coexistence

Shortly after Christmas, Chema and I got out for our first ski of the year. In the last couple of years, we’ve ventured into backcountry skiing.

Backcountry skiing, or touring as it’s sometimes called, involves attaching carpet-like pads called skins to the bottom of your skis. The carpet grips the snow, allowing forward movement up a slope without sliding backwards. This type of skiing requires a special boot and an adjustable binding that secures the toe of the boot but allows the heel to lift for the uphill hike (it looks like you’re walking up the side of the mountain, just on skis). When you get to wherever you’re going, you adjust the bindings to lock in the heel of the boot and remove the skins for the downhill ski. The specialized gear is expensive, but we’ve been grateful to have it during the pandemic. Since we don’t go anywhere steep enough to invite avalanche risk, skiing through the forest feels safer than congregating in lift lines at the downhill ski resorts.

Backcountry skiing is not an enjoyable experience for me yet. I can’t seem to regulate my temperature. I end up building too much heat in my chest, regardless of what layers I have on, and sweating. When we stop, I lose the heat quickly.  

Each winter, though, I try to hype myself up. This will be the year! We set out on the trail, Chema settling into an easy pace ahead of me, Dory bounding between us. Other dogs and skiiers passed us in both directions, some flying downhill, others adhering to a faster pace on the uphill. For the most part, I ignored my surroundings—the meadow we moved through, the snowy creek bed flanking one side, juniper and Douglas fir trees accumulating as we progressed uphill—and focused on sliding one ski in front of the other.

Eventually, we made it to Dory’s tree, a Douglas fir just off the trail where the forest begins to thicken. Dory’s, because one summer day she sat under the tree to catch her breath and tilted her head back, taking in the majesty, the whirl of branches covered in sage-colored moss. To spin under a Doug fir tree is dizzying, like when as a child I used to spin under the lights of the giant metal tree at the Trail of Lights in Austin.  

This tree was my unspoken destination, and we’d made it. I looked at Chema, his eyes bright with effort. It was clear he wanted to go on. I decided I could at least make it to the Forest Service gate a few paces ahead. As we passed through the gate, my legs picked up the rhythm of the landscape around me. Ahead, the trail abruptly curved left and cut around the mountain in a bend, the mountain above, the meadow fanned out like a skirt below. Resigned to the climb, my breath stabilized enough to begin to take in my surroundings.

Loping down the mountainside to my right, I saw deep, wading tracks, further apart than any dog’s. Just forty yards ahead I saw her below—felt her presence and then saw her—the moose, laying down against a backdrop of willows, facing up at the trail. Knees tucked under, calmly observing. A rush of emotions swept through me—joy, fear, and then the knowing that cut through with a tinge of sadness, the reality that she was most likely laying there watching this line of human and dog traffic until it was safe for her to move through her forest again.

I was taken aback by her patience, her acceptance, her adaptation. Her coexistence.

We make coexistence out to be this big sacrifice. But leaving the forest that day, I had the sense the animals are more than willing, if we’ll just do our part.