The Last Word On Nothing

The forecast for Friday above five thousand feet called for more than a foot of snow, high winds, and temperatures well below freezing. So dire was the prediction that the National Weather Service had issued a Winter Storm Warning for much of the southern Cascades in Washington, and around Mount Hood in Oregon.

“Why exactly are you going tomorrow?” a colleague had asked. The weekends either side of this one had had or promised sun and crystalline skies. I shrugged. This was the weekend that my friend Carson and I had determined months ago fit with our schedules as working parents, so this was the weekend we got.

We were off on an annual trip I have come privately to think of as Winter Stupid. The inaugural Winter Stupid was several years ago, when we skied a few miles into the Mount Hood National Forest to camp for a couple of nights, except on the first night someone who shall remain nameless spilled white gas in the tent. After a few hours of lightheaded sleep, we headed home the next morning.

Our plan this year was to go back to Hood, snowshoeing out of Bennett Pass and camping at a spot with a grand vista. I had been looking forward to the trip for weeks. Of course I always look forward to Winter Stupids in the way one looks forward to gratuitous recreational hardship, but this time my need had a different tenor. I have of late been feeling a certain tenuousness—for those who share my politics, I don’t think I’m alone in this—and I hoped the backcountry would bring back some of the stillness I missed so much, at least for a while. It was, I knew, a lot to ask from one night in a winter storm, so I tried to temper my expectations. Really, all I wanted was to see the mountain once, and I would be happy.

The snow was coming down when Carson and I pulled into Bennett Pass. Piles of it weighted the trees around the parking lot. We put on our snowshoes and packs and set off. The going was slow and laborious, occasionally a little bit treacherous. We followed a road for a few miles and then struck off through a likely spot in the trees. We emerged on a hillside that overlooked a valley. The mountain was nowhere to be seen. Carson pointed vaguely north-northwest. “Hood is somewhere over there,” he said.

We set up the tent, a pyramid shelter with no floor. On the snow we spread sheets of plastic and laid out our sleeping pads, then went and dug out a shelf in the snow where we could cook. The sun set a little after 5 p.m. By 6 p.m. it was good and dark and cold, and also the wind had picked up, so we retreated to the tent. I burrowed deep into my two sleeping bags and zipped myself in. I love tents, love the sounds I hear through them—the wind’s breath, the snow’s hush. I listened as the hush turned into a brittle patter: freezing rain. I fell asleep to its light stippling.

Around 2 a.m. a loud snap startled me awake. I blearily thought a tree had toppled in the wind. Maybe we had just evaded death. Then I felt the cold wetness of synthetic fabric all over my head and face and realized the center pole had broken and the tent collapsed atop us. While I held up the tent, Carson heroically dragged himself from his sleeping bag and went out to fetch one of his trekking poles. To it he lashed the broken tent pole with a spare piece of rope. He tested it. It held. We went back to sleep.  

White gas fumes or no, I never sleep especially well on Winter Stupids, and we both woke fairly early on Saturday. Soon I could hear the stove roaring outside as Carson heated water. When I roused myself at last, the sun had not yet made its way above a high ridge in the east. The clouds were low and thick over the valley, the trees dramatically illuminated. We drank our coffee to the distant BOOM of the ski folks doing avalanche control. Still no mountain, but I watched patches of thinning cloud flow over us, sometimes fully breaking to give way to blue. Maybe we would get lucky.

Around 9 a.m. we began to pack up. We were going to complete a longer loop with a bit of a climb at the end, so best to head off. I was stuffing my sleeping bag into its sack when I happened to look up and saw, in that moment, a hint of summit poking up above a trough of cloud. “Hey!” I yelled. “Hood!”

“Hood!” Carson yelled. We whooped and hollered and jumped around in the snow. We could see the top two hundred feet of the mountain, maybe more, maybe less. Above the peak, blue sky and sun. Then a thicker regime of clouds rolled in, and the mountain was gone.

“Hood,” I said again, more to myself. I waited to see if the mountain might come back, but it didn’t. We finished packing and started off, clomping down through the forest, chatting of this and that. The winter world was freshly blanketed, soft, beautiful. I could feel myself filling with the good of this landscape. Any time there was a clearing I glanced at where I knew the mountain to be, hidden behind clouds. Hood, I thought. Hood, Hood, Hood. There, and then not there. There all along.

Photos by the author