Spring comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb. Or is it “comes in like a lamb and goes out like a lion?”
Whichever it is I still wonder where all of the white goes when winter ends.
I have watched 86 spring seasons come and go and no one has ever been able to tell me which way it will end as I see the dirt creeping up from the valley below. The only thing I do know is that with the huge snowfall we’ve had, a lot of snow will have to melt this spring. It is not happening at the altitude we live. It has snowed from one to six inches every day for the last few days. It just keeps on snowing and not melting.
While it continues to snow nonstop, Laurie, and her great helper Linda, are packing up our stuff for our annual spring trek down to sea level.
Sea level for us is on a small island north of Seattle where we have a second house that is exactly the same as our house here in Montana. The only difference is that instead of a ski run next to it, on Orcas Island we have a dock less than 50 feet from our house at high tide. However, everything else is exactly the same. And that includes the interior décor, wood finishes, the floor plan and the furniture.
Laurie did such a good job on planning the first house on Orcas that when it came time to build our ski house we used the same set of plans. Why not? I don’t get lost in the middle of the night looking for the bathroom. My wife says this is a real plus.
Right now, I am really excited because I am working on my autobiography. That is the good news. The problem is how to fit everything that happened in my life in my book. Things such as getting sunk in a typhoon on the way to Pearl Harbor to get our ship modified as a shallow water mine sweep to invade Tokyo, or when I made it as a walk on for the USC varsity basketball team. I got to wear the varsity uniform for a few games, but just before a two-week road trip where I would have sat on the bench most of the time I went skiing. When I got back, I had a great time playing on the junior varsity for the rest of the season.
What happens when you write about an event in your life is that everything that happened on either side of the event unfolds as though you are unwrapping a piece of yourself that you had forgotten all about. I strongly recommend that everyone write their own bio and they will discover why their life turned right instead of left at a critical time. It is really enjoyable, but I will be the first to tell you that it is a lot of hard work.
It is great to relive the memories of surfing at Malibu even though it turned out to be the day the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. The water was crystal clear in those days and I was the only person there that day and I had the small knee-high waves all to myself all day long. This was many years before the invention of the wet suit and I didn’t know that I was supposed to be cold and my redwood surfboard weighed almost 100 pounds and was 11 feet long. I didn’t find out until later on the car radio, on the way home, what had happened.
I have a co-writer named Morten Lund. And we are almost two years into the project and have only covered the first 22 years of my life of fun and games.
People always ask me what I will name the book. How about “Accidentally Warren” for a title? It will probably change a dozen times before we are done. In the meantime it is still snowing outside and it looks as if this spring is going to come in like a lion and go out the same way.
The chairlift will shut down the day after Easter even if the snow is 19 feet deep under the chairlifts. So I guess we have to reluctantly put our skis away.