A Millionaire Meets an Avalanche and a Grizzly Bear and Achieves the Miracle of Limitation

Consider a ski slope with no one on it except one millionaire with exceptionally looking sunglasses, indicating he did not need a visor. Watch him toss powder with his expert strokes, mouth halfway open indicating a cognition of the trade, a knowledge akin to the twists and turns of the drifts. See him pollute the bare slope with ruts dribbling excess, and then there he goes into the woods like angels thrust him in there to do some soul searching. He was not an introspective man. But he did live alone in what he liked to call the metropolis, and considered himself a social person for telling people what to do with his investments all day every day. But there is only so much denial a man can muster. He filed and floundered through the pines, marveling at the quiet and the quiet’s unnatural marriage to speed. Down he lofted into a ravine, heart fluttering, and then out again into a brief pass until encountering another paste of forestry, apart from the lift, unattached to any route, simply falling down towards a destination like a held breath. Consider now the closed mouth, closed to indicate solemnity, to humble his own prowess to a territory he may not be able to master. Hidden routes threatening a fall, the cold simmering around the band of his neck. He traveled as a nameless figure, an unconscious wreath of North Face and expense. He didn’t want to know where he was going. He usually always knew that. He’d gotten the whole city memorized, the company interrogated to a T, all his coffee shops aligned on a schedule, all his romances plotted. It ended, he considered, with a plop on the bed which inevitably reminded him of a fall into the snow, an erasure of everything that had happened in the hours before. Every kiss, every dollar, every sip, every tap of the phone, it suffered a blow in that second of freefall, and he’d have to rewrite it all in the morning. Perform the ascent again, another self-creation. Skiing however is a daredevil’s penmanship. Apart from the lift, there is no revision. One fall for the millionaire and all stakes were trounced. He sped up, wondering what the end might be, a mattress of snow or a jaw of stone? A river, sharp as a knife and cutthroat in its glare? Trout and stone in its crystal iris, always flitting and blurred by an unfaithful lens? Would he be woken up by the currents, blasted by cold and scrambling with skis still attached down and down into pure euphoria? He hoped so. He hoped for an excellent story which would inform his first blinks in the morning. Oh yes. That happened. Now that’s something. He survived the swath of trees and flew over a round belly of snow, so clean that he was sorry to disturb it. All seemed well. The foothills were in sight, and he spotted the resort some distance down the valley. But suddenly the shelf of snow seemed to belch a warning, and a whole fraction of the mountain departed and amassed into an avalanche aimed furiously at its skiing victim. Who was, of course, unaware. Eyes pasted on the goal. Nothing but the vision ahead. Everything new! Tracks in the snow bear no consequence, no past to indenture will haunt the euphoria. Consider our millionaire with ski poles tucked professionally under his arms, skis parallel and straight forward, back hunched and mouth now wide open to swallow in the fall. But he was swallowed. Picked up with no effort and stripped by its power, neatly to be deposited upside down wearing one sock by the ski lodge, where there was no one but a bear to nibble at his appendage until he dug himself out and had to explain himself. The bear, after all, owned the place.