By Nielsen Greiner EBS COLUMNIST
Editor’s note: Ski Town Vignettes is a new monthly series taking a creative look at life in the mountains, including some elements unique to Big Sky.
It’s a Sunday in mid-October. I sleep in and wake up to a few new inches of overnight snow, seen through the window opposite the bed when I open my eyes.
I take it slow—coffee, morning pages, more coffee, silence, stretching, pancakes—then leave the house for a walk, my body pulsing with the low-grade but steady beat of anxiety.
If you’re like me, you do fine for a while until comes a day or two—or three or more—when all the hard stuff catches up with you; you recognize it, name it, and allow yourself to sit within it, hoping it passes through like a wave, from trough to crest to trough, and then calm again. You wonder what you’ll do and how you’ll manage if it stays.
I walk. The trees are raining clumps of melting wet snow. I go to the end of my dead-end street lined with Douglas firs and lodgepole pines and sparse aspens and turn around. I glance out past the trees to the open meadows of Porcupine Creek, the point of Ramshorn Peak above and the jagged ridge below it; all is speckled white. I am a little better now. I pass the driveway and keep walking.
I don’t know if anything brings me as much peace as the sight of snow on evergreens, or makes me as glad as the sound of happy birds singing from and flying between branches. Noisy clusters of chickadees, nuthatches and juncos. Chuckling robins. A Townsend solitaire belting out its melody from a treetop.
All around, the trees are raining. A few buckling aspens wish they would have lost their leaves a little sooner. Stout Douglas firs are not at all phased by the sudden weight of new snow.
Every time I go outside, it’s a small salvation. Nature offers an embrace I receive nowhere else.
When I walk back through the door to the tiled mudroom all the hard stuff might be waiting for me, but I couldn’t imagine facing it without the moments and fresh memories of nature’s small salvations that sustain me.
It could be something about its constancy, the way it stays the same for you whenever you come back, no matter how much has changed.
It doesn’t ask anything of you but gives and gives and gives. It’s not conditional like everything and everyone else, and all you need to do is put on your shoes and show up for a little while. It loves being that beauty for which you do nothing to deserve or create.
How desperately we need this gift.
I turn off the wet road and cut through a gap between the jack-legged fencing, climb over a log fence further down and walk towards my apartment, a soft crunch as I step on the snow covering the flattened native grass. I follow a faint game trail with dark droppings up the slippery bank and reach my door, open it up and return to life as I left it.
For at least a little while, I am a little more whole.
I hope nature’s small salvations carry you through the rest of your days in just this way.
Nielsen Greiner is an aspiring writer and outdoor enthusiast based in Big Sky. He loves snowboarding and splitboarding, mountain biking, long day hikes and truck camping in the woods, and has a thing for books, coffee, trees and birds. This summer, Nielsen lived out of his truck while traveling through Canada and Alaska for two months. To read more, visit nielseninthewild.com.
