AUGUST 13, 2023 – (Cont.) Two days later, in fact, Uncle Bruce was well enough, confident enough, at least at the outset, to agree to Cliff’s idea for an “off-trail” adventure. I was amazed that Uncle Bruce would go for it as far as he did. At the Alpinglow, Cliff had seen a brochure touting half-day snowmobile adventures originating at the top of the mountain and going way off into the backcountry.
“Hey, get a load of this,” Cliff said over dinner the night after Uncle Bruce’s emergency. He passed the brochure across the table to Uncle Bruce. “What do you say, Uncle Bruce? A little adventure to tell your friends at the exercise class about.” Cliff looked at me and laughed. For quite some time, Uncle Bruce had been attending a regular exercise class at a facility across the street from the Holman warehouses. The instructor and all the members except Uncle Bruce were women, and I think he was as proud of that fact as he was amused by it.
Uncle Bruce studied the brochure far longer than I had expected. “Eric and Cory will go with me, won’t you guys?” Cliff said. I cringed. Cory was still only a young kid, for crying out loud. The 30-second football rescue operation back in Havre was one thing, but driving high-powered snowmobiles through untracked powder up and down avalanche-prone mountainsides into the wild—underscore wild, I thought—yonder was quite another. If anything were to happen to Cory, Beth would kill me. Besides, I was no different from other cross-country skiers, and I had developed a visceral dislike for the loud, fume-spewing machines.
Cory reacted just as I had feared. “Yeah, Dad,” he said. “Can we go? I want to ride on a snowmobile!”
“That’s my man!” said Cliff, unhelpfully. “Come on you guys, what’s stoppin’ ya? Eric, you and Cory are going with me, aren’t you?” Without waiting for an answer, he leaned on Uncle Bruce. “Bruce, you’ll love it. Have you ever been on a snowmobile?”
“No, I’ve tried to stay away from them,” he laughed, still eyeing the brochure. Bad sign, I thought. Bad sign that he hadn’t just handed the brochure back to Cliff.
“Bruce, you’ll have a ball. You’re going to love it. We’ll all go—what is there a morning trip? And an afternoon trip too, I think. What do you say we take the afternoon trip tomorrow?”
“I’ll think about it,” said Uncle Bruce, putting the brochure back down beside his dinner roll plate.
Think about it? I thought. I was in a tight spot. Obviously Cliff, in his mind, already had us all committed. Cory was on board too, and now Uncle Bruce was “thinking about it.” I put up a mild protest, but Cliff wasn’t about to allow me to decline.
The next day brought high winds, blowing snow and poor visibility. Late in the morning, Cliff checked with the office that booked the snowmobile trips to see if the afternoon adventure was still on. I prayed for its cancellation, but it wasn’t to be. Cliff ‘s reaction was the opposite. “Good news,” he said. “Trip’s still on.” Just after lunch, the four of us rode the chair to the summit. There we braced ourselves against the howling wind and snow and found our way to the large metal shed that served as the staging area for the snowmobile trips.
Inside were the guide, two other adventurers, half-a-dozen snowmobiles, and various accessories, including a row of full-body snowmobile suits, hanging along one side of the shed. The guide greeted us curtly. He had a military haircut and looked more like a Marine drill sergeant than a guy who would make his living at a ski resort. For a moment, I thought we had just entered a bad dream, in which the only way out was to wake up, only that option wasn’t available, since I was already awake. The drill sergeant was no nonsense.
“Welcome, people,” he started in. “My name is Bob, and I’ll be your guide today. Before we get started, can I see a show of hands of who has ridden a sled, I mean, a snowmobile?” Having grown up in a part of the country in which snowmobiles reign supreme and where people in the know call them “sleds,” not “snowmobiles,” I knew he was dumbing down for the benefit of his six recruits. No one raised a hand. My two or three rides on a snowmobile—I mean sled—in the distant past didn’t count.
“Okay, not a problem,” the sergeant said. I didn’t think much of anything was a “problem” for this guy. Certainly not wind, snow, high speed or mountain inclines. “. . . as long as you listen up and do exactly as I tell you.” I glanced over at Cliff and Uncle Bruce. Cliff was attentive but not fazed. Uncle Bruce, on the other hand, looked nervous. I could tell by his mouth. Ever since I was a kid, I’d noticed that when he got nervous about something, his lips got really tight and twitched.
“Before we suit up, I want to give you some instructions on how the machines work and lay down the rules.” Definitely a military guy, I thought, but that’s a good thing. I wouldn’t want some wild talking, “sweet powder, dude” ski bum leading the expedition. After demonstrating the basics of how to operate the sleds, he got to his rules. “First, and foremost, you stay behind me at all times. There are safe places to go, and there are unsafe places to go. I know the safe places. If you stay with me, you’ll stay out of the unsafe places.
