George Sibley

Night Skiing - The Disorientations of Lunatic Perception

By George Sibley

First published in Mountain Gazette 92, March 2003,
significantly revised July 2004 for publication in Dragons in Paradise.

Lunatic. Loo-NAH-tick.

I forget the moon behind me for a moment, and look out ahead to the darker part of the sky where I can see past some distant star to a dimmer star, and on past that into the bottomless night, and I wonder if I would see the same thing if I'd grown up in some prior time, when people weren't indoctrinated to believe that the night is bottomless, and that we perch precarious on the side of a spinning ball of stone looking out into that night, rather than standing down on a stable ground looking up at it.

And thinking about that, I look back over my shoulder, lunatic, at the full moon, and again almost fall down, but get my ski pole in the right place to catch myself, and concentrate again for a minute on skiing, looking at the trail and those ahead of me, hearing the breathing and shish-slish of whoever is skiing behind me. A full-moon ski, in January in the Upper Gunnison valley above Crested Butte, and it's not even cold. Compared to what it should be anyway. The usual moderately nasty post-sundown river of cold air was flowing down the valley when we started - but that's eased off now, and it wasn't even zero scale, let alone some more customary January temperature in the Upper Gunnison. Couldn't be global warming, of course; our government scientists have assured us on that.

Lunatic - as in pneumatic, or dramatic, or astronautic. Lunatic: focused on the moon, moving with the moon. We're up the Slate River valley beyond Crested Butte: one of those longdrawn mountain valleys carved by snow and ice piled beyond our imagining in these droughty times, with the finish work done by a few millenia of wind and water and the gently penetrating roots of trees. The mountains rise around us ghostly in the monolight of the full moon. Under the moon, in the snowy time, the world is white and blue-gray, until you get into the woods where it's just plain dark, and scary as hell if you think you're on a downhill track but aren't really sure if you're moving, or if you are, how fast. Up the Slate, moving with the moon.

But now, we're out in the open, and the wash of the moon is cold on the slopes rising steep around us. These slopes I'm looking at: I'm part of a small local faction that advocates developing them for downhill skiing. Am I loony, lunatic? I want the development here because it would keep the inevitable expansion avalanching down into one already overrun valley, rather than spilling it over into another adjacent valley, which is what the ski resort has proposed in the past. I look up at the slopes, which are not looking back, don't appear to care one way or the other.

I try to imagine lifts running up them, here, there. It's easy enough to imagine, and it doesn't look all that different. Does it ruin it? Yes and no: I have to admit that, back when I was still up for that kind of skiing, I'd love to have lift-skied some of these long steep leeward slopes (after dropping a couple depth charges on them to see if they wanted to avalanche). Now, I'm more inclined to say, enough is enough, but that's not yet an acceptable concept in America; you don't stop this stuff; it's like diarrhea, you just try to get it in the right place. Better here, funneling down into Crested Butte where it's wanted, needed, than opening up the holy semi-whole East River valley, under Gothic Mountain.

There's already going to be a subdivision going in on the hillside behind us here, now in moon shadow. The loyal opposition has managed to get the house size down from a possible 20,000 square feet to 12,000 max, and has raised some interesting questions about the water supply - but that's about as far as that's going to go, and if the houses are going to be there, and the road plowed out to them, then we'll just have to start these full-moon skis a little higher up, at wherever the new end-of-road trailhead will be.

The Slate River trailhead in winter is already a few miles past where it was when I first skied here - and the first subdivision extending the trailhead was, is, a kind of well-planned commune of hardcore environmentalists who all walk or ski in from a common parking lot. There are in fact enough decent environmentally concerned people in this world to more than fill this valley all the way up, and someday, when the upvalley avalanche of developments for good people from this side meets the upvalley avalanche of developments for good people from the other side, all of them people who really love the mountains and contribute to environmental organizations in their valley - I'll be dead by then, thank goddamn.

I decide to think of something else. I look up at the people ahead of me, all of us head-down and concentrating on skiing, and I think how silly it is, to be out here on a full-moon night, but doing something that forces a fairly high degree of concentration down where one's feet are. Fixated on the ski track and watching one ski slide into view, then the other: I think how silly that is, and decide to look over my shoulder at the moon, which is looking over my shoulder at me and, I imagine, sneering at me for looking at my skis instead of at it, or the world, or vice versa - and I almost fall down again - flail my poles, skip sideways on one ski to catch my balance, violent moves a sixty-year-old ought to be too smart to be making himself make....

The moon. I am glad sometimes that I don't live closer to it. I mean "closer" in the sense of actually having to pay attention to it, as the only occasional source of light in an otherwise dark night, coming and going on a schedule of its own. I live in the modern world where, for the time being, lights come on and go off independently of the sun and the moon, their presence or absence. We have developed our finite resources to a point where, for a few years, we could probably survive, physically at least, without the sun or the moon for light. But there was a lot of time - most of our time as a species - when the moon was missed when it wasn't there; the first real record we have of scientific thought, mathematical thought, is a bone with 28 notches carved in it.

