drying out

All three sled dogs are inside the cabin, drying out now that the last of the freak midwinter rainstorm has passed. The yard is a mess of ice and the road has been plowed down to dirt. There were a few minutes of elation mid-morning when fat flakes of snow began pouring out of the sky. Elation died when it stopped cold after five minutes, leaving hardly a dusting on the wet porch. The trails are trashed, and what is left of the snow is solidifying into rock-hard pack ice as temperatures drop back below freezing. There is fog, but no snow clouds. We were promised snow tonight and tomorrow, if only a paltry inch, but given how unreliable snow forecasts are in this dry interior landscape, I am expecting stars instead.

If I can claw my way out of this pit of despair for a moment, I find it fascinating that a region used to enduring weeks of brutal forty to sixty below temperatures and winters that last from October to April was brought to its knees for three days by an inch of freezing rain. It is also a little heartening, if only from a distance, that this life with dogs forces me to be so tied to weather, the temperatures, the snow pack. Things utterly out of my control.

I am reminded of an experience a friend of mine had this summer. She had planned a trip up into the Alaska Range to do some climbing, a trip that required a ski-plane ride up to Pika glacier. After being weathered in at the airport for interminable days, she and her climbing buddy were finally ferried up to the ice only to be socked into their snow shelter, all climbing thwarted.

In our modern lives, it is only a rare ice storm or blizzard that might alter our plans by hours, and on rare occasions a day or two. But for those that choose (if we are privileged enough to be given a choice) to work and play outdoors the temperature, wind, ice, snow pack, fog & rain play a much bigger role. We can prepare for it with all the gear and training in the world, but until the moment we launch we won't know if the paddle will take three hours or twelve with a headwind, or if the trek will take two days or ten with washed out trails and mudslides, if the wildfire will burn through the village or be damped enough by a sudden passing storm, if the crops will come in or be destroyed by a freak hailstorm too late to replant. In some of the farming first world and much of the rural third world, lives are lived closer to this uncertainty of weather, and of timing, and ultimately of outcome. Perhaps this is why so much is taken in stride there, more than it is here in the world of iPhones and Facebook and ATMs and DOT maintained roads and 24 hour grocery stores.

I find that in spite of all the time I spent in the third world and in the outdoors of the first world I am frustrated and angered and dismayed by the turn of events this week. And I am ashamed of the ferocity of my feelings. On the first day of rain, I fought an urge to pray. I wanted to beg someone or something to make the freak weather system move off. This even though I no more believe that God cares to answer my demands about temperature or precipitation or sunshine than I believe God would fill my bank account if I asked nicely or promised some token of worthy behavior in return. This even though all I will lose (and only if we don't get any more snow before the deep cold sets in) is a little bit of recreation with some dogs. This makes me ashamed, but I think that it also makes me human.