Bible Boy hasn't known Dave long enough to make him out. "Who do you think he's thanking?" he asks.
"The Creator," I respond not really wanting to get into whether Dave's unifying force is the Almighty God John Tremann has committed his life to at The Christian Foursquare Church.
"He seems to think that everything has a spirit--animals, plants, even rocks. Do you believe that?"
From earlier comments John has made about false religions and Christ being the only link to eternity, I know where he stands on that issue.
"Well...I don't know about the rocks," I say, hoping to get farther up the trail before I, too, am condemned to heathen Hell.
I look down the glacial valley of Railroad Creek toward Holden Village, a one-time mining town on the border of Glacier Peak Wilderness and the gateway to this corner of the North Cascades. Since the early 1960s when the bottom fell out of copper prices, the mine has been closed. The adjoining village, however, has been manned and maintained, surprisingly, by the Lutheran Church.
To the church, owning a town with no telephones or roads to the outside world and situated below the walls and glaciers of 9000-foot peaks has been a tremendous asset. Such a town provides a location where one feels small, frail, and vulnerable--place where you naturally ponder life, death, and purpose. So for 35 years the village has been a year-round soul center where visitors of various creeds can attend study groups, discussions, and lectures in their quest to answer The Big Questions.
Truth be told, the village is one of the attractions that lured us here. John, as a relatively new convert to the Holy-Roller school of Christianity, is trying to let go of a troubled past and establish a new path for his future. That puts the village's worship sessions right up his alley. Me? I'm a longtime adherent to the Smart-Ass school of Skepticism. That leaves me looking for gurus with answers to such koans as: If a skier falls in the woods and no one sees him, do his obscenities make a noise? If God is all-powerful, can He create a slope He can't ski? Is it harder for a skier to enter the Kingdom of God or a snowboarder to anchor his pants to the kingdom of his hips?
We also came to Holden to rendezvous with the Buddhist, a long-time friend working in the village, who wanted us to ski the 5500-vertical foot slopes, the 45-degree avalanche chutes, and the pocket glaciers of the surrounding wilderness. To the Buddhist, the timelessness of these mountains, the raw power of their avalanches and rock slides, the nights of starlight and the days of storm speak more eloquently than anyone in the village about the awesome universal power to which we all belong.
The next time we see the Buddhist, he waits for us at the far edge of an avalanche path. His pack, skis still tied to it, lies on the snow and saucer-sized spots of blood stain the snow.
He smiles as I approach. "I'll bet you have a suture kit in there," he says nodding at my pack.
He has no way of knowing. I carry the smallest pack in our group and am the staunchest advocate of minimalism; he should have every reason to doubt that possibility. But he's right.
"What's up?" I eye the ace bandage around his leg.
Dave unwraps it to expose a finger-sized gash, about a half-inch deep, in his upper calf.
"Broke through the avalanche debris a few minutes ago and caught the sharp edge of a boulder," he says matter of factly. There's no surliness about his misfortune; to the contrary, he's delighted. "If that rock had cut me two inches farther around to the front, it would have splintered my shin; two inches higher and it would have severed a knee tendon." He smiles thinking about those possibilities, "Then we would have had an interesting problem."
He gestures at my pack, "Let's operate."
I pour water over the wound, while Dave scrubs it clean with an iodine swab. "Look at this one," he says enthusiastically. His fingers pinch out yet another BB-sized shard left behind by his rock assailant.
Once clean I confess it's been a spell since I've sutured. "That's OK," he says, "I don't know how many times I watched my Mom stitch me up. I'll do it." He takes the suture, clamps it in a hemostat and drives the needle into the meat of his leg with the detachment of a seamstress stitching a hem.
Seven stitches later the wound is looking good. Dave chats amiably as he covers it with gauze and slaps on the ace bandage. Then, before we discuss whether it's wise to complete the trek into Lyman Lake, he's shouldering his pack and making tracks. To the Buddhist the past is past. He's already focused on (and enjoying) the new moment.
As a resident of Holden Village, Dave has walked this nine-mile trail a dozen times, but you wouldn't know it. He sees it as if for the first time, marveling over the forces that shoved the adjacent walls of Bonanza Peak nearly two miles into the air, wishing aloud that he could have seen the mile-deep glacier that once flowed through this valley. A few miles from Lyman Lake, however, he's having trouble with the Buddhist creed of not diluting the present by focusing on the future. He knows that his return to the ski slopes surrounding the lake will be as sweet as a bigamist's homecoming.
