Return of the Grays

By Raymond J. Kimball

Note: A version of this article was originally published in the Washington Post under the title "May Your Track Run Swift and Deep" on Sunday, January 7, 2001; Page F02

East Coast cross-country skiers are silent, stealth adventurers, perennial optimists, displaced Norwegians and Catskill Mountaineers. Like the pileated woodpecker, they are the rarest and least-sighted adventurers, inhabiting the nearby woods and glades in resigned isolation, waiting, always waiting for that exquisite combination of powdered snow and bone-freezing temperatures before emerging to show their plumage.

Flatland skiers embrace other sports out of necessity. They pose, like Art Bell's late-night alien Grays, as normal people in a normal society, holding jobs, wearing business suits and raising families. Secretly they harbor messianic visions of a New Ice Age. They rail against global warming, jog fantastic miles to "be ready" for the next coming, and steal to the basement periodically to check their mothballed fleet of curved plastic boards, rotting, funny-toed boots and extra-long poles.

After Dec. 15, the X Fraternity becomes seared to the Weather Channel, fervently analyzing and recording the path of every arctic air mass and every wisp of moisture. It is far from a simple matter of snow heading this way. Predicted major storms evaporate overnight, leaving nothing but sunshine on bare, frozen lawns. As promising storms inevitably curve north and east, the X Grays silently envy their less alien bretheren in Chicago, Wisconsin, and Lake Erie's Buffalo-to-Syracuse Snow Belt.

For cross-country skiers to thrive, the conditions must be exact: The snowstorm must be powdery and dry, at least four to six inches, without the usual "wintry mix" of rain and sleet. The temperature should be no higher than 25, and the cold should linger for more than a day.

The track should be unsullied, swift and deep.

These conditions, like Halley's Comet or fantastic magic potions, often are imagined but seldom materialize. The Blizzard of '00 was an exception. Jan. 25, 2000, was the X Fraternity's Millennium.

A classic nor'easter carrying 12 to 18 hours of searing winds and heavy snows rousted Washington skiers from their beds at 4 a.m. on the 25th to converge on the C&O Canal. Some came on foot or on skis from their houses on the Potomac highlands, lured by horizontal snow and minus-zero wind chills. For the rest, the Park Service, bless them, had already cleared most parking spaces during the height of the storm.

By noon the skiers crossed the canal footbridges and locks to find a perfect idyll. Immediately they were alone in a white heaven, moving along a 184-mile-cross-country track made just for them, a trail endless beyond the imagination.

By 1 p.m. the woods and roads to the north of the towpath, Sycamore Island to Carderock (miles 6-10), filled with dozens of beaming, laughing, brightly colored bodies, otherworldly smiles frozen by the wind. For a few hours, before the dogs and walkers and trudgers and gawkers came to trample the perfect track, narrow blades cut swiftly, silently, with a little swish, but mostly silently, along miles and miles and miles of sheer, frozen perfection. Track is everything to an X.

Canada geese gathered in flocks behind rock eddies, facing upriver, calling and honking for position when new arrivals joined. Mallards hugged the shore in hidden coves, the males flushing out suddenly on low trajectories as an X slid by. And all the while, snow, endless snow, popped in little sparkles, refreshing the track and trail, blanketing everything with a perfect layer of swirling white. This was peace, this was silence, this was forever.

Life can offer no more to the cross-country skier than a nor'easter, swift skis, and winter birds on the abandoned C&O.

-- Raymond J. Kimball,

Bethesda, MD