Glum in Paradise

I called Dick to let him know I'd gotten to town, and he told me to pick up the key at the desk.  He was across the street at the show and would meet me for lunch.  I was sharing a room with a fellow who was a buyer for the store.  I had never met him before and kept thinking, "I'm too old for this shit."  Still. . . a free room is a free room, and it was only for two days.  Besides, I was sure the young fellow I had not met was anxious for my arrival.  He was looking forward to the company, I was certain.

The young woman at the counter was pretty, happy, and friendly.  Mormons.  Utah was full of them.  It's hard to dislike a Mormon.  Their whole culture is a friendly one.  It is a volunteer religion without paid clergy.  Sure, you needed to be as rich as Romney to do the Lord's work without pay, but Mormon's have a creed based on working hard, keeping your nose clean, and helping others. When people in the East think of Mormons, they call up images of compounds and multiple wives and secret marriages.  I'd not met any of those.  What I met were images straight out of '50's television shows like "Leave It to Beaver," and "Father Knows Best."  At night, when we would go out to clubs in Salt Lake, of course, I was curious to find the underside of it all, and I'd ask every girl I met if she was a Mormon.  "Sure," they would always say.  "Show me your underwear," I'd ask in reference to the special Mormon Long Johns they are supposed to wear that were sold at the Mormon Clothing Store.  I found out that I wasn't the first to ask that, of course.

The phone rang.

"You ready?  Meet us on the sidewalk by the side entrance in about five minutes.  I think Bob wants to go to a Chinese place for lunch."

Bob was Dick's brother.  He ran the outdoor store owned by the family.  Dick and Bob were both athletic fellows, though Bob had gotten the typical family of four/father of two boys fat, and he loved to eat.  The next two days would be filled with breakfast buffets, giant lunches, and big steak dinners.  I would have a hard time keeping up.

They were there waiting when I crossed the street, Dick, Bob, and Phil, an outdoor sales rep I'd known from before.  My wife had worked with him for awhile, and I hadn't seen him since.  I realized suddenly what I hadn't thought about before--I'd be dealing with a lot of ghosts.

Nothing much had changed in the ensuing years, it seemed.  Lunch was as it always had been, full of retail talk and witty banter, plenty of appetizers and big portions.  Remember this?  Remember that?  Oh, yea, sure, sure.  Of course.

There hadn't been snow this year, but the skies were heavy.  The ski resorts, Dick said, were about to shut down.  They had insurance policies, he reported, that paid them to close if they didn't have so many inches of snow by a certain date.  Business was bad.  We might end up skiing on rock and ice.  I considered that.  Just my luck, I thought glumly.  Nothing was ever fun any more.  The fun was over, it seemed.  Life had just gotten like that, had been this way for some time.  I realized I had been humming "Send in the Clowns" in my head over and over again.  It was about timing, I thought, and I had lost it.  It was what happened "this late in my career," as the song goes, an inevitable part of living. Fuck it, I thought.  My knees hurt anyway.  I was worried about that, about barreling down the slopes at a hundred miles an hour trying to kick into hard turns.  I said so to Dick.

"Hundred?  You shitting me?  You'll be lucky to do twenty-five."

"Feels like a hundred.  You sure?"

We wandered around the show after lunch, Dick stopping to talk with reps, asking about new lines.  This had always been fun for me.  I was like a "secret shopper."  I had long ago advised Dick and Bob that I knew the store sold real items, but they sold something else, too.  They sold dreams.  I could never walk into the store without envisioning myself climbing Everest or rafting the Bio Bio.  I was a through hiker on the Pacific Crest, a climber at Red Rocks.  I'd see customers fooling with brass lanterns and head lamps.  They'd buy something and take it home.  It was almost as good as going somewhere, one step beyond sitting and dreaming while thumbing through a Patagonia catalog.  Hell, I said, I only climbed mountains so that I could feel legitimate wearing the clothing around town.

But everything at the show looked the same as it had years before.  There didn't seem to be anything new.  The company reps, once kids, were now all older with families and bills and divorces behind them.  There had always been crazy fun before.  Around four o'clock, all the companies began giving away beer, hip liquor from microbreweries.  People began to relax and the music came up.  There were parties that night, big events put on by Marmot or North Face or Patagonia, legendary things that people talked about for years.  At least I did.  I played pool with the world's most famous mountaineering twins, kibitzed with Yvonne Chounard, became friends with dozens of the world's most badass adventurers.  I'd even won the imaginations if not the hearts of the world's two most famous women climbers, the head of Nike advertising, and the then current women's kayaking champion of the world.  We'd sat in fields under skies set on fire by the setting sun at giant barbecues, and once watched Lyle Lovett and His Very Big Band perform magically under a purple desert sky that was suspended in time, somehow, never quite going dark but shinning dimly on and on forever and ever on the most beautiful crowd in the world.

I asked, but there seemed to be nothing like that now.

"Yea," Phil said, "it used to be fun.  The show was an excuse to go biking or climbing or skiing.  Remember that time we all. . . . Now it is business.  Everyone just seems to want to get in and out.  Nobody stays after any more.  It's the economy, I guess."

The economy, sure, but it was something else, too.  The world had gone gray.  It didn't matter how many colors the clothing companies brought out.  They faded too quickly.  People were tired.  Worn out.  Even youth seemed jaded and tinged by it.  This trip, I thought, will not bring to me what I'd hoped for.  I had wasted my money, I despaired.  Useless.

"What's that?" I said to Dick.

I was looking out the windows at the top of the walls in the giant lobby.  I couldn't quite make it out.

"Is that snow?"

And sure enough, it was falling hard, giant flakes drifting down as big as your hand.

"Well, that's good.  That's real good.  It will be falling even harder up the mountain.  We might have gotten some luck."

That's what I needed, I thought.  I need some good luck.  I was tired of walking with ghosts.