The week after Miami we took our annual trip to the Wisp skiing resort in Maryland. I am not sure what I like better escaping to warmer climate like Florida in the winter or making peace with the cold and heading for the mountains. If you dress warm the cold really is not so bad. The first night we went skiing the slopes were a sheet of ice. From the manmade snow they can now produce with fans, pumps, water, and hoses. The conditions were not the best that first Friday night. But the following day we got out early and it had snowed throughout the night and was still snowing as we went up the ski lift for our first run. My brother and sister’s kids are still very young so they are still learning how to ski. On the first run of the day I locked arms with my niece when we got off the lift the first time, because I did not want her to fall and get hit in the head by the chair lift the way I did the first time I went skiing in high school. It worked out well. I was going to drag her forward if she slipped. We skied all day in shifts. We would go back to the house we were renting to eat and drink and watch the Olympics that were on all day. I watched some of the American men’s hockey team play Slovakia. And from my vantage point on the couch I could see skiers coming down the huge mountain right outside the big picture window. We skied throughout the day and evening. When everyone got tired and went back to the house, only me and my brother remained on the slopes. We got separated and I skied the last hour of the night by myself. And after having a few beers in the lodge before making my final runs, the singer that was singing up on stage played a John Prine song, ‘Take the Star out of Your Window. I told Laura to ask him to play ‘Stairway to Heaven’ by Bob Dylan. So after another beer I made my way out of the lodge to big Bob. On the slopes it was getting really cold around 7 degrees. On the furthest chairlift from the lodge two teenage girls got out of the hot tub they were in near the top of the mountain and ran under the ski lift in their bikinis. They were antagonizing some teenage boys on the ski lift in front of me. The boys were screaming at them. But the girls were pretending not to understand English saying – ‘no hable anglais’. So I started yelling at them in Spanish until one girl yelled at me leave me alone I’m flunking Spanish. Then freezing their asses off they ran back to the hot tub next to the log cabin. The boys on the lift were screaming and hooting to get them to get back out of the hot tub. At the top of the mountain the air was cold and clean. But I wanted to do a couple of more runs before closing time. I wanted a perfect moment that comes out of complete exhaustion. I kept skiing into the night. Finally with my hands and feet freezing I headed back to the lodge not before falling one last time. Finally back at the lodge the lone musician was still playing to a very sparse audience. I had snow jammed into the buckles of my ski boots and I could not unbuckle them. So I just sat back and waited for the snow to melt. Then it happened, I had my perfect moment. While the musician was fumbling through his sheet music I yelled out how about a John Prine song. And he said ok and he played “Christmas in Prison”. I don’t think anyone in that room knew the song but there were a bunch of kids at a table drinking and they got into it by clapping and pounding there feet. I sat mesmerized by the song, the exhaustion and my cold feet and hands. A perfect moment! When that musician from Morgantown was finished playing I yelled out excellent. Then I headed back to the house to eat lasagna and tell everybody about the girls in bikinis jumping out of hot tubs and running down the slopes… The next morning it was 2 degrees and sunny. So after eating some bacon, I decided to walk out on the frozen lake, barely frozen in some spots. As I walked along the edge of the lake and especially where the lake was very thin ice, the noise the ice made was very interesting. It made a very deep recoiling noise when it cracked. That noise was so enjoyable I sought out shallow areas and risked falling through just to hear that cracking sound. In previous years the ice was so thick that people were driving on it. And there were snowmobiles all around, but that Sunday morning I was the only one on the ice. As I was walking into the sun my face was warm but if I turned around my face got cold. It is a little strange when the sun is shining bright but it is only 2 degrees. Being out on that lake made me feel like I was the only man on earth…