The moon. Glad as I am that I don't have to live closer to it, I still note its presence in my own cycles. I rejoice in the new crescent moon, that fingernail at sunset: I always think when I see it - ascendant now for ten or eleven days. When I think about it, I think that I wax with the moon, and wane with it, which is a good reason to not think about it too much: for every day waxing, a day waning? How can one get ahead like that? The crescent moon makes me feel good if I don't look at it too long; it makes me think that great things might happen in the next ten days or so to full moon. And full moon for me is like Christmas for kids - this is it; it's all downhill from here, until the next lunatic (loo-NAH-tick) crescent.

The moon we call "gibbous" - the moon on its way back to disappearing, a moon still roundish all around but no longer round - I don't just dislike the gibbous moon; I kind of fear it. I remember driving to Denver once, and coming to that wonderful place on US 285 where the city unfolds and spreads all the way to Kansas, the only really beautiful way to see Denver. But that night a dark orange gibbous moon was hanging huge over the city, looking like special effects from one of those sci-fi movies designed to drive us into the embrace of fascism for our own security. The most malevolent moon I've ever seen. Gibbous, gibber, madness - the gibbous moon is the moon you see when you wake up at night at the wrong time of month having to go to the bathroom, and you don't get back to sleep till dawn, with nothing but lunatic (LOO-na-tick) gibbering going on in your head....

If I look at the lovely early crescent moon too long in the evening, the dimensional magnitude of the universe starts to creep up on me. Or just the magnitude of the relatively minute solar system. In the first day or two of crescence - in Colorado, anyway - you can see the whole moon, not just the crescent, because the soft light reflected from the earth makes the part not lit by the sun just visible - the dark side of the moon lighted by earth. "Earthshine" is the technical term.

So a kind of celestial triangulation begins to form somewhere between the eye and that part of the brain or the solar (?) plexus where our megabalance seats itself: the softly lit ball defines a line between where I am and where the moon is, but that brilliant almost detached edge of yellow-white light is an arrangement between the moon and the sun that so recently seemed to sink so intimately down just over that hill there on the horizon - yet, projecting the angular relationship between the moon and the sun from that crescent sliver, I can see, if not believe, that the sun is not just down there behind the hill, but is also way, way out there: we're a triangle in which the short leg between me and my reflection on the moon is very, very short, and the leg down to the distant sun is long, long, long.

Then, shortly, on those crescent nights, the moon is gone too, and if you're still sitting thinking of angles and distances, you do become aware of looking down and out into space, not up into it, and from a spot on the side, not the top, of this ball of rock turning at between five and six hundred miles an hour at this latitude.... It makes one want to hold onto something, a big rock, a god, something. Life is precarious, on the side of a ball of fire-fueled rock both spinning and revolving around a much larger ball of burning gases that is virtually indistinguishable in a galaxy adrift in an expanding universe whose dimensions are so unimaginable as to be as good as god.

Hanging on to my balance on my skis, the moon looking over my shoulder, maybe laughing but more probably totally indifferent, I wonder if I would feel this precarious if I'd grown up in an earlier world where people believed that the sky was just a kind of a bowl over a flattish earth: a bowl across which some Apollonian deity daily dragged the sun, then back under the earth through the night to do the whole show again next day. Did they ever see the night sky as something into which we might fall - if not forever, for a finite but expanding amount of time? Or would that have been too much for a young species? Or did the species start out with a terrifying sense of falling into the abysmal depths of the night sky? Who, in the process of falling asleep - falling, asleep - hasn't suddenly jerked awake, a feeling of falling, asleep? And that forcing us to invent stories about cerulean bowls, a lid of light over the night beyond, and Apollonian sun-chariots, stories to pull over ourselves like warm blankets against the night?

Apollo the sun god - Mister Up-and-at'em, up and doing, early bird gets the worm, footprints in the sands of time aren't made on your ass, et cetera. I give him his due all day, under his sun: Apollo, class president, captain of the football team, groom of the head cheerleader, general of the Rotary and first piston in the economic engine plowing the earth, Apollo's the one we all cozzen up to because we're all afraid not to. Lincoln pegged the sons of Apollo perfectly: "the family of the lion, or the tribe of the eagle...(which) thirsts and burns for distinction, and...will have it, whether at the expense of emancipating slaves, or enslaving freemen."

But Apollo loses his grip on my heart and mind and balls as he hauls the sun over the horizon, and the sky begins to go translucent and open up (especially if the crescent moon's hanging there) and alcohol's blue burn flares in to supplant the sunyellow coffee charge of the day.... Then comes Zeus's other son, fair Apollo's dark brother - half-brother - Dionysus who hangs with the moon and the moonshine and all the interesting women - all the women Apollo publicly shuns, the only beings he really fears, these women who would rather dance with Dionysus than be honored and worshipped on Apollo's pedestal....

