Mud Season

"It's lovely to live on a raft"
-Huck Finn

It's not really real mud season insofar as the late spring is a real mud season, with snow melting and mud being everywhere. But, identically, it is a transitional period for us mountain people tourist workers... one season ends, and the start of the next, seems delayed indefinitely... rations are low, savings are emptying, housing is scrambling to get secured and we're all just desperate for SNOW... not that I ski... but snow removal is a big business, as is ski tourism... And I'm still waiting for the answer to the housing question.

It's a great time to remember happier moments, easier times, and to kick ourselves for having run through them so fast. I might say, that after everything you can possibly calculate that has gone wrong around here in the past year, my biggest mistake was to rush through ghost towns back to this non-snowing prison of captivity one month too early. A month is a big deal, especially when you could be...















Or even...



















































Found this book and I was reading it, about rivers, and guiding, and the early days of commercial guides on the Colorado. There's some relevant words in there about the lure of the river, and guiding, and the difficulties of post-season grappling...

The Colorado irrevocably changed me, as it does everyone. It fanned a false ego, then doused the fire. The boatman subculture was a strong one, a brotherhood bond formed in the summer months, and we kept in touch in the off-season, compared notes. Everyone seemed to suffer the same fate and searched in vain for a winter's equivalent of the astral light that caressed us in the Canyon. But few found it. One bleak winter Dennis Massey, King of the River, was driving a pizza delivery truck, and he shot himself in the head. Years later, Whale, a ski-lift operator, did the same, on the eve of a boatmen reunion party. These were the extremes. Sometimes, though, the spool rolled the other way. Some people who were undistinguished in their normal lives, perhaps shy, or living with untapped potential, found an unplumbed confidence while guiding, and that allowed them to stretch, assert, and experiment, and sometimes become extraordinary in ways they otherwise might never have been. A few guides went on to be come celebrated photographers, film directors, businessmen, politicians, and one, perhaps the most envied, became the road manager for The Grateful Dead...

By the end of the summer... I came to realize a common current ran through all those who drifted into the life of a guide on the Colorado River- it was the knowledge that the cosmos could be reduced to a cool, wrapping white wave, to the pull of an oar or the twist of a tiller, to the crest of a wave- and at that moment, the top of the world was reached, all magic was white, and all was good and great. Once that knowledge soaked in, every guide, no matter how far his pursuits carried him, came back to the river.

Just six more months...