Summer is just around the corner

It's still "mud season" at the High Mountain Lodge. Winter Park and Fraser are close to being deserted. We left town, too, and spent a week visiting relatives in the south east, but now we're back at the Lodge getting ready for summer guests.

After a very successful ski season, it has been nice to catch our breath and take care of chores we put off when we were busy. We're painting and deep cleaning rooms as well as weeding areas in the gardens that are finally free of snow.

Julie took a class in high-altitude gardening and is full of plans and ideas to grow herbs and more hardy vegetables. Expect spinach on the menu quite a bit this summer at the High Mountain Lodge.

She was sort of shocked when she found out that you can't grow summer squash at our elevation. Zucchini and yellow squash need more heat than we're liable to get any given summer. It feels sort of unnatural to be living in a place where you can't grow squash. I'm reminded of the old joke about why, in small towns, August and September are the only months when people lock their cars while going to church: it's to prevent their neighbors from leaving bags of zucchini in the back seat. That being said, here is a very easy squash recipe for those lucky enough to be able to grow them:

Finely slice roughly equal amounts of zucchini and onion. A mandolin works best, but in a pinch you can use a knife. Each slice should be between 1/8 and 1/4 an inch.

Cover the bottom of a sauté pan with olive oil; add a pat of butter. Sauté until vegetables are tender. Correct seasoning. Plate over pasta or as a side dish and top with generous amounts of grated parmigiano reggiano or Peccorino Romano cheese. The parmesan is more elegant, but the peccorino is more authentic. 

This is a traditional paisano recipe from Rome and the Lazio region of Italy. It's simplicity itself, but is a surprisingly savory dish. Serve it al fresco over pasta as a stand-alone light dish in the evening with a glass of well-chilled prosecco. It doesn't get much better than this.

 The meadows below the lodge are finally starting to green up, but Sheep Mountain to the west still has some snow on its higher slopes. That will be gone soon, and before long, the fields will be eye-poppingly beautiful. There are buds on the aspen trees; when they leaf out, light sifting down through them will be filtered green-gold. That's when we'll know summer is really here.

Jarndyce v. Jarndyce

Charles Dickens's novel, Bleak House, contains a delightful satire on the legal profession regarding a lawsuit in the Court of Chancery in London. Jarndyce v. Jarndyce had been under litigation for over a hundred years and showed no signs of being settled. That suit in Chancery had provided generations of solicitors with a very good living, and seemed destined to provide their issue unto the seventh generation with equally comfortable incomes. I'm fuzzy on the details, being more interested in the novel's description of an alcoholic woman who spontaneously combusted due to too much GIN in her system (I read it in graduate school and was pretty starved for entertainment), but I'm pretty sure the suit was a metaphor for the complexities of life in Victorian England and the disconnect between human community and the institutions we create to facilitate that community.

Lordy, lordy, if Dickens were only alive today and living in Colorado, the novel that man could write about Colorado water law!

A few months ago, out of the blue, we were contacted by an attorney regarding the need for a "due diligence" filing in Water Court to make our "conditional" water rights "absolute." OK. Seems the former owner's petition got lost in the Water Court and never was acted on. Initially, I dismissed her as an ambulance chaser (or, in this case, a "drip" chaser), but the longer we talked, the more alarmed I became. We retained our own attorney and got the filing done with one day to spare!

"Whew," I thought. "Now guests at the High Mountain Lodge won't have to worry about their showers running dry before they rinse the soap off.

Then, just yesterday, this young, beaded guy with a pony tail (far too cool-looking to be a bureaucrat) shows up at the lodge and introduces himself as the Water Commissioner who has been working his way through a 3-year backlog of cases, and our Water Court filing brought us to his attention. Lucky us. He tried to explain that the water rights on our well were "junior" to water rights of people down the valley from us. It seems that, 9 months out of the year, demand for water in our drainage exceeds the capacity of the existing water rights, so those holding "junior" water rights are expected to sequester water in case of demand from senior holders.

And it seems that the ponds down below the lodge are there to sequester water for just such occasions.

"We don't own them," sez I, going into my best "I don't know nothin' about birthin' no babies" mode.

No matter. The fact that water necessary to guarantee my water rights is on another person's property makes no nevermind to the State of Colorado. That person is obligated to release water when the state tells him to to preserve my water rights.

And they wonder why that GIN-soaked person exploded.

Catching Our Breath

You gotta love irony. The High Mountain Lodge closed on Sunday, April 18th--the same day as Winter Park ski area. By the end of the week, we had had some of the best snow of the season. Alas! The snow was so good that CDOT (Colorado Department of Transportation) closed Berthoud Pass because of avalanche danger. The only way you could get to any of the ski areas still open was driving halfway to Salt Lake City before going south (I'm exaggerating, but not by much).

When confronted with the choice of doing laundry or driving through Kremmling to go skiing, you start washing sheets.

