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It’s one of those nights where you feel hardwired into existence. You begin to sense things, like an evening sky the color of peaches, or your tongue clicking against your front teeth while mouthing words to a song you know. This kind of hyper-reality is inevitable after a long day at work, a late New Year’s Eve party at the Hoodoo ski resort, four hours of sleep, a groggy day at work, a self-inflicted 8:00 bedtime, and another day at work.

Simon, Neal and I spent New Year’s Eve at the slopes of Hoodoo, which is forty miles from Bend past the town of Sisters, on the other side of Santiam Pass. It’s a rockin’ little mom & pop hill that threw a New Year’s party complete with night-riding and booze and a vaguely Celtic/Bluegrass band. The night was a surreal atmosphere bathed in bright amber lights. They pumped the music from the live band out of huge speakers on the chairlift, an ethereal voice echoing through the valley. The runs were an island of amber light surrounded by a sea of darkness, broken only by the headlights of snowcats grooming the upper reaches of the mountain. There was also guy dressed in a cow costume.

Midnight struck while we were on the chairlift, and after dismounting we took the first run of 2004 through the terrain park. When we got down to the lodge we had time to take one more run, so we headed back up, veered into the trees and caught some fresh knee-deep powder through a steep grove.

The drive back to Bend required snow chains, one pee break and 1 1/2 hours. We got pulled over by a cop for failing to turn off our brights for oncoming traffic (which was previously a subject of intense conversation for Neal and Simon, and later me and Simon… as I was stuck with Lucy the dog in the back of Simon’s conversion van and couldn’t hear a thing over the roar of chains on packed snow). Simon explained that this was because he had one headlight out and couldn’t see very well at night. The officer suggested that someone else drive and bade us a good new year. At 2 AM we stopped at the 7-11 down the street from Lava House, and let me tell ya, there are some crazy people who hang out at the 7-11 at 2 AM on January 1st. Creepy people who drink Yoohoo out of paper bags and shout into pay phones.

After four hours of sleep I got up for another day of snowboard instruction at the Mountain. The weather was cold enough to crack your marrow, and the 50-60 mph gusts at the top of Skyliner lift made it a day of teaching survival snowboarding to 9-year-olds. Miraculously I made it through the entire day without falling asleep in a snowdrift or dying from frostbite or vomiting from exhaustion, and when we got back in Bend we were greeted by a foot of new snow in town.

Having only 6-8 inches of clearance I couldn’t get the Green Dragon in my driveway, so I stashed my car in the parking lot of the Catholic church down the street and hiked home. I grabbed my shovel, the last remaining shovel at Wal-Mart, a telescoping piece of junk that would have been better for shoveling the reveries off the sidewalks of Bourbon Street than the heaviest snowfall in Bend since the Blizzard of ’77, and went to work clearing enough of my driveway so I could park my car. Cranky and swearing from exhaustion, I channeled my anger into the snow and at the neighbor’s dog, who was darting back and forth in the street barking his fool head off at me. “Why don’t you get hit by a car or something?” I grumbled but he never listened and just kept darting and barking.

I went to bed at 8:00 and had a restless night of sleep. I kept dreaming that I was teaching snowboarding lessons, which was really frustrating because I just wanted to relax and sleep and not teach snowboarding lessons, for once. I found myself getting angry and yelling at my students. “I DON’T CARE IF YOU CAN’T SNOWBOARD! I DON’T CARE IF YOU’RE NOT LEARNING! I DON’T CARE IF YOU’RE NOT HAVING FUN! YOU’RE ALL A DREAM! YOU DON’T EVEN EXIST! LEAVE ME ALONE!”

I tried the same tactic on my classes today but it didn’t go over nearly as well.

Ten minutes. Let’s play this out and see what happens.

Tonight I made thai chili, which was near-disasterous on any number of fronts. It turned out to be an absolutely gargantuan recipe intended to feed the entire crew of an aircraft carrier, which meant that a lot of vegetables had to meet some slicin’ and dicin’. In the mayhem of knife wielding and onion weeping and terror-alert panicking I sliced the bitty tip off my left thumb. I saw to it that the flesh didn’t make its way into the pot, lest I insult vegetarians with my tainted vegetarian thai chili.

All in all, I fared better than one of my snowboarding students did, yesterday. We were pulling a short run, from "the clump of trees to the chairlift." He fell on his arse, managing to break his tailbone, wrist, back, skull, pride, bread, etc. There’s nothing like standing with your class, watching one of your kids get carted away to Ski Patrol on a sled behind a snowmobile. My fellow instructors were a tad bit concerned for me:

"You doing OK, Dane?"

"Yeah."

"It’s not your fault, man. Don’t worry about it."

"I’m not worried."

"It’s a sport. People are gonna get hurt, ya know?"

"Yup."

"…you seem rather calm."

"I worked at a summer camp."

"Oh. I see."

This cold thing is starting to get out of hand. I’ve been playing it safe and sleeping lots and not playing outside in the cold and drinking homestyle orange juice so it isn’t progressing into something fierce, but it isn’t going away, either. I’ve now missed two bluebird days at the Mountain, which are a precious commodity in the Cascades because the weather is pretty nasty most of the time. Overcast skies, thick fog, blowing snow, wind that tries to rip you from the chairlift, the occasional rainstorm… they’re all a reminder that those 300 inches of snow have to come from somewhere. The Summit chair was open today, which ground my soul something else because the Summit chair typically only opens three days a season, and this season it has already been open three days.

