Clear and Cold

It was clear and cold when I started the snowshoe up to Mount Bierstadt. Nine degrees. The brittle snow squeaked like Wisconsin cheese curds under my snowshoes. It talked back to my poles, the sound of a squeaky hinge - the oldest variety - or the sound the Scream face might make if it made a sound. The cold snuck up on me in weird places, stealing the warmth from my right arm here, siphoning it from my knee caps and quads there.

It was clear and cold when I came across the Moose Guy. I thought he was a moose at first. I watched "the moose" as it worked its slow way up the path. I became puzzled when I noticed it was following the switchbacks. But that hump? As I drew closer, I could see the man, bent over the trail, his pack humping on his back. He worked the snow across the trail, walking hunched over, his hands busy. Something in the busy-ness of those hands made me recall Tobacco Charlie and our seedy college apartment house. My husband and I had named the maintenance lady Leather Face. She liked my handsome husband. "Those old ladies let you leave the nursing home?" she'd call to him in greeting. Kind and charming, Eric would quip something back. The leather would split to emit a hacking cough of a laugh, one that cut through the smell of Meals on Wheels seeping under the door of our neighbor's apartment and over the sound of his TV to reach my ears in our own apartment.

Tobacco Charlie, another apartment dweller, was so-named because he wore a grizzled (the poster man for the term) beard that served as a bib for the drippings of his tobacco chew. We didn't interact with him, just knew him to spend time arranging tools in the back of his rusted pickup truck. He'd stand alongside the open bed, strapping his rake to his ladder and then strapping that to the box. He shifted tools beyond inventory, arriving after a time at some satisfaction with the arrangement. Upon seeing us, he might say hello or grunt or be silent. He was more likely to acknowledge my husband. I was a little afraid of him.

Until the day I was a lot afraid of him. Home from my waitress shift at Chi Chi's, I was turning on the shower when I heard a fist pounding on our door. I heard Leather Face, "What's going on, Charlie?"

"That bitch took my parking place!" It took some moments for me to register that I was the bitch. I swallowed and pulled a towel around me.

"I know she's in there!" he yelled. I heard indiscriminate words from Leather Face, placating in tone.

Pound, pound, pound.  He wasn't going away.

I couldn't move and didn't dare go open that door. I thought about calling to him that I'd move my car in a minute, but I didn't want him to pound through the door. It seemed like he could. I padded over to the phone and took the handset into the bathroom, closing the door. I dialed Eric. He was minutes from the end of his shift at the nursing home and would come home, he said. Until then, keep quiet and put the table in front of the door.

Even as I hung up the phone, I noticed that the hallway was quiet. I dragged the kitchen table over to the door and sat on our futon to watch it. Eric came home minutes later and took my keys. He moved the car. Tobacco Charlie was nowhere to be seen. When we went out the next day, his truck was in "its" parking spot.

My Moose Man moved his hands like Tobacco Charlie, the constant motion, settling the snow here, then scooping to move it there. Un-inventoried amounts of snow. I came upon him and called, "Hello!" He didn't answer, nor did he seem to hear me. No head cock, certainly no eye contact. I moved past him and, in front of him now, looked at him, hunched and moving the snow. "Hi!" I said.

Nothing. I thought to myself, "Okay, he wants to be alone," and continued. As I drew even with him on the switchback above, I'd had time to become concerned. I stopped and looked right at his hunched back, the side of his face, his bald head. "Are you doing okay?" He'd heard me. He emitted a low sound, maybe a sniff. I left him to it.

On my descent, he was farther up the trail, doing his same snow shifting dance about twenty feet off the snowshoe trough. This time he stopped and straightened. "The trail is over here." My insides froze, keeping my neck from swiveling to look at him. "You tear up the tundra going off trail." I insinuated myself to the far edge of the snowshoe trough and descended.

I had him figured. And I agreed with and admired what he was doing. People love the Colorado mountains to death, sometimes making track across tundra that takes decades to recover. But he also loved that trail and tundra more than human beings. He had a single vision of what is right. A rigid adherence to a parking spot. I imagined that David Brower and even John Muir might growl at another human being that way. I hoped not; I hoped they had balanced their environmentalism with diplomacy and maybe even kindness. I left the Moose Man to his shifting.

But his stance went down the hill with me. I wondered if he could enjoy the mountains. Did he appreciate the clear and cold? Could he see the insane green of the pines that ever-deepened as it contrasted with the whiteness of snow in full-on Colorado sun? Did his eyes smart as they took in the brilliance of it all? Did his breath steal as he caught the scope of distance, Square Top Mountain across the valley seeming so close but miles of hard hiking away? Did he resolve to come here again, to send a picture and an invitation to his cousin who, recently-diagnosed with cancer, needed inspiration to fight and see more of the beauty in the world? Did he see the mountains and beauty and inspiration, or did he see snow?