The Christian is unimpressed. Since he committed himself to his sport eight years ago, John has performed a personal form of Tai Chi on skis. And since he publicly committed himself to Jesus two years ago, he has derived his morning inspiration from Scripture rather than scenery. He asks if I'd like to hear a verse.
"Sure."
He reads a passage from Psalms, glorifying God's creation and interrupts himself, "I don't know how people believe that life evolved from nothing."
It is one of those imponderables. Life evolving from nonlife, pockets of order thriving in a universe of chaos, simple life creating complex life through a mechanism of mistakes. It is enough to turn you toward... a Creator. But then you're left with an even larger imponderable: From whence cometh that Creator?
Sooner or later don't you have to face the fact that the organic arose from the dust of the inorganic? Or is our distinction between the organic and inorganic a false one--is life an innate quality of all matter? Do the rocks I denounced yesterday actually respond to stimuli but on a level we haven't measured? These are rough questions before we've even brewed a cup of Java.
An hour later we tour across the lake and climb through a glade of bare larch trees. I'm thinking about a boy who grew up in Seattle and spent most winter weekends at the family cabin ripping down the slopes of Stevens Pass--never as a racer but always with reckless energy. His family had substantial money, he got along fine with parents, he mad a name for himself in a tough sport. And yet he must have teemed with unhappiness to embrace religion as he has.
I've probed John before trying to understand this riddle and the troubled past to which he eludes, but haven't hit pay dirt. Today I touch the nerve. He tells me about his learning disorders--dyslexia and attention deficit disorder--and how as a kid he was constantly bounced between different educational programs. He felt inferior, had no self confidence, and in moving from school to school, developed few close friends. He was confused and angry.
After flunking most of his first-year college courses, he remembers a night of despair when he suddenly realized he could carve a place for himself as a skier. He believed even then that God was telling him where his talent lay, where he could succeed, where he could climb out of his hole of inferiority. That insight instantly gave him peace.
Within a year, the single-minded persistence with which John pursued this God-given direction had him working with several top ski photographers including Hank de Vre, who is along with us now. Pictures of John looking unshakable in menacing terrain materialized in all the ski magazines, and before many years the underachiever had skied into Warren Miller, RAP, and Steve Winter films. Still it would take five years of substance abuse and failed relationships for John to admit that while he was succeeding at his sport he was drowning in his life.
John grows silent as we ski above timberline and approach the bald lands around the Lyman Glacier, a square kilometer of ice flowing off the flanks of Chiwawa Mountain. Before reaching the glacier, Hank points out steep slopes laced with rock bands that he'd like to check out. He and John commute to the site and go to work.
I position my pack and skis into a chaise lounge and tan myself while watching the spectacle. They find a hot zone and John climbs above it while Hank positions himself below. I watch to see if John prays before each jump as he did two years ago when I traveled with him to Switzerland. At that time, he had just made the big-air leap of faith and was asking a greater power to direct all aspects of his life.
I had wondered then whether faith was what John relied upon when he cannonballed himself into space. Did that faith give him the mental stillness and confidence to keep it together in a sport where mistakes are easy to make and, potentially, as messy as flying Value Jet? On one of those jumps two years ago, a buried branch snared his ski and he took the twenty-footer on his back. The difference between a jump that had us motionless in fear and one that could have left him motionless for life boiled down to what...luck?...divine intervention?
John had shown the same mental fortitude that made Dave's operation so impressive yesterday. There was no outbreak from the skier who at that time held the world record (and considerable recognition) for making the longest cliff jump. He had bowed his head and thanked God for His protection, yes, His divine intervention, then walked back up and, from a different launch, flown fearlessly and flawlessly. In a game where timidity is the precursor to injury, God was a steel rod fortifying the boy's backbone.
A year later when I worked with John again, he'd fallen from Graceland. His Bible, an odd companion in the Tahoe skiing scene, was packed in a box with his summer clothes. Out with the winter garb came the bottle and a bundle of arrogance. But the big head hadn't float him; again he found his personal life sinking toward barrel's bottom. This year the revolving door to which John has nailed his ideology has brought back the God guy. And it appears the God guy may stay.
Like his jumping (which is not the spontaneous event that it appears to be on film, but the product of careful planning) John is now choreographing his personal life. He's severing old ties that he deems destructive and is building a network of praise-Jesus friends to support his new flight.
He's also cutting the sponsorships that have previously motivated him to remain on the cutting edge of the sport. At age 28, he claims to have fulfilled his skiing goals and, before he cripples or kills himself (outcomes that have befallen others who have surpassed his biggest jumps), has decided to take his healthy body and run.
