Winter Dog Days
And cross-country ski adventures!
My face is buried in black fur.
I sit with my torso folded over my dog Baxter, resting my head against the curve of her spine. My hands grip her floppy ears like handlebars, cupping each triangle to make it funnel-shaped as I stroke them in sync. The soft velvet caresses my palms.
Her fur smells like nothing—not like a dog, not an animal, nor the perfumed scent of human hair. Seth and I have always marveled at our dog’s lack of odor and joked that she self-cleans like an oven. Her full name is Baxter Rose, and I tell her she smells like a Baxter Rose bud, borrowing a phrase Mom used in my childhood.
Baxter and Laney came up the stairs at full trot a few minutes ago and circled like sharks, only their snouts and fishhook tails visible above the edge of the bed. They took turns barking at me before relenting and leaping onto the mattress to lie next to me.
It’s the third time today they’ve lobbied me to get up and go on an adventure. Most days by this time we’re loaded into my 2003 Chevy Astro van heading for a cross-country ski trail. But today the van is in the shop getting four leaky, corroded tires fixed, and the ski trails have turned to slush with the January thaw. We tried to ski yesterday and ended up a half mile down the trail with two inches of snow stuck to the bottom of my skis. I’d stopped to let a porcupine waddle down the trail in front of us. Seth restrained Baxter, but my ski-heels wobbled and Laney pulled me face-first into a fir tree. The porcupine wasn’t in any hurry, and the dogs weren’t letting up their frantic pull, and the snow stuck back onto our skis as soon as we scraped it off. So we turned back, and I brushed fir needles from my hair before climbing into the van.
With today’s temperatures pushing 40 and rain in the forecast, I’m not interested in a repeat performance, even if I had a vehicle to get me there. So I’m sitting inside staring out the window at the waning gray day, wondering whether to run around town in the rain to make the dogs happy, or “take a zero” as we say in the hiking world and give up on the idea of exercise.
Laney stands up and comes over to kiss me, her tongue transmitting static electricity that shocks us both in the mouth. Then she jumps off the bed and circles again, staring at me with her golden eyes and barking.
It’s been one month since I pulled into my driveway with my other van, my 1999 Roadtrek camper, after a pointless 2,500-mile drive to South Carolina and back in ten days. I’d thought I was going back to Baja, Mexico this winter, but got overwhelmed by traffic and rain and loneliness, so I impulsively turned around. That’s left me with six unscheduled months on my calendar in the dead of a New Hampshire winter.
A decade ago, that would have been a dream. In January 2016, I was busy hiking a list of peaks called the New England Hundred Highest, trying to summit them all in a few consecutive winters. My work schedule constrained hiking time to weekends, and when the weather didn’t cooperate, my friends and I set out anyway in marginal conditions. One of those winters I stood atop the twin peaks of the Bigelows in Maine with my thermometer reading 25-below-zero and the wind gusting 50 miles an hour. Tiny icicles covered my eyelashes, and my toes ached as they thawed on the descent. That Monday morning at 5am, I drove from the motel in Maine straight to my middle-school teaching job. Mist rose from the ice on the Androscoggin River at twenty-below zero.
On New Year’s Day last week, I lay in bed wondering what to do with my life. The first thing that came to mind was that I could fulfill my former dream of summitting all 48 of New Hampshire’s 4,000-foot peaks in a single winter season. The most peaks I ever bagged in calendar winter was 31, back when I was teaching, so I reasoned it wouldn’t be hard to hit all 48 in the ten remaining weeks before the vernal equinox if I had nothing else to do.
“Hard” being a relative term here—there was plenty of time to orchestrate a few dozen hikes between now and March, but my body would still have to do the climbing. And my brain would still have to do all the planning and worrying, keeping daily and sometimes hourly tabs on the higher-summits forecast and trail reports, then calculating which peaks I could safely summit in what conditions, and whether I could do it alone or needed to find a hiking buddy or join a group.
The first weekend of the New Year brought valley highs in the low teens and summit wind chills more than thirty below zero. I didn’t want my first winter hike in years to be a repeat of the Bigelows, so I stayed home and skated the town ice rink with Seth instead. By the time the temperatures turned mild again, I had lost my ambition for peak-bagging. My all-or-nothing brain told me that if I couldn’t finish the whole list, it didn’t feel worth it for me to hike a single peak. So I bought a season pass to my favorite cross-country ski trails and vowed to take the dogs as often as I could.
