Today was ten degrees colder than yesterday. And windier. There was no new snow. I worked most of the day at home because it's Presidents' Day, but about 3:30pm, I decided it was time to get outside, even though it did not look very appealing. Enrico, who had been out for a walk earlier, cautioned me to dress warmly and not forget my neck gaiter.
Once I was bundled up, I headed out, but my legs felt dull. Perhaps I was tired from the three skis on Saturday and long ski on Sunday, but I just didn't have much spring in my stride. As Sam Anderson writes in a recent NYTimes article, "What Cross-country Skiing Reveals about the Human Condition," cross-country skiing is "notoriously, almost inhumanly, exhausting — a brutally sustained nonthrill." So why would I want to choose to ski as a "break" from all my other work?
Anderson thinks it is because "cross-country skiers lean right into a bleak truth: We are stranded on a planet that is largely indifferent to us." I can see his point there, especially on a day like today. There's nothing really warm or welcoming about this gray day--the cold temperatures make my skis drag; I don't take any photos today because I don't want to expose my skin in the wind; the dull light makes it hard to see irregularities in the snow surface, causing me to slip and almost trip at times. There are no other people out here--even the animals and birds are hiding today. Nature is indifferent. And to connect with it while out skiing on a day like today, I literally had to "lean in." Lean in to the wind, lean in to the camber of my skis to get purchase on the icier parts of the trail. And also mentally lean in to find a connection inside myself with the cold, gray environment around me. In fact, I did a couple of extra loops today, staying out for ninety minutes. Because it was too cold and windy to stop and rest, I kept moving the whole time, but why?
Anderson might have an answer. He asserts that "Cross-country skiing expresses something deep about the human condition: the absolute, nonnegotiable necessity of the grind. The purity and sanctity of the goddamn slog." In reflecting on this assertion, I thought about how none of us had a choice about coming into this world--we got signed up for "the grind" by our parents. So here we are. Choosing to cross-country ski is a way to make that choice our own. It's a way of saying, I'm here, I can do this.
Another answer about why cross-country skiers do what they do takes Anderson longer to unfold: "And yet consider the world that this suffering unlocks. Racers rake the stark landscape with their angular shadows. They slide into a whiteness beyond civilization, etching thin parallel tracks over the face of infinity, through places most of us will never go, past the pitter-patter of animal tracks in old-growth forest. This is one of the sport’s great consolations: access to a landscape so stark it merges with the spiritual state of absolute exhaustion, a simultaneous emptiness and fullness that is essentially religious — topographical Buddhism." Yes, that gets at it. When I "slide into whiteness" here along the Red River of the North, on the flat white, in the flat light, I become flat as well. In a state of exhaustion, I'm no longer me--I am becoming a part of everything else in the world. As I get colder, approaching the same temperature of the snow around me, my self slips away. Anderson is right--it is a spiritual state.
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