“Second, we’re going to be traversing a few spots that are fairly steep. When we’re on those places, I want you to lean way over your sled, like this.” He jumped aboard his Bombardier, grabbed the handlebars, and with a leg on either side of the bench seat, he threw his weight so far off to of the machine, I thought he was going to come right out of his boots. I could imagine Cliff doing that and even myself, with Cory hanging on to me tightly, but I was worried about Uncle Bruce. I looked at him again.The mouth was twitching. I wanted to pull some kind of ripcord on the whole operation, but I hesitated.
“Third, once we get down to the valley, we’ll be on some regular snowmobile trails. I want you to stay way over to the right, because they’re two-way trails, and some of these sleds will do 60 miles an hour. If you meet one head-on, you’ll be eating plastic.” Cliff, I noticed, took the warning in stride. He looked focused but not the least bit anxious. I was downright nervous, but tried to talk myself out of it. Cliff could go right behind the guide, then the other folks, then Uncle Bruce, then Cory and I, to keep an eye on Uncle Bruce.
“Finally, I want to hand out these,” said the drill sergeant, as he passed out what looked like small walkie-talkies. “These are transponders in case you get trapped in an avalanche.”
“That’s it,” said Uncle Bruce. “I’m not going.” A great relief passed over me. No cajoling necessary. If he was out, then it was far easier for me to ditch the trip for Cory and me as well. “I’d better stay with Uncle Bruce,” I said. As the words left my mouth, I realized how little sense they made. Why was it necessary to “stay with Uncle Bruce” since he was opting out of a dangerous expedition? I could tell that Cliff was about to ask that very question.
“I mean, I don’t think Cory should be going on this trip,” I said to Cliff. But that wouldn’t explain why I wasn’t going. I turned to the age-old method of invoking the specter of spousal disapproval. “Cliff, I don’t think Beth would approve of this at all.” He understood and didn’t protest, though I know he was disappointed in us. He wasn’t about to forgo the impending adventure.
And so, Uncle Bruce, Cory and I left the expedition before it was even underway. The round trip was supposed to take about two hours, but when the sun disappeared behind the range to the west of Big Mountain, there was no sign of Cliff. I began to worry. The Alpinglow restaurant opened for dinner, and still no Cliff. Cory, Uncle Bruce, and I were hungry, but we didn’t want to eat without Cliff, so we sat in the lounge by the entrance of the lodge and waited for the snowmobile adventurer to return.
Finally he came through the doorway, face red from the cold. “Cliff!” I shouted out.
“That was a trip!” he said, as he removed his down gloves and untangled his scarf.
“Where have you been? We were getting worried about you.” I said. Uncle Bruce was on his feet, and I could see that the tension in his face was gone, now that Cliff was back in one piece.
“It was a fuc-riggin’ disaster,” said Cliff, deflecting the F-bomb the instant he uttered it.
“How so?” I thanked my lucky stars that Uncle Bruce, Cory and I had opted out.
“Well, we got down to the flats, and after going a few miles on the track, Bob asked us if we wanted to go off track, and of course we did, so we went into this area way out in the middle of nowhere. We wound up in snow that was the deepest of anything I’ve ever seen, and then we got stuck. I mean stuck like you can’t imagine. Hell, that snow was up to our armpits. We couldn’t get our machines going at all. Even Bob, the expert, couldn’t get us out of there. Christ, I thought we were goners. We had to dig and dig and dig and stamp on the snow to pack it down, but no matter how hard we tried, we couldn’t get ourselves out of there. As the sun started going down, it was getting colder, and my feet started getting really cold, and gees, all I can tell you is that I’m glad we’re back!”
“Jee-zus!” I said, “So are we.”
“But I’m telling you, except for that, it was a riot. You would have had so much fun. Those machines are blast! We went up and down mountainsides, I mean some of those slopes were this steep,” Cliff said, holding his big hand up at a sharp angle. “And on the flats, we opened those puppies up full throttle. I could easily get into snowmobiling on a regular basis.”
It was classic Cliff, genuine Cliff. As much as he liked speed and machismo enterprises, he did not project a macho image for the sake of image. He did so because that was his genuine nature. He liked adventure, and in all his actions he was decisive and determined. Years later, Mother, who seemed to be parroting Uncle Bruce, would call Cliff impulsive—“too impulsive,” she’d say—but my observations of Cliff over the years led me to distinguish between impulsive and what I’d call decisive, the latter involving an essential degree of thoughtfulness, calculation and intelligence, as opposed to the lack of forethought that one comes to associate with impulsivity. (Cont.)
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© 2023 by Eric Nilsson
