Climbing the stair master at our local gym, which is one of the
most perfect gyms in the world, way beyond what a small town deserves, I
flipped between two movies – Apocalypse
Now and Music Man. The time flew but I had a wicked
headache when I got off the machine.
The
stair master is the closest thing there is to walking up a mountain. Dwight “Dewey” Evans, probably the best
right fielder in Red Sox history (with all due respect to Tony Conigliaro –
we’ll never know), was an early adapter of this climbing machine. I remember the controversy in the early-eighties
when Dewey made the then-dead Sox drag his Stair Master around the league
during the season. I suppose hotel
gyms were not so good back in the day.
At our awesome gym, called the Swimming Hole, an allusion both to rural
landscape where we reside as well as the kick-ass Olympic size pool at the place, there
are but two of us as far as I can tell who love the machine and we go to the
gym at around the same time most days.
Maybe by writing about it the management will take pity and buy another
one – or a ski erg. Another great
machine.
When
did our Swimming Hole change from a new sports facility in a rural town to an
established, cherished institution in this almost-suburb? I never knew we needed it but now I
cannot imagine the town without it.
I don’t use it anywhere near as much as I should but I am darn glad it
is there.
I
am not a diarist. If I were it’d
be easy to check this fact: April has
always been a cold month where we live.
There is typically snow on the ground through the month and the ski area
is typically open and aiming for May.
We don’t usually start mowing our lawns until May. We do not uncover let alone plant a
garden until May.
It is not normal to be able to hike our mountains in April without
trashing both hiking boots and trails due to wet conditions. It is not normal to put in peas in
March. It is not normal to be sun
burnt in April heading to May. This
all is not normal.
Having
said all that, and as you may remember from an earlier post now the peas are up
(as are the lettuces, the collards, the spinach and some others), the sun is
out and is bright, the lawn looks, to quote my son, “like the PGA.” Can’t decide whether this is a good
thing or not. Kind of like
watching Apocalypse Now and Music Man at the same time. Weather as dissonance.
And
I’ll end this stream by quoting Katie Ives, editor at Alpinist magazine, a world class journal of mountaineering,
writing, photography, illustration, and life, built with love just on the other
side of our great mountain, now reachable by simple serpentine road rather than
needing to drive around the edge of the world.
Katie posted a note on Facebook (and I’ve come to peace with
Facebook – it’s a cacophony of the inane but also not unlike, as a good friend
put it, a coffee shop where you see familiar faces), commenting on the beauty
of late-spring snow:
Since last
night’s storm, a layer of new snow lies across the hilltops, as brief and soft
as the apple blossoms in the spring woods a shimmer of green rises from the
valleys, with the sounds of water, growing brighter, and louder.
There is a
thinness, a delicacy to spring and summer if you live in a cold place. Katie, a much better writer, captures
it. I try to capture it here and
there (take a look at the film I just posted about). At the end though you cannot capture it; you have to go out
and live it.
David Rocchio lives, works and writes in Stowe, Vermont. (c) 2012 David Rocchio
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