All day we'd been going gonzo, letting 'em roll at full thrust, and storming through the chop like we'd just bounced in off the ionosphere. The light was turning bad, the shadows extending toward the horizon, and clouds from Sacramento swelling up from below like the tide in the Bay of Fundy. The world, all mountains, turned under the sun and I thought this must be the greatest place on earth. Indeed, it was one of those quiet Sierra moments where the earth in the distance seemed like an immense chapel. I might as well have tried to eat a coffee table as jump into vertigo.
Skiing is integrity, only romance is a disaster.
With that he uncorked a beautiful golden run that fixed even my jaded mind into a timeless spotlight. All of a sudden another year was over and they're playing Christmas music. All of a sudden you could receive a card in the mail announcing your 2Oth high school reunion. All of a sudden Vietnam was another old war fought by parents of kids who grew up playing Nintendo, and never heard of Walter Cronkite. The biggest howl was that the path to the top of the Palisades was so packed that it resembled the retreat from Moscow.