First Snow Soup

First Snow Soup

(2003)

It’s September 19th, and I’m cleaning my room to the soulful smoothness of Spyro Gyra. Not exactly cleaning music, I know, but I had to compromise. My CD player is tweaked, you see, so I dusted off an old vinyl from by brother’s room and threw it on.

Ok, I take that back, I’m not really cleaning my room. There is a storm outside, the first winter storm of the year. I habitually look out my window, watching the wall of white slowly approach me. I wander about my room, trying to remember what I was doing, what I was ‘cleaning’. About the time I remember what I was doing, I look back out the window again, and my brain turns into soup and runs out my ears. It’s good soup.

“We could still go out today, it’s only 1:30” my father says to me as I sit in the living room looking out the window, eating some good soup. He’s talking about deer hunting. This weekend was the muzzleloader opener. We both have tags in the same area.

“Yeah, pretty crumby weather though.” I love this sort of weather, but it’s not the kind of weather I’d like to haul my hand-finished walnut Kentucky Long-Rifle around in for its first hunt.

“We ought to though; you don’t have many days to hunt.” He says. Between school and soccer season, I don’t have many days to go out and have a quality hunt. Even though leaving the house at 1:30 on a blustery Sunday afternoon isn’t what I’d call ‘quality’, I agree to go out. As we prepare our packs for an evening of hiking and hunting, the phone rings.

It’s a worried wife, and not my fathers. Supposedly, her husband and son had also gone on a hunt, but for the entire weekend. They have been good family friends for many years. They live about 3 hours north of us, in Elko Nevada. They traveled south to the Cherry Creek Range, a favorite place of our two families to hunt deer. It’s good high country, and there aren’t many people there. The father and his son have been there since Friday, hunting the 10,000ft high spine of the range, from an undisclosed spike camp. At 9:00am or so this morning, they called home and said that they were having ‘vehicle problems’. Somehow, the call had been forwarded to us, perhaps because we know that part of the mountain inside and out. My father offers to drive up and get them off the mountain.

“We are going to the Cherry Creeks.” My father tells me as he hangs up the phone. From listening to his side of the conversation I know exactly why. We leave all of our hunting stuff in the vehicle, because the Cherry Creeks are in our tag’s hunting unit.

As we drive out of town, Ely, Nevada, I notice a motor home, covered in snow, heading south; two distinct signs of autumns approach.

North we go, straight into the country that always seems to see more weather than Ely. The road becomes wetter and wetter as we go, the clouds darker and darker. An hour later, we drive past the failing town of Cherry Creek, a collection of trash, hicks, primordial buildings, mangy dogs, and a handful of adventurous retirees. The pavement ends right in the middle of town. As quickly as we drive through town, the hills around us turn white. The road gets muddy, fast.

“Uhh,…this might not happen.” My father says as he struggles to keep our fishtailing Ford Expedition on the muddy road. I say nothing, in consent. He keeps driving.

“Watch for deer.” He mutters a short moment later. Upon hearing this, my eyes change from the road to the surrounding landscape, and the soup begins to flow. Snow! It finally hits me that I haven’t seen fresh snow since April. That white, fluffy substance completely re-works my mind. I begin to think about skiing, snowshoeing, snow-ball fights, shoveling snow, eating snow, digging snow out of my pants, breathing snow. Oh boy!

We slime our way along the winding road, thinking every minute we should turn back. The road winds down into a valley and becomes straight. It’s now a bench road and continues, endlessly, into the stormy abyss. So do we.

A few minutes later, we are greeted by another sad collection of trash emerging from the white. Our vehicle slows as we pass the Paris Ranch. It’s a habit to slow down, usually to avoid dusting them out. Now, though, it’s to avoid sliding off the twisting road and adding another wrecked vehicle to their junkyard.

As we round the last small turn, a camp trailer, with Utah plates, comes into view about 50ft off the west side of the road. A pick up truck and three four-wheelers surround it. My father hesitates to stop, and continues to contemplate it as he drives by. Coming to a late conclusion, he stops and reverses to the turn off that parallels the camp. He drives up and gets out. He knocks on the door, hoping someone inside will have seen our friends, or know something about their whereabouts. No ones home. They must be out hunting. We resume our northwardly movement, turning right on to a road that leads up the bench, towards the steep pitch of the Cherry Creeks.

When the low-lying, stormy clouds diffuse into thin air, the towering face of the mountain appears in full for the first time since our arrival into the valley. It’s enough to get the soup flowing again. The vehicle stops and both of us grab our respective binoculars to search the slope for the road, and to search the road for a vehicle, or signs of one.

“Nothin?”

“Nothin.”

The road, which switchbacks up an open face then follows the ridge for a while and finally reaches the top after crossing another slope, is devoid of signs as far as we can tell. Of course, we are still close to a mile away.

We go another quarter of a mile towards the mountain. We are forced to stop again, and look, for we are losing important landmarks on the ridge in our decreasing line of sight. While raising my binoculars to my eyes, I see, in peripheral vision, a stand of attractive orange Aspen locked up in the snow. I lower the binoculars, never letting them reach my eyes. I stare at the orange, in awe. You see, normally the Aspens have all dropped their quaky leaves before anything white falls from the sky, around here at least.

+*+*+*+*+*+

I’m up on the slope, now, looking through the orange fringed limbs of an elderly Aspen. Snow is lightly falling through the gaps. So lightly, in fact, that it might just be my imagination.

Rodents and birds move amidst the branches, boughs and earth, trying to remember where they positioned their stashes of forest-goodies, hastened by the early snow. In the same respect, I imagine myself in my basement, frantically trying to remember where I left all of my winter-goodies.

It’s not winter yet, I remind myself, looking once again at the orange oblong leaves, still attached to their twigs. And I’m not even looking at the orange oblong leaves, I remind myself as I awaken to find myself on the road below, searching the road for tire tracks.

“It’s pretty awesome up here.” My father says as he looks slowly in a full circle at the lofty white mountains and the vast valleys that separate them.

“It’s almost worth the trip just for the sights, eh?”

“Oh yeah…” I say, from within the mountains, eating a warm bowl of soup beneath my patchy ceiling of orange.

“Hell yeah.”

(photo: not a first snow, not the Cherry Creeks, but a comparable warm fuzzy aura - Ward bench February 2006)