You hardly know the Rockies here in Vail. The four-lane
passing overhead. Designated parking underground. Had I only dreamt
my childhood terror in the Crowsnest Pass? “Those days are gone,”
he says. “Move on.” Six hundred dollars here will get a night
in a hotel. A hundred more and you can ski
with Nesterenko for a while.
His face is ragged in the bar’s expensive mirror.
Still, I know it easily, the way I recognize the rudely scalloped
planks that frame the glass—wood from stalls that horses like our own
had gnawed, bored with winter nights or worried by the howling
in the fields. “Windsuckers. Eerie sons of b’s,” my father
would say. “Sure as hell you’ll have one or two.”
At night in the frosty barn, you’d hear them grind
away at the wood, wheezing as they sucked in the frozen air.
The waiter brings me a German beer and Eric
something soft. “I was fishing on the Island once,” he says.
“River of Ponds. You know the place?” They’d banked in off
the sea, and landed on some lake. Middle of nowhere. Saved his life,
he says. You never see another soul. The lazy river in the sun
is what he won’t forget, the tint of amber in the pools,
and all the birds—the loons, the whistlers, so close
to the water, the single ducks or pairs, the way they’d bullet
back and forth like messengers. He sips at his juice.
“Some guys had a hard time at the end.” He glances
past the doubled bottles in the glass. “Don’t talk to me
about a Slavic mood—you can find a way to save yourself.
You have to want to, though. I won’t say more.”
He says he hopes I’m not pissed off. Tells me even here
in Vail, there’s more than what you see—once you’re over the back
and into the bowls. You’re up in the clouds, a thousand turns
from home. You slide your tips out over the edge and pray.
“Hell, this is only where I come to warm my feet.”