What I'Ve Always Known Living in Full Awareness of the Earth

It didn't feel that cold to me at first. I remember miles of packed powder crumping underfoot as I walked along in the vast silence of forest. Winters are the real thing along the U.S.-Canada border in the interior of British Columbia and Washington state, so I carried matches and a knife and was dressed in layers. In those days it was a down vest over a wool coat, over a sweater, over a flannel shirt with flap pockets. Probably jeans and those military black leather gloves with wool inserts I liked to wear. Leather boots, of course, and a knit cap pulled down over my ears. Definitely not a parka, which shows how unprepared I was for what happened. Maybe it had to do with no longer working outdoors in the cold every day. For years I'd spent the winters pruning apple trees, repairing fences, even feeding cattle during the worst blizzards. But ever since I'd taken a job with a local social services agency and moved into town, all I did was interview people and shuffle papers in overheated offices. And the days when I would spend every spare moment off in the hills with my Okanogan Indian friends to hunt deer, cut firewood, or search for stray horses were just a memory. I was already having second thoughts about my new life of small town, indoor tameness. It bothered me that there was no need to pay attention to what my senses were telling me. Indoors, it was always the same--if it got cold, you just turned up the heat. Maybe a kind of atrophy had set in, because coming out of the mountains on foot in snow that day, I failed to read the obvious signs of danger. It wasn't as if I was breaking trail through the deep snows of the back country. It was a Sunday afternoon visit with old friends, and then an easy walk down the forestry road from their cabin on Cecile Creek to the town of Loomis, a distance of only seven miles. I'd driven the road hundreds of times, and when snow closed it, walked it out many times. Like a stroll down memory lane, every turn in the road reminded me of the life I'd left behind. The spot under towering tamarack and fir where a herd of deer milled around on the road one summer morning, fearlessly blocking my way as I drove a stock truck up to a rancher's cattle permit in the high country. The cobbled cutbank where I parked to gather rocks for the sweat lodge. The open, rocky slopes where chukar partridges would burst into flight when I passed. The pullout where cowboys would sit in pickup trucks, looking through binoculars at a herd of bighorn sheep across the valley, on the open side of Aeneas Mountain. It was there at the pullout, where the road emerged from timber and curved back and forth steeply down to the Sinlahekin Valley below, that the cold really hit me. Smoothed and rounded in snow, the open slopes were broken here and there with brush and solitary ponderosa pines. Out in the open I could see for miles and feel the flow of frigid air from the north. The sky was undecipherable--not clear, not really cloudy, just a northern interior steel-gray blur, indistinct but solid overhead. The winter birds that had been so noisy on the morning walk up were noticeably absent, yet I failed to interpret what that might mean. No crows sailing overhead, no chickadees calling from groves of trees, no bluejays or magpies shattering the silence with their raucous cries. Just a hissing, vacant, brittle solitude--the world asleep under snow and only the sound of my steps to keep me company. The afternoon light was fading, and it got colder and colder the farther down I went. I hoped to get to Loomis before nightfall, and could see the cluster of houses in the far distance, under a pall of woodsmoke. Without giving thought to anything else, I kept on. I should have known better. I was walking steeply downhill, barely generating any body heat into an arctic outflow imperceptibly fingering its way into the lowlands under the relatively milder air higher up. (It had been maybe 20Harmer, Tom is the author of 'What I'Ve Always Known Living in Full Awareness of the Earth', published 2003 under ISBN 9781400048557 and ISBN 1400048559.