I’m sitting,
suddenly, after an ungainly, sliding scramble. The chair rocks, just a little
bit, as the gap between my weighted-down feet and the ground stretches wider
and wider. As someone who is constantly battling a fear of heights, I should be
nervous, but I’m not. Not really.
In front of
me, the sky glows behind the mountain, and I’m gliding up and up and up, right
toward it. It occurs to me that this might be what it’s like to go up to
heaven. Then there’s a burst of light and I have to close my eyes, because I’ve
come far enough along the lift that the mountain isn’t blocking the sunset
anymore, and the insides of my eyelids dance with spots of color. When I open
them again, the chair is floating past the signs that warn riders that the end
of the lift is coming, so I push up the bar and scoot forward on the seat. Then
I’m sliding again, like I was at the bottom of the slope, only gracefully this
time, going down and around the hump where the ski lift ends.
The snow
grates under my skis, icy now that the sun is going down, and I snowplow to a
stop, taking a breath before the race downhill. When the air is about to be
rushed from my mouth, dragged by the chilled wind before I even blow it out, I
take a few seconds of calm while I can. Then it’s all a speeding thrill of trying
to steer and trying to look like I know what I’m doing and most of all trying
not to fall, and it’s only when I reach the bottom that I notice my cheeks are
aching with cold.
A few runs
later, the sky behind the mountain has wrapped its warmer hues in a blue so
dark it’s almost black, but under the gathering clouds, the blue blackness is
thick, not sharp. Once again, my body smacks the seat; the chair rocks; the
ground falls away. This time, as I glide up, there is no sun bursting over the
peak onto my face, spotting my vision orange and pink. This time, I start to
think the words one more run.
And this
time, when I swing around to face the slope, I stop so abruptly I almost fall
over. Way, way down below me, past the lodge and the parking lot, the road
vanishes into the dips and swells of twilit mountains. And beyond that is a
city I thought I hated.
From here,
it’s nothing more than a dimple in the purple hills, invisible except for the
glitter of yellow lights, looking like so many fireflies. There is a warm haze
around it where the lights met the darkness, and for a moment I doubt that this
treasure of a sight really is the city I think it is. The blue-black dark
presses closer around me, and for a minute, I am stirred by a sense of longing,
like a faded Eden wish-
and then it
is gone. And I shiver, and the city is itself again, and I push off down the
slope toward it. But later, as I drive home that night, I see a glimmer of the
jewel-city from the mountain among the sullen and the dingy and the ordinary,
like a ghostly afterimage on my heart.
