Hello {{first_name | Reader}},
I’ve just posted a new Low Visibility Ahead entry, “Diffuse Byproducts.”
“July 1971, or thereabouts. I was working for the Forest Service as a wilderness ranger. One morning, I hiked up from my tent on Iron Creek to Sawtooth Lake, talking to 70 or 80 people on the way, asking them to keep the place clean for the next people who visited, and answering questions about the fishing and bear and mountain lion fatalities.…”
You can read the rest on my website at johnrember.com/blog/diffuse-byproducts.
Parting with Such Sweet Old Ski Boots
Last month I said goodbye to the boots I learned to backcountry ski on. I had purchased them new, in 1973, for $42. They were wonderfully soft and comfortable, broken in as only much-maintained Sno-Seal-saturated leather boots can be. They were only ankle-high, but within a decade of buying them, by staying in the sweet spot on my 210-cm no-sidecut crystal-blue state-of-the-art Atomics, I could and did use them to make deep powder turns down long steep couloirs in the Sawtooths.
When I finally got high-top plastic Garmonts, I used my old boots for cross-country treks on fish-scale skis. A couple of years ago the soles finally cracked, and I quit using them because they were getting my socks wet. I kept them in my closet just in case I wanted to remind myself how hard it would be to make skiing great again.
I checked to see how much it would cost to have them re-soled. $350 was the lowest price I could find.
So they’re gone.
It was not easy taking them to the dump. It felt like I was throwing away 53 years of my life. It doesn’t matter that I no longer remember how to ski with equipment that sloppy and floppy. I loved those boots.
Recommended Reading
The next installments for my Books that Changed My Life series are two short pamphlets, Alcohol and Poetry: John Berryman and the Booze Talking by Lewis Hyde, and The Grand Inquisitor scene from The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky.
The latter is Dostoevsky’s critique of western Christianity, and underscores the gap between the spirit of Christ and the church that spirit inspired.
Another way to put this is that if I was like L. Ron Hubbard and starting a new religion, I’d include The Sermon on the Mount, The Book of Job, and Ecclesiastes from the Bible and call them the essential sacred texts. Once my religion got going and I was buying Rolls-Royces on the proceeds, I’d add The Grand Inquisitor scene.
John Berryman and the Booze Talking came into my life just before I started in the MFA program in fiction at the University of Montana in Missoula. I had spent the two previous winters bartending in Sun Valley and writing on the side.
I enjoyed the job, but it had a casualty rate. I had come to the realization that if I didn’t leave it soon, I’d spend the rest of my life pretending to write but not writing. Lewis Hyde’s monograph focused my awareness on the idea that alcohol was an intoxicant that artists struggled with and ultimately were defeated by.
When I got to Missoula I took a walk downtown, and in a four-block area I counted seventeen bars, and I realized, given what I had seen as a bartender, that I’d never make it out of Missoula if I drank while I was learning to write.
I vowed not to drink until I had an MFA. I was true to that vow, which meant that I did make it out of Missoula, did get a job teaching writing, and did eventually publish some books.
I met Lewis Hyde when he read at the College of Idaho and I told him his small book had changed my life. He smiled sadly at me and said thank you, which makes me think he knew that writing was an intoxicant, too.
