No, I’m not talking about clouds or coconut-flavored cotton candy, I’m talkin’ ’bout snow. While we might get some snow in the San Diego mountains, to get the good stuff you’ve got to head north. Through the glass and aluminum robot forests of Irvine, the exclusive hills near the Getty in LA, then upward into the mountains and…back down. For another 6 or 8 hours you’re in the deadpan of the Central Valley, which finally relents and relaxes into the most lascivious and fertile green folds to the east of San Francisco Bay. Turn west, cruise past Sacramento, a surprising stunt of buildings rising from a river junction, then you begin to rise. Up go the pine trees, the grass gets spotty and, if it’s winter, you’ll begin to see smears of snow tucked into crevasses and beside rocks like unmelted butter on an English muffin. Higher still and there’s no mistaking it. Once you get to the real mountains the snow is Big Time.
It’s the Sierra Mountains in Truckee and this is what we got the day before Christmas. The children, with varying degrees of excitement, sledded and skied. I walked in the deep snow and remembered what it was like to grow up and find the world transformed into a soft playground. We got over a foot.
While Number Two was overwhelmingly against spending time in the snow doing anything other than getting back to warmth, Child Harbat couldn’t get enough. She played in the slush, played in the snow, struck out through open snow-crested meadows, and generally absorbed the landscape into her soul. Now she knows snow, and she’ll spend her life living the magic of it. Merry Christmas, CH.
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Writer, architect, father, husband.
For the life of me, I think projectile, Physics and Geometry.
And such a wonderful time it was for all of us!!