God Willing and the Pass Don’t Close

By Sutton R. Stokes, 2-10-08

Tuesday’s paper brought the news that Interstate 90 would be closed at Lookout Pass for a few hours of “preemptive avalanche work.” I had a vague idea of what such work might consist of, but it turned out to be nothing close to what the article went on to describe. “The specialists will ski along the ridgeline, light fuses on 2-pound charges and toss them over the edge.” A highway official was quoted as not being “quite sure” how all of this would turn out. “It’s not an exact science,” he admitted, in what sounds to me like a bit of an understatement.

I follow news of Lookout Pass closures these days because we have a road trip to Portland planned for later this month. Lookout Pass isn’t the only way through the mountains, of course, but our friend Brandon, a backcountry skier who has clocked his share of bad-weather miles on remote Montana roads, says that if Lookout is closed, we just shouldn’t go. We’d be driving our ten-year-old Toyota Corolla, so we’re receptive to this kind of advice.

As I reflect on avalanches and pass closures, my thoughts drift, naturally enough, to sailing. This is because I learned to sail from a Swedish woman who told me that what she loves about the sport is the way it forces you to pay respectful attention to nature and the weather. Lena’s day job was teaching people how to build and operate Viking-style sailboats, but for vacations she liked to rent a modern craft with her best friend, another lifelong sailor, and wander the archipelago off Sweden’s west coast. She told me that their rule was never to fire up the outboard except in an emergency, which meant that — if winds were light — a leg of the trip they’d hoped would take one day might end up taking three. This wasn’t a frustration, she said, but rather the essence of what she found pleasurable about sailing: the reminder that there are some things we modern humans still can’t control.

I had the chance to sample this “pleasure” for myself while Lena and I were laid up on the Swedish island of Marstrand for a couple of days waiting for a bad storm to blow itself out. The winds were roaring straight into the harbor and we had neither the sailing room nor the horsepower to beat our way out against it. So we paid “respectful attention to nature” while two days of my planned weeklong sailing adventure evaporated, which was frustrating, but on the other hand it gave me the opportunity to take one of the best walks of my life, a half-day’s scramble along the island’s rocky, forested coastline and through the ruins of an old fort while the great gray ocean drummed on the beach and the seabirds fought the strong gusts overhead.

The purpose of our planned Portland trip is to visit an old friend of mine whom I have not seen in just over eleven years. Colman and I worked together on a Coast Guard cutter out of Seattle, making two-month patrols of the cold and turbulent Bering Sea, where we learned a thing or two about paying respectful attention to nature and the weather ourselves. There is nothing like lying in your bunk in the middle of the night, unable to sleep as forty-foot seas deal shuddering blows to the ship’s hull, to help you reflect on things like the universe and your place in it.

If we do have to cancel our trip, the challenge will be to find the kind of lesson in it that someone like Lena looks for whenever the wind doesn’t blow her way. I see it like this: if Montana weren’t the kind of state where avalanche risk can close highways, it also wouldn’t be the kind of state where my wife and I can drive an hour from our house and snowshoe around on top of a hundred inches of snow so fresh and smooth and untouched it looks like some giant has arranged immense scoops of vanilla ice cream all the way to the horizon, which is the best way I can think of to describe the conditions we enjoyed up at Lolo last weekend. Plus it’s not the worst thing in the world to be reminded just how much I miss an old friend. The years and the snow pile up whether we want them to or not.

For more like this, read the rest of the Missoula Notebook.