A raggedy mound of dirty sidewalk snow outside my Anchorage house began to melt for the first time today, marking the first official afternoon to rise above 32 degrees in 52 days.
Over the weekend, four of us skied 20 miles through the Chugach Mountains in malodorous polypro. The snow bridges held, and the sun blazed down, and my clothes grew wet with sweat. But I still stuffed a hat in my crotch to block the wind in the pass.
These are signs. We’ve reached the cusp of spring here in Southern Alaska, probably only a week or two from true breakup and ankle-deep mud. But we don’t need melt and long days to signal the changing season.
The spring outdoor gear catalogs are arriving by the pound.
Glossy they are, with sweeping full-color spreads of twenty-something couples hiking green ridges in very clean mango camisoles, or drip-dry khaki pants that zipper themselves into cargo shorts. The breathable, waterproof trail-running shoes carry no mud.
The women play with their hair and wear lipstick as they belay up mixed rock and ice. The men eat pita sandwiches and leave shirt tails hanging. No one sweats as they step lightly in tastefully rumpled outdoor wear. It’s clear they don’t slosh through muskeg, or dump their clothes in the corner between Monday and Friday. Unlike mine, their polypro probably doesn’t reek as though it once wrapped old salmon.
But it’s the smiles that are most unsettling. The catalog people block their eyes with glacier-rated sunglasses, so you must interpret mood from teeth alone. The lips are pulled back and jaws clenched in mirth, true, but it’s as though someone had just cracked a clever pun at a tea. Strangely, no one seems to actually be laughing.
Real hilarity, the sort that makes you gasp, always hides something painful, like the wrong turn that added 10 hours and a mosquito-infested bivouac to an afternoon hike, or the broken ski pole repaired with duct tape that collapsed on the first plant and pitched you into a tree well. Among my friends, humor erupts darkly, deprecating and ironic, like coffee brewed thick.
Go ahead and watch your own friends the next time someone starts razzing, and you’ll glimpse a frown above the smirk. But among the catalog people, eyebrows arch up, like the expressions of children in milk commercials.
How can they always be smiling? I wonder. Don’t their feet ever hurt? Does no one stink in that world? Just once, I’d like to see the fancy clothes sweat-stained and torn, hair matted, chaped lips and squashed bugs. And the couple snarling, as one demands to know whose idea, and the other shakes out the Ibuprofen.