A Place Where the Snow Goes to Die
On April 22, outdoor journalist John Luthens will embark on a cross-country camping pilgrimage to explore some of the hidden nooks in the outdoor landscape of the United States. His journey will take him to multiple venues in South Dakota, Kansas and New Mexico, capped off with an attempt at 4 days of backcountry survival in the Chiricahua Mountains of Arizona. Assuming he isn’t killed outright by marauders, rattlesnakes or mountain lions, the colorful characters, camping lore and tips that he discovers along the way will be shared in a series of photographs and articles on the On Wisconsin Outdoors website.
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What made me think I had any business setting out on an adventure that would pack me across a half-dozen regions of the United States? I’m 50 years old for crying out loud. I’ve got aches and pains. I have enough trouble keeping my worries at bay while tossing and turning in the comfort of my bed, not to mention the fact that things that go bump in the night are magnified three-fold when you are huddled in a tent in an unexplored environment after burning a dinner that was cooked over a portable stove.
A mid-life crisis? A way of proving to the outdoor gods that I’m still worthy? One final fling at full-blown adventure before riding off into the sunset with a potbelly leading the way and a receding hairline in tow? Perhaps those things are true. I’m not really sure. But I know without a doubt that it was the place where the snow goes to die that pushed me over the edge. That forsaken city lot summed up my journey in a nutshell.
I’d been suckered into the lot without understanding. The plow trucks collect a winter’s worth of snow from the parking lots and streets and dump it there in mountainous piles. It’s tucked away from the beaten path of the avenues, a hidden kind of place, and it had always made me feel like a rugged explorer when I crested the endless mounds with the wind howling drifts in my ears. The snow-collection lot was the unexplored tundra, and I felt like I was breaching into a realm that precious few had ever experienced.
Then, it inevitably happened. The seasons began to mellow. The sun rose earlier and set later in the blink of an eye. Due to a cosmic miscalculation on my part, I’d neglected to visit my adventure lot in any season other than full-blown winter. Maybe I should have kept it that way. I could have stayed blissfully unaware of my shortcomings for the remainder of my life.
I chanced across the city lot in early spring and found my snow mountain world decimated into a muddy splatter. There were still a few glaciers holding steady, but they were shrunken and crusted with street gravel. It wasn’t rocket science, but my world was blown away just the same. What did I think was bound to happen? I sat down in the thawing mud and wondered If I’d taken a wrong fork in the trail of life.
I vaguely remembered going to far-flung places. I faintly remembered doing wild things and experiencing remote sensations. But looking at the shrunken, snow- mountain range before me, I found that I was no longer certain what had been real, and what had been invented in the illusion of my mind. Perhaps I’d been fooling myself. Could it be that sum of the outdoor conquests in my life had melted away to nothing but a muddy slush pile?
There was only one way to know for sure. I needed to go far, I needed to go fast, and I needed to go now. I made some phone calls and arranged passage with a pair of wandering nomads who were headed to Arizona on an adventure of their own. I dusted off my backpack and tent and found a few campsites along the way who were willing to take me in. I called work and asked for a sabbatical to which they happily agreed which, depending on how one looks at it, either goes to show what wonderful employers I have are or tells a woeful tale of my importance in the corporate machine.
The spheres would continue to turn, and I’d likely have trouble remembering in another year what parts of my journey were fact and what parts were too unbelievable to pass for legitimate journalism in even the loosest of newsrooms. I even imagined there was an outside chance that I wouldn’t make it home at all, which was truthfully more fantasy than fact but of minor importance either way. In my mind, the only current relevancy was that the place where the snow goes to die would soon be fading in the rearview mirror.
John Luthens is a freelance writer and photographer from Grafton, Wisconsin. His first novel, Taconite Creek, along with a nonfiction collection of his stories, Writing Wild: The Tales and Trails of a Wisconsin Outdoor Journalist, are available from Cable Publishing at www.cablepublishing.com