Teatime at Timberline
January 1st, 2017.
New Year’s Day. No-one has to work.
It is an Oregonian winter, which is to say, the ground is patchy with wet snow and Mount Hood is a white diamond on the eastern horizon. Time to head for the hills.
Two friends arrive at our house, optimistically ensconced in puffy down snowsuits. We pack sleds into the truck and we drive up Highway 26 towards Timberline Lodge.
Mount Hood is a permanent orienting landmark in my mental map of the world, which for most of my life consisted almost entirely of the northern Willamette Valley. The coastal range where I grew up is just a forested speed bump on your way to the ocean, but the Cascade Range is made of real mountains. It bisects the state, a whitecapped, spiny barrier that encloses all that is green and well watered and fruitful against its rocky western slopes. On the eastern side is a different world. Bone dry in the Cascades’ rain shadow, the vast high desert is a barren, Martian landscape of tumbleweeds and orange dust, wild horses and black lavabeds. But from within the valley and for the rest of my life, the mountain is the east, the ocean is the west, the river is the north and, well, California is the south.
This New Year’s, we hope to find sledding hills. I have childhood memories of sledding all morning through the dark pines and then driving down the other side of the mountain into the Warm Springs Reservation to swim in the naturally heated pools at the Kah-Nee-Ta resort all afternoon. Today, though, global warming and better signage conspire to spoil our plans. Most of the hills where enough snow had accumulated are marked “No Trespassing” or have been civilized into pay-per-slide snow parks.
Undeterred and unwilling to pay to play, we turn up the drive to the parking lot at Timberline Lodge. We load our sled with provisions and haul it into the hills to find a perch with a view.
At the top of a south-facing ridge, we build a couch out of snow and set up our camp stove. An ocean of clouds below us break in misty cascades against the blue ridges of the foothills as the sun slips down the face of the western sky. Mt. Jefferson stands solemn watch on the far horizon, the Three Sisters peeking over his shoulder.
I don’t know that in four months’ time, I will leave the valley below me, maybe forever. By June, I will find myself perplexed and adrift in a twisting maze of Appalachian hollows and gaps, no longer able to tell north from south, east from west, without the kindly face of the Big Mountain to anchor me.
But not on New Year’s Day, 2017. Instead, we make ourselves a cozy bundle of parkas, drink bourbon and hot chocolate and sup chicken noodle soup from plastic mugs. We feel perfectly small and at peace, knowing that in a world never and yet constantly changing, for the moment, we are exactly where we belong.
