My own jointed bones and square inches of flesh are feeling stretched taut, full of love and friendship. Full of the happy sadness and sentimentality of leaving a place one loves. Last night thirty-odd favorite ski bum friends poured into my home with arms full of food, drink, gifts, and good wishes. Chris set it up as a surprise party, but with so many friends excited to talk about my trip and share their support, the secret was never going to be kept for long. It was a great sending-off; tomorrow as I lift off from the Salt Lake airport, I’ll imagine that the plane is being buoyed by my friends’ excitement rather than jet fuel. I’m excited to leave; I believe as Muir does, that it is easy enough to live out of sight of one’s friends, but only because I know that I’m bringing their love with me, and that they’ll be waiting for me when I get back.

The adventure begins tomorrow…

Linda works for an environmental consulting firm.  Last spring, knowing that I have a degree in English, she mentioned that the company was looking for a part-time editor.  At the time I was packing to hit the road for the summer, and knew I’d committed to snowmaking in the fall.  Interested, yes, but it felt like poor timing.  A month ago she got in touch to tell me they were still thinking of taking on someone new, so I sent in a resume and cover letter.  It was the most challenging job application I’d completed oh, since college, probably.  I haven’t applied for a serious, “professional” job in five years.  My food service, customer service, and outdoor/physical labor resumes are in tip top shape, but an editing resume?  Um.  Well.  Yes, I have this degree, yes I worked in a publishing house (seven years ago), yes I’ve always been very good at grammar and research, yes I’m a perfectionist and a good reader, but phew, finding solid work experience to back up all of those general acquired skills was challenging.  I spent the better part of a day compiling, wording, and re-wording my resume and writing a cover letter.  I wasn’t sure it would be good enough to get the job, but I told my parents about it, bragged to my boyfriend, and felt a warm, satisfying pride in actually doing it.  I can still complete hard assignments!  I do have some innate talents, five years out of academia!  Kari, Linda’s boss, wrote back immediately to tell me that my resume had been received and was “in the mix”.  Ah well, I thought, at least I tried.  It took another month for her to call me and offer me the job, but she did.  I was sitting in the waiting area in my local Firestone while the mechanics changed the oil in my car, and I accepted.  I started the next day.  That was three days ago, and I’ve been giddy every since.

What is this new job?  Say that Kennecott Copper Mine (the largest open pit copper mine in the world! the website brags.  I can literally see it from my house) wanted to dig another pit.  The National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA) provides laws and regulations that the mine must follow in order to do any expansion, so Kennecott would hire the company I work for to run tests, inspect the site for archaeological artifacts, and write up an Environmental Impact Statement, which I would then edit.  The writing is technical, but fascinating.  In two days of work, I’ve already learned about the history of the Shoshone-Bannock tribe of Idaho, and that one of the major issues with building a solar panel farm in the Arizona desert is the amount of water the farm would require.  I feel like I’m listening to NPR or reading National Geographic articles while working.  I love it.  I’m getting paid (well) to learn new things and use my college degree!  The best part (or, one of the best parts) is that I’ve been hired on a temporary/part time basis.  I don’t have to commit to working in an office for the next year.  Kari (who’s my boss now, too) told me they could have anywhere from zero to twenty hours of work for me a week.  I’m more or less functioning as a contractor.  And once I get the hang of the company’s style guidelines, I will likely be able to work from home, on my own time.  This is a dream come true for me.  I’m building skills and connections that will ultimately allow me to earn a living from home.  This is just the beginning.

So, a new job!  On top of still making snow at Alta (we should be finished any day now, except the weather won’t cooperate.  Salt Lake is stuck in an inversion: polluted, 35°F air in the valley trapped by high, 45°F air in the mountains.  I scrape frozen pollution off my car windshield every morning.), I’m coming up on the dates when I told Brighton and Solitude Resorts I’d be able to start work.  Weekends at Brighton, weeknights at Solitude (no housekeeping this time, just reception/bellman work at the Inn), and my daytime hours split between skiing and this new, professional editing position.  Plus, I have friends!  GIRL friends, even.  I’ve stuck around long enough to make meaningful connections with women whom I admire and respect.  And strangely, staying put seems to be helping me to achieve some of my greater life goals: writing, adventure, travel, baking… I’m writing more, and more easily, than I have in a long time.  Adventure lurks around every corner (motorcycling in Moab, downhill mountain biking, dating a man with a 10-year-old).  I’m planning my travels purposefully instead of randomly (at least for the moment).  The next trip is slated for mid-March, back to Peru, with a possible two week side trip to Colombia.  And while I still rely on store-bought bread for my own personal use, next weekend at Brighton I’ll be selling all kinds of baked goodies at the 2^nd annual craft fair.  Life is moving like a flooded river: fast, and full.  It is good.

