Powder and Sky
by Sam Bartlett

Standing at the top, I find myself looking down on the run below me with my heart pounding. I push and begin and slowly, the snow making a soft crunching noise as my board glides over it, I pull my feet back and fourth swishing the board like the body of a fish and move downhill. The wind howls as I pick up speed and I line myself up with the lip protruding from the snow ahead of me. Pushing down on the board I reach the lip and push off, lift off the snow and fly. I feel the earth slip away and I become untouchable, cradled by cold air whipping at my face and falling, falling but not downward, not returning to my origins just yet. Staying unprotected, venerable, free, if only for a moment. Then, just as it seems I could escape forever, I feel the subtle pull of gravity, I don’t resist. I can’t.

I crash into the powder, exhilarated, guiding the sleek piece of fiberglass that is my ticket to the air under my feet and glide down, between the trees and through the snow drifts, speed becoming desire, a craving, an addiction impossible to live without. Down the mountain I fly, gravity pulling me faster, my movements changing from awkwardly choppy to a perfect flow. I carve the fresh layer of powder that keeps the mountain ever-changing, all the while some drive, some splinter in my mind, knows exactly where to go, where to find that lip or cornice or bump or hill that takes my ticket like a train conductor and points it toward the sky again.

Then I am launched off the snow, off the world and into the air again. In that moment I feel true freedom, a freedom from all thoughts, and worries, a state of sheer ecstasy like music just before it gets too loud, and there I am untouchable, cradled by cold air whipping at my face and falling, falling but not downwards.