The Buddhist and I rise in near unison and prepare to branch off. It's time we decide, to take our healthy bodies and ski. Our creed is really far simpler than John's who has the angst-ridden concepts of sin, salvation, Heaven and Hell to wrestle with. For us it is enough to ski hard, tax our bodies, absorb what we can today; tomorrow could be the day we fly TWA to Paris.
As we meander up the lower slopes of the Lyman Glacier, I ask Dave why Buddhism is his spiritual medium of choice. He discusses the philosophy's emphasis on living in the present, its concern for the entire creation rather than just the human element, and its belief that everything is part of the whole. All that speaks to him.
Buddhism, Christianity, Islamism, Judaism, Hinduism, cold science.... Yahweh, the Eternal One, the Creator, Vishnu, the Dude Almighty, Mr. G.... Making a choice from the menu of spiritual choices is even worse than settling in on the one true snow tool--alpine skis, snowboards, telemark boards, Fat Boys, parabolics... With so much confusion how can you possibly hone in on an answer?
Dave sides with Emerson who said, "God enters by a private door into every individual." Many routes lead up Dave's conception of the spiritual mountain. The important thing is to climb even though, like the two blind men who had grabbed an elephant (one by the trunk and one by the tail), the perception of the path you climb may seem heads or tails apart from the path of others.
John doesn't endorse such diversity. He sides with writer G.K. Chesterton who said, "A man can no more possess a private religion than he can possess a private sun." To him all routes but one follow the avalanche express into the abyss.
The topography surrounding today's route best fits John's picture. Avalanches from the snows that fell several days ago cut loose by the minute. They detonate with the thunder of a ski patroller's bomb and rain down the cliffs encircling the glacier. We reach the steep headwall of the glacier and confine ourselves to the path of a slide that released two days ago. On either side, loaded slopes are ready to explode.
An hour later we stand atop Chiwawa Mountain and gaze out over a hundred peaks that are even higher than ours. My pet theories of human purpose favor the inane--perhaps we are the rats of a higher species' research, or, in the way that we harvest silk from worms, perhaps another species seeded us on this planet to produce the plutonium it needs. Today, however, with all these metaphorical mountains surrounding us, I wonder whether truths--not just the paths to truth--are many.
Physicists say our common-sense notions of the universe are profoundly inadequate. Crazy as it may sound, some of our brightest minds wonder whether we might not each share in the maternity and paternity of reality. The key to understanding the universe may be... us. Science at the subatomic level has become so paradoxical that physicists actually ask questions like, "Did this particle exist before I started looking for it?"
In other words, all of us may affect reality. If so, then perhaps the Greeks did have their gods, and John's Almighty may exist for him but not for Dave whose less-personal creative force permeates all things. The theory even explains the National Enquirer's alien sightings--they're after the plutonium.
The Buddhist brings me out of the ozone.
"We gonna ski, or you just gonna stare?"
Skiing is problematic to my new theory. If we create reality, why would there ever be breakable crust? Why isn't there powder today? These are questions requiring meditation...later. Dave is already streaking down the slopes laying uniform tracks through two inches of corn snow and screaming, "Oh baby, baby, BABY!" I pack away the soapbox philosophy and burn P-tex trying to catch that Buddhist bastard before he lays first tracks all the way to camp.
Before reaching the lake, we traverse under the slopes where we left John and Hank hours ago. In what may prove to be John's last photo shoot, Hank is trying to call it quits. But John doesn't believe their efforts have created the image of skiing that they were after today. He wants to get it perfect. Clouds have piled up in the southwestern sky and it's doubtful that the sun will reappear today.
Hank packs away the cameras, but John will not be dissuaded. He is a man of faith, living in a world of miracles. Even after Hank abandons him to join us, the Christian is unmoved. He stands alone at the top of his cliff, waiting for the sun.
Details, Details
Holden Village is located on the eastern slopes of the Washington Cascades and is reached by the ferry servicing the 55-mile-long Lake Chelan. About 65 people live in Holden during the winter, the majority being an ever-changing core of volunteers who run the village in exchange for room and board, a rich spiritual environment, and the immediate access to the wilderness.
During the snow months (November to May), walking out the front of the village leads up the 5000-vertical-foot (and skiable) slopes of Copper Basin; walking out the back of the village leads up the skiable slopes of Martin's Ridge. For more information write: Registrar, Holden Village, Chelan, WA 98816.
