Into the White — Harold & Luna's Winter Wonderland Summit
I kept a list. Through forty years of working, raising children, attending meetings, and watching the calendar move faster than I ever asked it to — I kept a list. Things I would do when I had time. When I was ready. When the world sat still long enough to let me.
Retirement came in October. Luna had been with me for two years by then — four years old, Siberian Husky, silver and white, with eyes the color of a winter sky that seemed to see considerably more than I was showing her. The list was long. But the winter ascent of Mount Carrow, in the northern range, with its documented aurora views from the upper ridge — that one sat at the very top. Luna looked at the photograph I'd pinned to the fridge for years. She wagged her tail, once, slowly. I took that as a vote.
We started before dawn on a Thursday, headlamps cutting through a dark that felt textured and alive. The temperature sat at twelve degrees. Luna did not walk so much as float — she moved through the snow with a lightness that made it clear she had been designed specifically for this. Her Ruffwell insulated booties protected her paws on the icier patches without slowing her down, and her reflective safety vest caught the beam of my headlamp so that she flickered ahead of me like a moving star. I followed her. She seemed to know that was the arrangement.
"Luna in the snow is like watching something return to its truest self — every step lighter, every breath deeper, as though winter is the language she was born speaking."
About two hours up, we encountered Ranger Delacroix — a woman of remarkable calm who was patrolling the upper trail with a dog that stopped me in my tracks. He was enormous and pale grey with yellow eyes, and he moved beside her with the silent authority of something that had decided, generously, to operate within human rules. Luna regarded him with great seriousness. He regarded her the same way. They touched noses. The ranger smiled and said, "He likes other working dogs." I chose to take that as a compliment for both of us.
The icy patch came without warning on a narrow traverse at around 8,000 feet. I felt my right boot begin to slide before I'd finished processing what was happening, and for one lurching, cold second the slope felt very steep and very indifferent. Then Luna's weight pressed against my left leg — deliberate, solid, anchoring — and I caught myself on a trekking pole. We stood there a moment, both of us very still. Then she looked up at me and I looked down at her, and I scratched the base of her ears and said, "Good girl," in a voice that came out quieter than I intended.
We took the rest of that traverse more slowly.
The aurora appeared near midnight, when we were camped just below the summit ridge. I had set an alarm on the optimistic theory that I would actually sleep, but I was already awake when the color began — a slow green shimmer at the horizon that deepened and shifted and then opened across the entire sky like a curtain being pulled back on something that had always been there, waiting. I sat outside the tent in the cold and the silence and I watched it move. Luna sat beside me, upright, alert, her breath rising in small white clouds. Neither of us spoke. (One of us couldn't. But I believe she understood.)
"The aurora doesn't make a sound, and yet it is the loudest thing I have ever experienced. Standing under it, you understand — in your bones, not just your mind — how large the world is, and how fortunate you are to be briefly inside it."
Summit at dawn. The view extended in every direction into a white and blue silence that I had no adequate words for at the time, and have found none since. Luna sat at the very highest point and looked north with those pale eyes, ears forward, tail still. I sat beside her. We ate breakfast — trail bars for me, her kibble with a little warm water from my thermos, served in her travel bowl. Ordinary things at the top of something extraordinary.
That night, back at base camp, I opened my journal for the first time in years. It is a green leather notebook I bought in 1987 and have carried in various bags through various decades of intending to write in it. I wrote three pages. I will not share all of them. But the last line, I don't mind telling you, said this: I think this is the best thing I have ever done.
Luna was curled across my lap as I wrote it, enormous and warm and deeply asleep, her paws twitching occasionally with whatever she was running through in her dreams. Snow mountains, probably. Northern lights. The particular satisfaction of pressing your weight against someone who needed steadying and being exactly enough.
The list is still there. But the top of it is different now. The top of it just says: more of this.
