JANUARY 1, 2023 – Happy New Year cheers to all my readers! May 2023 bring you good health and lots of happiness. And may it bring a measure of peace and prosperity to the world.
Yesterday, I celebrated the end of an eventful year by skiing for an hour on the American Birkebeiner Trail, the finest point-to-point x-c ski trail on the continent. An access point is less than a 10-minute drive from the Red Cabin. The outing was my first time on the Trail since the spring of 2021 and my 35th ski day of the current season, including every day of December.
My pace wasn’t what it was BC (before cancer), but I found plenty to sing about, as I made a round trip up and down the hilly course between Wheeler Road and shouting distance of the Fish Hatchery trailhead. Conditions were ideal, and the scenery, supreme—still blanketed by the pre-Christmas blizzard.
Along the way, I encountered only three other skiers. One was a guy probably in his mid-20s with well-coached technique, doubtless a veteran of several Birkebeiner Races. We exchanged a simple “Hey!” on the first encounter. When we met on the return, as I skated uphill and he coasted down, I called out, “Did you win?” All he heard was the inflection of my question. He made a hard stop to say, “What?” I turned back and restated my quirky humor. A friendly smile crossed his cheerful face, as he answered. “No, just enjoying the trail.”
At a crossroad about a kilometer later, I met a couple walking across the road from the opposite direction. They wore fancy x-c skiing outfits and had topline equipment. I’d encountered them earlier, skiing the opposite direction, at the north end of the skiers’ bridge over Highway 77, where they’d asked about trail conditions south. The couple were about my speed but three or four years older. As we transitioned at the crossing, we exchanged greetings and assessments of trail conditions.
The guy was intense. His partner, less so. He focused on the finer points of the snow conditions. She commented twice on my ski cap—its colors, not on the little Swedish flag displayed on the front. I later thought that perhaps she was expressing her support for Ukrainians, whose flag is also blue and yellow. (The couple wore outfits with the Norwegian national colors and little Norwegian flags sewn in.)
From the cities, the couple were frequent skiers on the Birkie Trail. When I mentioned that that outing was my first in two seasons and why, the guy revealed that he’d battled melanoma several years ago. “I missed a year of skiing too. But after 165 injections of interferon, I recovered, and here I am!”
“Happy New Year,” I said, as we headed off in opposite directions. “Happy New Year to you too,” they said in return.
You just never know a person’s story . . . until you do.
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© 2023 by Eric Nilsson
