My love for winter likely stems from my February birth, a year so snowy that the snowbanks alongside the road towered my parents’ car and a neighboring farmer stood at the ready with his tractor plow in case Lake Michigan would drop another foot of lake effect snow before the country plows had a chance to open Church Road and my mom went into labor. I’ve lived in Montana for more than two decades and our winters are much, much easier than those Upper Midwest, Great Lakes powered storms that dropped feet of snow in one giant blast and topped off fun with subzero temperatures for days. Here we may be lucky to get six inches or more in a storm, and most of that precipitation remains high in the mountains where hardly anyone must contend with snowplowing and expectant mothers. While the Flathead Valley might offer milder winters, it’s much better to ski down thousands of vertical feet than the rolling humps of hills of northern Michigan. No competition.
Now that winter has arrived, I feel my blood stir once again, surely some form of reverse hibernation, my body feeling much more energized with each falling flake. Part of this is pent-up winter energy as I missed ski season last year due to ankle surgery and performed a series of mental gymnastics to endure a winter on the couch, unable to walk for six weeks followed by six more weeks spent navigating ice and snowbanks on crutches. It wasn’t anything like skiing, but it was no less challenging. To those individuals and businesses that keep their sidewalks shoveled and ice free, you have my eternal thanks. So now winter courses through my blood and I’ve logged three solid days of sledding which is optimal ski training, in case you’re wondering. If you have young children, you get the added bonus of impromptu strength training when helping haul kids and gear back up a hill. The legendary alpine skier Bodie Miller used to train for his World Cup race season by pushing a wheelbarrow filled with friends or rocks up a hill. This is basically the same thing when you’re sledding with kids, so if it’s good enough for an Olympian than it’s good enough for me. Besides, wet snow gear is about as heavy as a boulder, so I have no qualms explaining my expert ski conditioning plans to folks who go to gyms and liked to be yelled at by a super fit instructor. I am the proud parent of two children who love to yell and scold me.
Plus, if you’re sledding and not hauling dumbbells across fake turf while music blasts in your ears, you get the added joy of gliding down a hill. Gliding down a hill on the snow is one of the best feelings on earth, and like Walt Whitman we all contain multitudes and you have most of those precious multitudes when you head downhill. The deeper the snow, the more multitude.
Also, there are multitudes in ways we experience winter from chairlifts to cross-country skiing at twilight in a forest coated in white frosting and you feel at peace with the world as your heart thumps in your chest. Winter in the blood means building roaring fires and taking to your bed well before nine at night because it’s dark and your bed is warm. Your legs are shot from skiing, your cheeks are windburned, and you might be a parent with a full-time job and bills to pay but winter makes you feel like a kid—unbridled and gleeful— and you can’t believe you can keep doing this under the falling snow.