Back in May, I moved northeast out of Sandy into Cottonwood Heights, a stone’s throw from the canyon where I spent my winter.  I’m living with two ski instructors, Tim and Connie, and their two boys (10 & 8), plus three cats, one turtle, and one black Labrador/Great Dane mix.  It’s a house they built themselves, custom-designed to comfortably fit their six-foot-plus frames.  I need a step stool to reach the top shelves of the pantry, and I have to stand on my tip-toes to work at the countertop. The house is full of light, music, and color.  The windows at the front of the house are open to a panorama of the Wasatch Mountains.  There are speakers in every corner, even in the bathroom, and Jack Johnson, Michael Franti, Joni Mitchell, and Bruce Springsteen are regulars on the playlist. Photographs of family and friends plaster the fridge, walls and tables. My room is huge and bright, with six floor-to-ceiling windows.  It’s a room that begs to be decorated and inhabited.  For the first time, my few backpacking possessions seem inadequate, and within a week of moving in I’d already arranged to have my favorite Peruvian rug shipped to me from NH.  Tim and Connie’s is a house that feels like a home.

Though I endure rather than enjoy the city life, staying in Salt Lake through the summer has allowed me to take pleasure in being a part of a community of friends and their dogs, of rock-climbing partners, hikers, strong, creative women and outdoorsy men.  Winter relationships have grown and blossomed.  Chris, or Koogs, my skiing partner, has become my best friend and boyfriend, and partner in most things.  Together we’ve road-tripped to Colorado and to Utah’s Shakespeare capital to see Henry V.  We’ve hiked and biked and camped; gone to outdoor concerts, festivals, barbeques and parties; dog-sat, floated the Weber River on inner tubes, and soaked in the Diamond Fork hot springs.  Having someone with whom to share the summer enriched each moment and experience.

One of the summer’s highlights was a trip to Moab, Utah’s red rock Mecca and the gateway to Arches National Park.  Chris and I left Salt Lake one Friday night in May as the full moon was rising, and spent the weekend camping on top of a rock, with no roof over us but the stars.  On foot and on borrowed mountain bikes, we explored Edward Abbey’s desert paradise.  Early spring in the Utah desert means vivid green life against red buttes and mesas.  Biking before sunset on our second night, we turned a corner and observed a small grove of mature aspens standing in front of a sheer red wall.  Their bark glowed green in the low sunlight, and their slender branches curved gracefully, elegantly, as if frozen in the middle of a slow, twisting dance.  In that cool, potent moment, I believed we had found the lost Ent-wives of the Lord of the Rings.

As the warmth of the summer in the desert west fades and I look ahead to a second winter spent in Salt Lake City, it would be easy to be fearful, to wonder why I’m not moving on, as my custom has been.  Instead, I’m excited.  I feel like a new stage is coming in the life of Susan the Traveler.  The wave of serendipity that I’ve been surfing has become an eddy, a current swirling contrary to the main flow.  Though the pace has slowed, the voyage continues, and I’m happy to float on these friendly waters, trusting the swell to carry me where I belong.  I’ve got a new set of telemark skis and my old job at Brighton back, and I’m ready to make the most out of the winter and enjoy my new community of friends.  Let it snow!

I can’t wait to get spoiled.

Salt Lake City, Utah, home of the Greatest Snow on Earth (they say).  With seven ski areas within ten miles of each other, all less than an hour drive from the city, all averaging 500 inches (12 m) of powder every winter, I don’t care if it’s the “greatest” or only so-so, just as long as they let me ski on it.

Twice a week I work the counter at the Brighton ski school, selling lesson packages and directing harried parents to the rental shop, the bathrooms, the cafeteria.  My uniform is jeans, a fleece vest, and a baseball hat or beanie.  I answer phones and smile at customers and when it’s slow no one minds if I read a book behind the desk or slip out to take some runs.  I love my job.  I hitchhike to work or to ski every day from the mouth of the canyon, me and a handful of other bums.  Yesterday I rode up with a registered nurse who described to me the first time he witnessed a C-section birth.  “Dude, I grew more in that half an hour than I did through all of puberty!”  Today I waited in a line of cars that snaked for ten miles through the jutting canyon walls.  I watched the emergency lights spinning for an hour, on the other side of the trees where a truck had rolled over the embankment.

I live with Kathy, a cheerful massage therapist, and her husband Troy, a construction worker.  Winter and the flagging economy give him plenty of hours to fill playing WWII video games and shouting at the University of Utah football team.  Kathy’s sixteen-year-old, Mackenzie, makes occasional appearances as a dark-haired zombie on a stool in front of the TV on the kitchen counter.  I have a room to myself, furnished, full use of the kitchen and a living room, wireless internet, and the company of a balding cat when I want it.  They’ve also loaned me a bike for the winter.  Not having a car, the bike means freedom, and being able to visit the local library twice a day.  I grin at how much faster a bike is than walking, even as my teeth chatter and my hands turn to ice in the wind.

Beginning a life in a new place is always hard, and I’m a little bit lonely, despite the friendliness of my co-workers and the kindness of the Eaton family (wonderfully gracious friends from back east who gave me a place to stay when I arrived and helped me find work and housing).  I’m still smiling, though, and I can look ahead to a month from now when the slopes will be overflowing with snow, when regular paychecks will be plopping into my checking account, when I know the names of all the ski instructors I work with, when I am too busy to think, when I’m apparating from powder day to night job to day job to drinks at the pub with the other scruffy snow addicts, when all of this is normal, when I forget that I’ve ever lived anywhere else.