Mentally and spiritually I need to be shreddin’ around the mountain, but physiologically my body suggests that I need to take it easy, lest three days of needed rest blossom into two unnecessary weeks of stumbling angst at the world. The hardest part about not being at the Mountain is that all of my friends are fellow co-workers up there, and since we’ve so far been lazy about trading phone numbers, if I don’t see them on the slopes I won’t see them in town.

Nonetheless, the day hasn’t been a total loss. I swung by the mountaineering shop down the street to learn where all the climbing punks hang out in town, and they referred me to the Cascades Mountaineers, who are based out of the Central Oregon Environmental Center (also right down the street). I dropped by, picked up details on their next meeting, and trucked on down to Bend Map and Blueprint to pour over topo maps and whet my appetite for adventure.

Also, I am seriously pursuing an avenue that would make Bend, Oregon my home for an undisclosed number of years and months. This is a spooky prospect, as I am still a bit uncomfortable with the idea of casting down roots, especially so far from the place and people that feel like home. The more I think about it, though, the more I realize that there could be worse things than living in Bend, Oregon, a town that caters to groovy outdoor folk with its mountains and snow and climbing and trails and rivers and lakes and forests and wildfires. If I do end up hanging out here for an extended period of time, I will become, in essence, a western outpost for fellow rugged Midwesterners looking for a change of scenery.

Even though I needed to blaze fresh trails and often navigated by dead reckoning to find my way out here, there’s no reason that you passionate individuals need to dive headlong into the darkness yourselves. Looking for a cool place to hang for a summer? Looking for an outdoor bum lifestyle post-graduation? Chances are we’ll be here, looking for you.

Let the exodus begin.

Despite strident attempts to convince myself otherwise, I’m getting ill. The sore throat snuck up during night in strange dreams of hanging out with the Nerd Herd, and the weezy hacking summoned itself while dining at Quizno’s. I’ve put myself on a strict diet of water and vitamin C pills, strict as in "That which still allows gentle abuse of Double Stuf Oreos and winter ales." Despite extreme sacrifices to prevent myself from slipping further into the world of weeping relatives and death beds (such as postponing this season’s fourteenth day of snowboarding until tomorrow), my tummy feels rumbly and my tongue is riddled with tell-tale canker sores.

I don’t do well with getting sick because I rarely get sick. For some people illness is as common as mail delivery, but for me it comes around as often as comets, white rappers and clean public restrooms. All seen together. In this I rarely fare well when the angel of grippe finally does pay me a visit, as I haven’t developed any emotional or spiritual strategies for dealing with such things. The lack of cohesion coupled with short-term memory loss ensures that each bout with a bug becomes its own independent battle, complete with improvised rules of engagement.

My faculties for logic and reason are the first casualties, and at my weakest, degenerated state you could convince me that anything will make my body heal faster. A stiff glass of unleaded? Goat hearts strug on an elastic candy necklace? The left-hand suzuki method? Bring ’em on!

The last few days I’ve made it a habit to trek on over to the public library every evening, if only in an effort to infect as many fellow intellectuals as possible. My living conditions in Bend are supercalifragiloovy in that the Deschutes Public Library is huge and beautiful and two blocks from Lava House. A few days ago we had a little snowstorm in Bend that left three inches of accumulation, and it’s still hanging around because it hasn’t been above freezing since then.

In the world I’m familiar with this wouldn’t be a problem because we so salt the hell out of everything that flesh itself melts at 17 below, but in Oregon they use (what I have described before) what they call "cinder". And since cinder is useless for anything beyond breaking windshields and turning roadside slush into bloody hunks of meat, the walk to the library can be slippery and treacherous and wrought with unspeakable dangers.

I have been lucky enough to complete this excursion successfully three days in a row, and each trip has rewarded me with unadulterated access to secular periodicals that I consume ravenously. I have thus far spent an evening with Skeptic Magazine, Smithsonian and Scientific American. Scientific American has always been one of my favorites, even when I was ten years old and really had no idea what in the hell it was talking about. Most ten-year-olds are satisfied when handed an issue of Popular Science, but even then I believe I had an inkling that Pop Sci was a bit thick on the Pop and light on the Sci.

Really, Popular Science should be renamed “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Scientific American.” Most of Pop Sci’s articles are wrought with junky elation over stealth battleships, overpriced satellites and American cars. Not to mention that every futuristic, speculative article is filled with artist conceptions of technology, which are useful in that they show you exactly what the future won’t look like. More than anything, it’s the fight between engineers and natural law that determines the shape of the future, not artists.

Artists are consulted only at the very end, when they get to mold glass into huge salmon murals to hang in libraries. At this the artists do a very good job, as well as at the traffic circle on Colorado where a dozen metal salmon statues swim on little poles. They also do well with the traffic circles in the Old Mill District, where we have huge gears fashioned out of weathered metal. This also leads you to wonder, though, what huge gears in the Old Mill District have to do with salmon. Did the salmon once run so thick that one could cross the river by walking on their shimmering backs, and the mills were powered more by their seasonal migration than by the water? Were the mills where turn-of-the-century workers, after a large salmon harvest was floated down the Deschutes, ground salmon into gourmet cat food, cosmetics and housing materials?

These are the things that command your ponderance whist you descend ever deeper into the yawning void of unhealth.