Holly Kays photo
The Secret Neighborhood
My dog Arti gathers momentum on Wednesday’s adventure.
Winter has a way of reducing things to their essence.
The mountains’ skeletons lie exposed, their leafy shrouds long gone. The air contracts, soft silence replacing the sounds of traffic and chatter that filled the warmer months. The sky opens, and the mountains flex their power, turning dismal rain to snow and ice, each drop or flake re-formed by the particular Appalachian slope where it happens to fall.
I had little thought of snow as I watched a wintry drizzle fall down in town, the occasional flake of soggy white punctuating the rain long enough to droop through the air before disappearing into nothing as it touched the earth. But when the clouds finally cleared, white-capped mountains emerged against a bright blue sky. I hadn’t seen real snow all year. Work forced me to let this fresh deposit sit overnight, but as soon as I wrapped up my job responsibilities the next day, I loaded the cross-country skis into my car and started driving.
Roadside snow began in patches, too thin to cover the grass and too weak to retain its hold on anything else, but it gathered strength as I ascended, patches joined to a quilt of unbroken beauty by the time I reached the Blue Ridge Parkway. I snapped on my skis and began to glide atop it, the effort quickly warming my body against the vacant air.
Then the road swung left, and the easy rhythm came to a halt.
A single mountain can be a thousand nations, countries divided by streams or slopes or stones that change the norms and challenge the rules prevailing just next door. Nothing proves this more neatly than a day-old blanket of snow. Here, where I’d been forced to pause, lay the remnants of a battle between the afternoon sun and the newly fallen flakes—exposed patches of asphalt separated by regions of soft, mushy snow that clung to the bottoms of my skis, hobbling them. I picked my way through the slush, searching for the white border that rimmed this sun-strewn battleground.
Holly Kays photo
The Secret Neighborhood
The landscape turns white following a Saturday snowfall.
Beyond the land of the afternoon sun lay a cold, windy country where powerful gusts had shepherded the snow into drifts, imprinting a pattern like that of ocean waves as it moved. Delightfully deep on the left side of the road, this nation proved dangerously icy to the right, where the wind had scraped away every loose flake. I dug into the edges of my skis, sidestepping gingerly to the next border.
Once across it, I found a country that celebrated all the best parts of winter. The ice disappeared, the snow turned to powder, and I smiled as I glided through a forest of white-covered birch trees. Up ahead, rays of sun streamed through an overlook, bright and golden in this final hour of the lighted day, illuminating the purpling Plott Balsams across the valley.
I breathed in the distance, the solitude, the fleeting beauty of the moment—and suddenly became aware that I was no longer alone. A single skier was descending the mountain, headed my way.
The skier drew closer, and I saw first that it was a woman, and then that it was a woman I knew. That didn’t surprise me. A mountain is like a continent, a multi-national landmass floating alone through a sea of low places, but the community of cross-country skiers who traverse it in the winter is more like a neighborhood—everybody knows everybody, and if you don’t know them yet, you do by the time you leave. When one of those rare, snowy Southern days comes around, I know who to look for on the trail.
After drinking in the uphill solitude, I welcomed company on the descent. Judy and I skied side-by-side when possible, single-file when not, catching up on life and quarantine and travel and everything else that had happened since the last time we ran into each other.
By the time we reached my car, the sun was preparing the streaks of pink it would set across the sky as I drove home. Judy and I parted ways, sending regards to each other’s husbands, and I settled into the driver’s seat, satisfied by the day’s adventure while at the same time wanting more.
Heavy snowfall going into the weekend granted my wish, filling the mountains with deep powder. On Sunday morning, I retraced the now-buried route I’d traveled just four days prior, gliding effortlessly between the nations, their differences curtailed to a temporary homogeny by the new layer of snow. I waved hi to the occasional cross-country skier, always pausing for a chat to recognize our mutual residence in this ephemeral neighborhood.
The unbroken blue sky and reborn landscape urged me ever higher, and I didn’t stop for lunch until reaching a panoramic view some four miles away from the asphalt pull-off where my car waited. I’d wandered a long way that morning, but the distance didn’t bother me. This, too, was my home. I’d already met the neighbors.