New Home

New Home- A new job, a new life.
By David Huebner

The road is long, winding, and quiet. Watching the forest go by, my eyes dart at the gaps, search the clearings, scan uphill and downhill. Is this a possible line? My mind wonders. Hey, look at that! I see another clearing in the forest, an avalanche path that starts up on the high ridge. Down, down, down I drive searching the woods, listening to Peter Tosh and just smiling in the sunshine of the fine day. Welcome to The Valley. Switching passions, my eyes start sifting through the granite outcroppings lining the road. Spying tall granite faces, frightening off-widths, and everything in between, I find a new reason to get excited: there's climbing! Down in the bottom of the valley I pass a couple lakes, and see several float-tube fishermen. I try to picture it without anyone around, removing all the cars, the people. I try but I can't, I'll just have to wait until I'm faced with the real thing.

Passing under the towering sign that marks the resort, I instantly think of Jurrasic park, remembering the characters initial sense of wonder and amazement at entering a world filled with life of the pre-historic past, and though no T-rex's are going to be greeting me at my cabin, certainly a whole new reality will be. Slowly, I pull up to the small wooden cabin. "Ski Touring" the signs says out front and points randomly to the West. Pushing the door open, my steps make the floorboards creak sharply. I look around, from room to room, avoiding cobwebs, or jutting nails, feeling as if I am trespassing into another world, another life. I try imagining my own life functioning within these walls. This is where I'll sleep, this is my cook stove, here's my bathroom and here's my shower - oh wow, this room's also a sauna, amazing! - here's the sun room, where I'll drink tea, eat, watch the snow fall until the snowpack covers the windows.

Almost disbelieving that this is my new home, I hesitate to unpack, to move even, and just stare out the windows, look into the wood grain of the walls. Well, this is it, and as it sinks in again I grab a broom and start sweeping.

Watching the snow fall, I stretch my lower back, twisting and arching, moaning and groaning. Only half way through the first day of wood splitting and I'm feeling worked from leaning over the noisy splitter and heaving the large rounds into place. I wish I could split it all silently by hand, the crack of the ax thudding like a fallen pine cone in the forest, but I can't. I have seven quards or more to split if I want to survive the winter, so I am slave to noisy crunching machinary. The roar of the splitter is gone from my ears at the moment though, and the flakes that are slowly placing themselves on pine needles and tree limbs, spraying patterns in the duff of the forest floor, are soothing to watch. The first snow of the season is always so beautiful, so wonderfully unexpected. The bite of winter in the air, the frost of breath, the cold burning my lungs. A fresh numbness enters the fingertips and toes, and pretty soon snot begins its drip cycle from my nose. I love winter, and I think that many years the anticipation, the waiting - the soft brief white blankets of fall - is better than the full winter itself.

My back is still sore as I step up to the splitter once again, surveying the mountainous pile of rounds still left to be split. The amount of wood says quite clearly how long I'll be down here, and how much snow there will be, and I think ahead to my eight months living alone in the woods - the isolation. Can I handle it? Plenty of people will visit, and I'll leave often enough, but still, only the silence and emptiness of my cabin will greet me when I get home, only the grains of wood will listen if I chance to speak.

Part 1 in a series beginning this winter ('02-'03)

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