Back when I wanted to be an engineer, at Carnegie Institute of Technology in Andrew Carnegie's Iron City, I got my mind infected by Dionysus, at a performance of "The Bacchae" - that terrible terrorous play of vengeance, Dionysus' revenge against Apollo's servant Pentheus who knew nothing if he didn't know how to Just Say No to that side of the soul that comes up with the moon. Like a kid tearing wings off flies, Dionysus destroys Pentheus' rational clean well-lighted world with slow relentless grace, and at that performance, understanding nothing, I first looked over my own shoulder at the Dionysian moon and began to stumble onto that theretofore religiously and conscientiously ignored side of the soul. Like so many sophomores, I stopped just saying no, vaguely concerned that it might be saying no to a lot of life.

And I look out at the moon again now, this wholly lunatic night: look over my shoulder and down and out at the moon from the rolling side of this earth and I stumble again. The full moon lacks the delicate subtle spatial significance of the crescent moon, its triangulated intimations of infinitude; but that's okay, especially when you're out under it skiing and worried enough about falling down: you don't need to be thinking about falling off too.

I realize I'm starting to work up a sweat; the people up front are setting a pretty good pace. Under the guises of getting a drink, adjusting layers, blowing my nose, et cetera, I gradually work my way back to the end of the group, where I can set my own pace, including the occasional full stop to let the cold blue fire of the night burn itself on the retina of my brain.

Stopped there, free to front, confront the moon in its own kind of vibrant stillness, I reflect on my own adventures and misadventures with the godly brothers Apollo and Dionysus. Forget the father god - Zeus, Yahweh, whatever you want to call him - he's what he is, and ever will be, but we have to make our peace with his sons, who both say, each saying in his way: declare an allegiance the other way, and I'll come destroy you.

I know people destroyed by each of these brother gods - people destroyed by the constrictions of common sense, people destroyed by the excesses of nonsense; people who drank themselves to destruction and people who rationalized themselves into a sad dry old age; people who loved too much too many too often and people who died devoid of understanding the question. Apollo of the sun, Dionysus of the moon - learn to love the twilight, and the morning when the gray starts to go pink, the times of translucent and transparent transition between dark and light.

Stopped there this wholly Dionysian night, I watch the others ski on down the valley, back toward the cars. I wasn't stopping there in any terminal way; I knew I would be there when we all reconnoitered at the designated place in town, and said wow, great, wonderful, cocooned again in the babel of people, booze, food, music, and I was. But I hung back so a piece of me could stay there where I stopped, lunatically sundered to lope off up the hill to sniff the sky, and wait there till I came again to stay.

I can never figure out whether I am strong enough or smart enough to learn what the lunatic world has to teach, or whether I'd rather just make up stories under the well-lighted lid where I can hunker. I feel like we are close, but just not quite there. We get lost in nostalgia, security yearning, god dreams, stories like warm blankets of blesséd ignorance. And the moon meantime goes gibbous, disappears, then again begins its quiet crescent pass toward fullness.

Stopped there, the moon ignites the memory of another night moon burned on the brain - very late one night in a bar in town, when - no real hope left of getting laid - I remembered that it was a full-moon night outside, and stepped outside for a breath of air and saw Gothic Mountain, Fuji-like from Crested Butte. And with Dionysus' blessing, went back in and got some friends who were about to drive back to the biological lab in Gothic to wait; I ran home and stuffed my sleeping bag, a tarp and a jacket, a canteen and a partial box of Cheerios into a pack, and catching their ride up to Gothic town, cradled by Gothic Mountain, I walked on up the valley in the moonlight, full summer moon then, and started up the mountain - just went up, no trail or anything, just up the side of the mountain, to climb it to the moon....

I stopped that night on an open bench only a few hundred feet up. My feet not fueled by the same fire as my brain. And I woke up in the morning to a sky still open between night and the coming lid of daylight. I huddled cold and vaguely sad in my soggy bag, muzzily munching my Cheerios, a little hungover, abandoned again by the dark god of drink and dance I'd tried again to follow to the moon, and would again and again. No father god, just the bipolar brothers that haunt our days and nights, the gods of up and down, light and dark, who drive us strange between light and night, left brain and right in terminal tension, like paired stars circling each other but fending off some consummate fusion for fear of - loss. Loss of whatever.

But the sun god came that morning with an almost Dionysian diffidence. No great swelling dawn like thunder up out of whatever wherever. The sun that day - like always in the mountains, I realized - didn't come up, but came down, meandering leisurely but carefully down over the high rocks above, down into the trees and eventually down to where I lay waiting. As if to say - "Oh! Hello. Well. Bless you, my son" - and then wandering, wondering on down, lower to nudge awake the outliers and villages and towns and cities all the way to where his leisurely retreating brother of the once and future night was moving on ahead.

And I, like the mythic high-altitude black butterfly, absorbed the random wanton indiscriminate energy trailing behind these brethren, and rolled up my bag and started up again, on up the mountain so much more finite under the sun than the moon, but no less real.

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