Washburn Ski Weekend
February 14–16, 2014
We drove five hours from Green Bay to Washburn on Friday night so Jojo could do the Book Across the Bay ski race on Saturday. Five hours is a long drive for a weekend. It was worth every mile.
That first evening we went skiing in the Chequamegon National Forest. Kathleen and I took some shorter trails while Jojo did the longer ones. The snow was packed and the trees were dark against it and then the moon came up — a huge orange full moon rising over the forest, so big and low it looked like a painting someone had hung between the pines. We skied under it. The shadows of the trees stretched across the trail in front of us and the only sound was the swish of skis and our breathing. I don’t think any of us talked much. You don’t talk when the moon is doing that.
We had lasagna back at Joyce and Kathleen’s house and watched some Olympics coverage. I looked through their books — maple syrup sugar making, canoe paddling, canoe building, wild rice foraging. All things I wanted to do more of. These were people who lived close to the land in a way that wasn’t performative. They just did it. It was Tuesday and they were tapping trees. It was September and they were harvesting rice. I wanted that kind of life and didn’t have it yet.
Saturday morning we woke early to see the sea caves. We drove to the Lake Superior National Lakeshore at Meyer’s Beach and hiked out on the ice. The caves were enormous — sandstone arched and hollowed by centuries of waves, now frozen into cathedrals of ice. Monster icicles hung from the ceilings, blue and white and clear, some of them twenty feet long. The light came through the ice and turned everything the color of sky. It was beautiful — genuinely, stupidly beautiful, the kind of place that makes you embarrassed to try to describe it because nothing you say is adequate.
It was also packed with tourists. I couldn’t complain because I was one of them. But I noticed the contradiction, the way I always do — wanting the wild place to myself while standing in a crowd of people who want the same thing.
In the afternoon Jojo and I skied at Valhalla trails in the National Forest, just the two of us. It started to snow — a soft, slow powder that landed on our jackets and stayed there. The trails wound through the trees and the snow kept falling and Jojo stayed with me the whole time, which was nice. She was the better skier by a lot, but she matched my pace. She taught me how to step-turn down hills so I’d stop crashing at the bottom. I thought about how I’d like to bring my kids up here someday to do these things with me.
That night everyone did the Book Across the Bay race except me. I carted them around and watched Jojo finish first for the women’s division. We had beers and chili after the race and Jojo talked with friends and I was still exhausted from my ski earlier. It was very cold. The kind of cold that gets into your teeth.
Sunday morning we had breakfast with Kari, and then Kathleen and I went skiing one more time at the Jerry Jolly trails. Just us and Jake, the dog. Many of the trails were ungroomed — narrow paths through spruce trees so loaded with snow that the branches hung low and you had to duck under them. A creek ran through the middle of it, open water in all that white. It was so quiet. Kathleen and I took a leisurely pace and Jake ran ahead and circled back and at one point I clipped him to my belt and we skijored — the dog pulling me through the snow, both of us grinning.
We had lunch and left for the drive back. Even the drive was pretty — five hours through the northwoods, the snow on the trees, the light going flat and blue as the afternoon faded.
I think about that weekend a lot. Not because anything dramatic happened. Because everything was exactly right. The moon, the caves, the powder, the dog, the narrow trails through the spruce. A weekend where the world was cold and beautiful and I was in it with good people and my body worked and the snow kept falling.