(HOST) After thirty-five years years of an epic ski tour, Willem Lange and his friends are hanging it up.
(LANGE) This is the end of it. After thirty-five years, it’s coming to a close. Tonight I hand it over to the next generation. They can do with it what they will.
The members of the Geriatric Adventure Society are gathered in a cabin at the northern tip of New Hampshire. If I listen and sniff, I can tell what’s going on. From the kitchen, the aromas of baking ham, baked beans, and cornbread wonderfully moist, with whole corn kernels in it. The clink of a spoon against a metal bowl: somebody’s mixing the cole slaw. The metallic clunks of somebody setting the table. The pssh sound of a beer can being opened. And the rumble of half a dozen conversations.
Outside, the wind howls in the spruces and whips the smoke off the cabin chimneys. Somewhere, a lot of people are without power tonight. But we’re in good shape here. The old Hanover Winter Song says it best:
For the wolf-wind is wailing at the doorways,
And the snow drifts deep along the road,
And the ice gnomes are marching from their Norways,
And the great white cold walks abroad.
But, here by the fire we defy frost and storm;
Ha, ha, we are warm, and we have our heart’s desire.
For here, we’re good fellows, and the beechwood and the bellows;
And the cup is at the lip in the pledge of fellowship.
So many years of this annual adventure have piled up that now we can’t recall the details without our written records. They’ll get passed on, too. I don’t need the details anymore; just the memories.
Hugh Thompson, in 1972, poised at the top of a plunging log road that threatened major fractures, turned and said, “If it weren’t for the honor of going first, I don’t think I’d want to do this.” Wayne, in 1977, breaking his femur blessedly close to an evacuation route. Ascents of all the hills around us – Mount Tucker, Mount Dustan, Black Mountain, and Emerys Misery and Mount Aziscohos over in Maine.
This morning’s tour stuck to the road: nine miles up the Dead Diamond River nine miles back. None of us bushwhacks as well as he used to. The whole eighteen miles was on frozen snow machine tracks that made it very tough skiing. But everybody was safe in camp before dinner.
It’s later now as I finish writing this, remembering all the great high and low points of our adventures. The danger, as we age, is that our annual tour will become more ritual than adventure. It’s time to turn it over to the young members. As I get ready to put away my pen, I can hear an accordion and singing in the parlor, by the radiant stove.
For the room has a spirit in the embers,
‘Tis a god and our fathers knew his name,
And they worship’d him in long-forgot Decembers,
And their hearts leap’d high with the flame.
This is Willem Lange up in northern New Hampshire, and I gotta get some sleep.