Newtown, Our Town

We stretch the skins across our skis, throw the hinges of our bindings, and with the snow falling in delicate curtains that hide the mountains, that make us forget the depths of loss that lie behind the lightness, begin our climb. A ravine of willows reaching out of the powder, red limbs fine and tapering into the gentle cascade. The snowy ridge dissolves in cloud, and when we gain it, the next ridge too is washed away. The faint squeak of our skis slipping through powder. Icicles hanging from the fir trees like Christmas ornaments, make cool suckers that wet the throat and slow your breath. 

We don't talk so much this time. The first climb we bubbled over like two college kids meeting on campus, talking in Italian and American, trading stories, translations of poetry, the pieces of our lives that show the whole. Now it's different. Now we are like old brothers who know already what the other is thinking. And besides there is little to say: the mountain decides our steps.

And beyond the mountain is a story we can hardly talk about. On the other side of that white and forested ridge, on the far side of the continent, is the classroom where it happened, the small winter town collapsed in grief, the parents hugging memories like shards of glass to their hearts. They are parents like us. Like us, not because we have lost like they have, but because we share the same great love, the same great risk. A love that holds open our souls to the pain of the world and makes us shake at even the smallest thought of suffering. Their children are our children, and our legs strain with the hard steps of the next turn, the hard doubt of its worth.

Random images sift out of the sky. Our wives and children asleep in warm beds as we unzip our coats to the thin cold. Rabbit tracks like pearls over a crest. A flash of the impossible, crimson on white, and then a shake of the head to clear the mind. Lanes of forest submerged in a charcoal sky.

The climb becomes a meditation, a practice of measuring the chill on your neck against the sorrow inside. The work of knowing loss while moving on, moving with it. Our capacity for love is a capacity for loss. The sensitivity of our hearts, of the hearts belayed to ours, is an awareness that at any moment, at any misstep, the beauty of the world can become an avalanche of suffering.

Yet we must carry on climbing. The next ski brought forward, weight shifted from one board to the other as you make the hairpin switchback, nearly falling back, catching yourself, a scent of fir brushed from heavy limbs.