January 23, 2009
It is now mid-winter a still, gray day, so I train with the garage door open. After all there are snowflakes blowing around, here on the dusty Front range a few snowflakes can summon a mind-vestige of long-ago winters, deep snow under interminable slate skies. Now is that odd time following the Ouray Ice Festival, that post-solstice nouveau-pagan fete where winter aficionados and other sundry weirdoes converge in early January to climb ice, soak their white flesh in hot water and drink beer, a measureless volume of beer.
Festiglace du Quebec, a sister festival in Canada had until several years ago dutifully followed in February, pale French-speaking cousin of Ouray. This time of winter was auspiciously reserved for recovering from Ouray and preparing for Quebec, until the Taliban stepped inopportunely in and event organizer Eric Declerc dutifully went off to Afghanistan with some organization called the King’s Rifles, so now no more Jello shots in the basement of the Pont Rouge Community Center whilst bumping half-naked to the techno beat.
Those Islamic Fundamentalists, they ruin everything.
Winter now presents an open-ended rune, what to do with the next two months of cold, snow and ice? Climb, of course, but where, with whom? To what end? Rumors abound of another festival in Alaska, an event with ice, possibly a competition and most importantly, a disco.
I work the plastic holds bolted up on plywood panels in the three-sided garage, the fourth and eastern aspect open to the sky. The cold means I wear what I would normally wear on the hill, the weight and confines of clothing add to the rigor of movement. Mind you I have climbed nude, much as winter calls for frightening days dry-mouthed sweating out last night’s plonk into over-ripe synthetic clothing, a hot mid-summer day calls for climbing over sun-heated sandstone, “as God intended.”
For I figure if you wouldn’t look good climbing nude, why bother? Maybe viewing all those strapping marble Gods in the collection of the Pope’s in Roma has made me vain. I once spent two hours photographing the “Dying Gaul” in Rome, circling this masterpiece in adoration, watching the light change on marble polished to loving perfection by some long-dead sculptor two-thousand years earlier.
Am I a Dying Gaul, fading warrior of a lost cause? In the mountains to the west great swaths of Lodge-pole pine stand brown, dead upon the slopes. Beneath these tragic sentinels the ever-thinning snowpack struggles to feed a bony river. Drums beat loud the inexorable march of climate change, man’s bastard product of unholy liaison with petrochemical gluttony. One year there will be no ice, I know this to be true.
Photo: Rob Fullerton>
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