jeremy cluchey
contributor

There’s a weatherman back home named Dave Santoro, kind of a flashy guy, blonde hair combed just right across his shiny forehead. I think of him as sort of a mix between meteorologist and magician, I don’t know what it is exactly, but the way he reports the weather is like it’s some kind of trick, and he’ll never tell us the secret. The other day he was on the radio and the DJ asked him if we were supposed to get any snow, and Dave said, "Well yes in fact we are indeed going to be getting a storm front, I’m plotting it right now."

I know he meant that he was plotting the path of the storm front on his radar, but I couldn’t help picturing Dave leaning back in his ergonomic chair, feet up on the weather station desk, twisting his handlebar mustache and "plotting" the storm front. In my mind there is a mischievous gleam in his eye. Also he is wearing a cape.

Sure enough, though, we got nailed. It was a dinger of a storm, as my friend Matty would say. When it hit I was up in New Hampshire skiing for a night with my mom. We used to go
there every year when I was little, up to this old resort, and I remembered loving it so much I asked her to take me back this year. The food is amazing at this place, the carpets are all green
and plush, the bowls of candy always full. They have Double Dragon in the game room.

I used to save my quarters all year for that game room. My brother and sister would hover around as I played an old car racing game where the bad guy cars would try to knock me off the
road with spiked tires and oil slicks. Once I got to the level where you turn into a boat. I ruled at that game.

This time, though, I had to work. I had a paper due for my Constitutional Law class so I settled into one of the giant sofas and surrounded myself with case law and precedent. There was
a pretty girl sitting across the room, probably about seventeen or so, talking to a kid who I think was from Spain. I eavesdropped. It turns out he works for the hotel, and she was up on
break with her parents, whom she hates. It didn’t take me long to realize that he was hitting on her, but in this upsettingly slimy European way, and when he asked her back to his room I
think she finally caught on because she straightened up a little, looked at her watch in surprise and commented on how late it had gotten. As they walked by he flashed me a knowing
smile as if to say, "No loss, my friend, I get more women than this before lunch time, and prettier."

The next morning the snow was coming down like gangbusters and showed no signs of quitting. After breakfast we checked out of the hotel and headed over to the mountain, but the storm was already furious. A few runs later my mom called it a day and headed back to the lodge, and I told her I’d catch up soon. For now, though, I had something to attend to. I had an appointment....an appointment with danger.

The mountain is pretty small, really, but the chairlift is so slow it seems huge. On the very edge there is a trail called the Notch, it’s the hardest trail on the mountain, narrow, steep and winding. When I was little I imagined the Notch as this enormous beast, the trail running down along his snowy back, and skiing it became a race to get down before he knew I was there and hurled me off into the forest. I tore down it so fast that the whole thing was a blur, a hazy mysterious panicked charge, and to this day I get a little nervous when I think about standing at the head of that trail, peering down into what I thought had to be the face of certain death.

This time, though, I was determined not to rush. I am twenty years old. I am a competent skier. It would be foolish of me to fly down that trail at ludicrous speeds to avoid awakening an
ancient mountain-monster. I think there would be something clinically wrong with that. So standing there, pole straps on, goggles secure, I surveyed the battlefield. Then I took a breath,
uncoiled, and I went.

Some things, perhaps, are embedded so deeply in the soil of our identity that no amount of logic can change them. I have no doubt that the trees along the Notch are wonderful to look at. Indeed, there is no reason why I shouldn’t be able to slow myself down and take it all in, the pines, the snow on the pines. But somehow I know I will never be able to do that, not in a thousand years if I went down it every day. Somehow there will always be a giant snow monster asleep under the Notch, and getting bigger and older just means I will be able to rocket down his back with that much more reckless abandon, seconds from rousing him from his fuming slumber, inches in front of his thorny claws.

I was walking to work the other day and the snow was melting. The last tiny patch on the grass was hiding in the shadow of a tipped beer can. It made me think of the little birds that hop around in the crocodile’s mouth, except here in exchange for refuge the snow was giving the beer can a chance to be something more than litter. I thought it was symbiotic, almost maternal. It got me thinking about opportunity, the relationships begging to be forged between things, and I saw how the world waits for us.