comfortable much above mid-70 and I really am in my bliss around 58-65. Spring and fall are okay, but winter keeps me sane. My constant “swim” north has been my internal compass.
But why Rangeley? I think the urge northward is mere genetic predisposition. But what makes Rangeley the home base? I remember again one of those weird epiphanies. This one from way back in high school/early college when I first found myself here. I was 18, recovering from a life-threatening injury and the long healing. I threw on a pair of snowshoes one blustery January day. I was fiercely pushing back against circumstance. I walked to the frozen Rangeley Lake and just kept walking. It was a day of snow showers and some winsome wind. Nothing special other than causing incomplete whiteouts, where shapes might still form within the swirling white. In a whoosh of white wind, my interior world, obscure and random, without direction, was set in rhythm to this external reality…the snowy undistinguished trek. I have heard that this is what artists seek, a direct mingling of the two states, internal and external. I’m no artist, and I really don’t think I could handle such a mingling all the time. But being in Nature allows for that rhythm and mingling, a snowglobe in my aunt’s dusty apaartment. Epiphanies rise and drift.
I’ve often told people that Nature is my Church. Reading Emerson and Thoreau confirmed it. Every hike, every snowshoe in a storm brings it home to me. My rambling started in the woods and fields of my family farm and it hasn’t stopped yet.
As I write this for this Winter Guide it’s the end of October and the first snow has fallen. This is how it should be. This is muscle memory to me. I gleefully bust out the door with my camera and take yet another series of “first snow” pictures. Yes….I have quite a few years of them. Yes, many look the same…but NO…they are not. “Never the same day twice”
You may ask, what do you find to do up here in the hinter/winterlands in the deep dark? Well. Here it is folks. It’s the wash of bright stars against the inked black of insanely Dark Sky. We have that here. White-out snows on a frozen lake. We have that here. And honestly, we have mud season and I know it’s crazy. But I start giggling. Every day is a fitful birth and a push toward Life. It’s amazing and yes I take pictures. We have the sounds of wood creatures and tracks across the snow. We have low lights on a well-written book and a warm wood fire.
Humans were not made for endless nights of TV and popcorn. If you want to move in the coming Summer, keep practicing through the Winter! Take that snowshoe track into the threaded snowy trail. Grab some cross country skis and feel some color flushing into your cheeks. Skate away your cares on Haley Pond. It’s all here. Walk into the dark and stare straight up.
That’s the Universe calling …
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