red things
April 6, 2009
The sky turned red orange on Friday afternoon. For several hours. What is it? we mused at the grocery store.
The world is coming to an end, they told us.
It’s a fire, we decided. (I surrendered my idea of breath-taking sunset when I realized it was only 4:30).
Apparently, a neighbor explained, it was actually sand, blowing over from Utah. This proved true the next day, when the snow — all over the town and the mountain — was coated with red brown gook.
This made interesting snow conditions for the last day of the season (yesterday). It was a little like skiing on dirt, but not too bad, and the whole town was there for the party anyway.
Particularly one long-haired fellow, who was skiing naked (with a small cloth covering his front side). He’d just gone down the North Face, and apparently gone down, since he had an enormous strawberry covering his whole right butt cheek.
Shivering on the chair lift (it was cold), we discussed this wound with two rowdy strangers. His girlfriend probably painted that on him, for effect, one of them said. That thing was too brutal.
No dude, said the other. It was real.
