Winter Adventure!

I was issued someone else's lunch today at the take-out place where I've had a series of running gift certificates going (thanks, Mom). This winning streak has gone on so long that the restaurant itself has come to be a kind of mythical place to me, a place where commerce and sustenance no longer intermingle. I haven't paid for food there in almost two years. I walk in, I slide my special card through the reader, and behold: hot, delicious food!

So today when I was given someone else's take-out order after it had already been twice shuffled to other wrong people and returned, I only checked to confirm it was hot and otherwise undamaged and took off with it. I can't really say why, only that when you've gone so long without paying these people, you have a more quixotic view of service and might be more prone to accepting two containers of soup over a half-sandwich and salad. Maybe you know better, Panera, what it is I need. Maybe my lunch offerings should be more full of surprises anyway, kind of like a gastronomic horoscope.

Or maybe I'm just in a good mood, having spent the last two weeks bathing in the glow of Pants's undivided attention. Winter Adventure 2009 was glorious, and I say that with a fairly recent and vivid memory of lying on camping foam, encased in a fat layer of down like a big puffy caterpillar and watching my breathe cloud above me as wave after wave of rain raked over our tent. But I was warm and dry, I had a stomach full of hot stew, and we'd spent the days in the Redwoods hiking, agate hunting on the beach, and building a series of deeply satisfying fires. I think the Pacific Northwest agrees with me, or I with it. There's something magnetic about a landscape that jumps from forested mountain straight to beach without lingering at any bullshit grasslands stage.

And is it ungrateful to note the twinge of disappointment with which I noted the morning news today about the 6.5 earthquake we just missed on the way back through Northern California, and the mild good humor its residents expressed about the whole thing? Very low drama, despite the mounted elk head crashing from its perch over the register of a meat counter in Eureka, CA. Only last week I probably walked under a similar elk head in a similar tiny market with water-stained floors, looking for a six-pack of some local microbrew and that popcorn you have to shake over an open range. I could do this, I think, live in a place where nature overstates itself and everyone nods in equal parts reverence and amusement and gets on with it.

We also snowshoed around Crater Lake, which satisfied two more major categories of a perfect vacation: making me feel like a total calorie-torching badass, and whacking me over the head with scenic hyperbole. Snowshoeing is my perfect winter sport. Where snowboarding humbles me and teaches me the art of violent collision and shackled motion (there's still some quasi-Buddhist, letting-go notion I still haven't mastered and I still make my turns like I'm half mannequin), snowshoeing is just easy. And fun, and very likely to kick your ass if you get too enthusiastic about it. At the end of a six-mile hike at the lake, I was so perfectly peaceful and worn out that I actually ran for a while with the shoes still strapped on and didn't immediately burst out laughing when Pants said there are actually running versions of snowshoes and people have 10Ks and marathons in them. OK, I thought, that sounds fun.

And then we spent the next day snowshoeing the same distance uphill and following some other jack-hole's tracks. Said jack-hole was also clearly a man because he took giant sasquatch steps and stopped periodically to pee a yellow cavern right in the middle of the trail, obviously delighting in the ease of his portable equipment. I found myself grinding my teeth and purposefully taking long stretches to break my own trail, even though it was twice the work, just so I wouldn't have to step where he stepped. The other absolute appeal of snowshoeing for me is the promise that you can stomp on unbroken snow, and leave a footstep sentence behind you about where you've been. Walking in someone else's is no fun, even if their step-length matches yours.

I should say again, because it bears repeating, that I have unwittingly married my ideal travel/camping partner, and if we were on Lost, say, we totally would have broken off and formed our own tribe with all those troubling extras who keep hanging out at the edge of each group shot and never get named. Pants would keep us all in luxurious Boy Scout dwellings, MacGuyvered from whatever was at hand, and I would be great at coming up with fun things to burn in the campfires and pointing out the obvious historical and philosophical references of the name John Locke. (For Christ's sake, why hasn't anyone mentioned that yet?)

Also, if there were an iPod on the island, I would also show off my ability to riff entire playlists for hours on end whilst incorporating little rddles into them. I played songs on the themes of Satan, murder, tacos, dystopian ideas of heaven, and robots, and that was just the trip from Patrick's Point, CA to Fort Klamath, OR. Also, because I can't stop high-fiveing myself on the appropriate music choices, I played us the Last of the Mohicans soundtrack as we drove through Jedadiah Smith State Park one foggy morning as we wound through mountains and next to a flooded river. Imagine that-- I know, right?

So this is what it feels like when we have some time off and are perfectly back in tune with each other. If I had any sense I'd start prepping myself somewhat for the impending intrusion of work and school and stress and details again, just so it won't seem like such a calamity when it happens, but right now the music's coming in so clear and good and loud that I don't want to think about it.