Winter hiking wouldn’t be the same anyway, I reasoned, since Baxter couldn’t come with me anymore. Her adventures have slowed dramatically since her knee surgery two years ago. She can tolerate jogging a few miles on leash, but the few times I’ve let her run wild in the woods, she’s come home limping. We don’t know if it’s the metal plate in her knee, or arthritis in her hips, or the other knee starting to go, or some combination of all three. So far she’s done alright trotting ahead of me on leash while I ski for a few miles, so we skijor instead of peak-bag.
Skijoring is a comical sport for the dogs and me. I wear a harness on my waist that loops around my legs, and the dogs attach to me on long bungee leashes that connect their harnesses to mine through a flat red strap around my waist that doubles as an emergency release. But before I can attach them, I have to lay out my skis and poles, shoulder my Camelbak, and start the GPS tracker on my phone. Then I sling open the sliding door of our Astro van and the dogs burst out, sniffing every pile of snow that their bungees will stretch to as I try to untangle their leashes and connect them to me.
Once the dogs are attached to my harness, I turn my attention to clicking the toe bar on my boots into the narrow slot on my bindings while balancing on one foot at a time, poles in hand. In the midst of this, Baxter flops over to writhe on her back, Laney strains to sniff distant snowbanks, the leash wraps around them and around me, and I nearly fall over. Repeat on the other side.
After I untangle the dogs from my poles and myself and each other, it’s time to hit the trail. But the first twenty minutes of “skiing” consists of taking a few strides and then being jerked to one side or the other (sometimes both sides simultaneously) by dogs stopping to sniff or pee. When the first poop happens, I stop and awkwardly attempt to flick it off the trail with my ski pole and bury it in the snow, then scrape the poo off my pole. By then, Baxter is belly-up scratching her back in the snow, Laney is wrapped around a bush, and I am tangled in another web of leashes.
It’s worth getting through that first mile, though, because once we hit our stride, I feel like a championship musher in the Iditarod. As we crest our first hill and begin the descent, both dogs lean into their harnesses and sprint, kicking snow in my face as they keep pace with me. I hoot and howl and yip as I become one with my team, gliding through the woods with the focus of those early sled drivers delivering life-saving serum to Nome. My dogs are overjoyed to move as a pack, ears pricked forward, mouths agape, tongues flapping. We wind around the curves of the winter trails as if we were on a sleigh ride. The louder I cheer, the faster the dogs go.
The bliss is short-lived, as we descend the hill much faster than we’d climbed it. Soon it’s time to detach my skis and carry them across the road to start again on the other side, giving the dogs two more opportunities to tangle around me. Once we get on the move, I herringbone my skis up a steep pitch, slide down the other side, and cross the railroad tracks. We’ve arrived at my favorite stretch of trail, where we glide through the corduroy of freshly-groomed snow along the banks of the Saco River. Baxter drags behind me now, tired from the downhill sprint, and I slow my pace for her.
After fifteen minutes, we arrive at an open spot on the riverbank where the last rays of sunlight reflect golden on the water. The edges of the clouds turn pink and purple behind the silhouettes of the surrounding mountains. I stop and breathe. Baxter lies down to rest. We stay like this until the sunset starts to fade and my fingers feel cold. Baxter stands up and barks at me as I wrap my pole straps around my wrists. She’s ready to go.
We’ve had this same adventure several times this week, but not today. Today, Laney barks and stares at me from beside the bed, begging to do it again, but the van is in the shop and the rain is tapping the roof and I decide I’m too lazy to bundle up for a cold, wet run.
Instead, we snuggle, and I write.
Hello from Mexico! I arrived in San Poncho 5 days ago, and am loving it. I still think you made the right decision to return home, Liz. I flew here from Palm Springs after a seven-day juice fast/cleanse at my favorite spa. Driving to Mexico from New England is a tremendously long journey, but flying is, obviously, a much smaller commitment.
Glad to read your report from NH. I do miss the quiet of Maine, as even this small beach town is noisier than I am accustomed to. Take Care, Jack
Have fun to read about someone cross country skiing. I was raised in upstate New York and my parents bought them and all three of us kids cross country ski gear. We went quite frequently. They even used to take us out of school to go skiing! You could never do that today, but it was an absolute blast, and I have very fond memories of it.