Then we had friends come in to spend a night. They had to wait half a day to get over the pass before CDOT opened it, but when they arrived, we had a good time. We made a lot of music, drank a lot of beer and wine, ate good food, and generally enjoyed each other's company.

Even with the ski area closed, it's pretty awesome around here. There's still snow on the high peaks on both sides of the Fraser valley. True, the mud does get pretty deep, and you can tell locals from visitors by the amount of splash-back on their vehicles. But in the Fraser valley right now, the views of the snow-capped peaks of the Continental Divide or to the west of Byers Peak and the further peaks of the Gore Range are so jaw-dropping beautiful that if, while wandering about in thigh-deep mud, you fall into a ditch and die, at least your last images of life will be comparable with any museum experience.

Later this week, we're embarking on the first of two mini-vacations: one to Oklahoma to visit relatives, watch rodeo, and get reacquainted with high-school buddies; later in May, we're heading to North Carolina to see Julie's relatives. After a visit with them, we're heading down to the South Carolina low country. Of course, we're staying in Bed & Breakfasts. One of the places we're staying is outside of Charleston, and their B&B website boasts two Famous Recipes, both based on grits.

"Honey," asks my wife, "What are grits?"

"They're good stuff. They're awesome stuff."

"Then why have I never had any?"

"You never had any because your mother was a Yankee from Pennsylvania who, when she decided to learn how to cook, subscribed to Bon Appetit instead of Southern Living."

"But you never cook them either. Why not?"

"My mama was a Republican from Cincinnati. About the closest we ever came to grits was boiled canned hominy. I don't know how to cook them."

Julie gave me one of those disappointed looks; I'm not sure if she was disappointed because I didn't know how to cook grits or because I felt ashamed from my lack of knowledge.

"This will be an interesting vacation," she said.

Oh, yea.

Mud Season

Yesterday, my son, Mark, and I skied the last day at Winter Park for the season. We were some of the last people up the Panoramic lift at Mary Jane before they closed it until next November, but coming down the face of Parsen Bowl was a little bit less than wonderful. A couple of inches of powder didn't hide the fact that we were skiing on crud. "Well," said Mark, "that wasn't the best run of the day."

At the end of the day, Mark took me down Hughes, a famous run leading to the base of Winter Park. It was my first time ever to ski it. Truth be told, I couldn't have found it without his help. Winter Park is not the most intuitive ski mountain, and it has skiing secrets.

The snow was nasty, but it wasn't that nasty. Coming down from Mary Jane, we saw ski patrollers taking down fences around hazards. "That's dangerous," I thought, "skiers could hurt themselves," but then I reflected that we were just about the last legal skiers on that run for the season.

The family had a celebratory dinner at a restaurant in Winter Park that evening. In the face of a bad economy, we'd had a huge number of wonderful people stay at the High Mountain Lodge, and we needed to enjoy each other's company. It was a disappointing meal for me, but Julie and Mark liked their selections.

After the wildness in the restaurant on the last day of ski season, it was eerie going into the Safeway this evening to buy food. Gone were the exhausted skiers buying anything they could cook quickly in their rented condos. Everybody was gone. There was no reason for anybody to stick around.

Driving out to the store this afternoon to get groceries, I came around the corner of the road and saw the Continental Divide stretched out from north to south as far as the eye could see. It was stunning, the contrast of the white of the snow on the high peaks with the fading colors of the forests down below. Murphy, the Lodge Dog, thought she saw the neighborhood fox about then, and she barked her way into the Safeway parking lot in Fraser. After we got to the Safeway, she forgot about the fox and turned her attention to the dogs tied up outside the grocery store. Lordy, the racket she raised. Hanging out the window of our Subaru, she let out a chorus of barks at the dogs tied to pillars around the front of the store, and they responded with some deep-throated "woofs."

The funny thing was, outside of two dogs tied to posts and Murphy barking from the car window, there weren't that may living things in the parking lot.

Mud season had arrived. The Safeway had noted that fact by halving the price of most of its groceries. There was nobody in the store, when a week before, you couldn't have found your way down any aisle without tangling with visitors from elsewhere in the country half your age who prefaced every comment with "Dude!" As in: "Dude! I know your girlfriend's a vegetarian, but that sausage looks awesome!"

There's nobody here right now, except us. Locals sort of recognize each other in a sort of shell-shocked way. We have a month or so before the summer crowds show up.

The IRS Is Coming To Get Me

Since the first of the year, many of the 300+ channels of satellite TV that the High Mountain Lodge subscribes to and advertises as a desirable amenity to potential guests have been infested with advertisements for tax preparation programs. Intuit (the makers of TurboTax) and H&R Block have been buying huge blocks of ad time showing happy people answering simple questions on their computer screens then hitting a button, and presto! the gummint sends them a check for two thousand dollars. 

I swear, if either of those companies buys Super Bowl time, I will turn.the.game.off and the Saints can fall into the Gulf of Mexico with the rest of the city.

I have been using tax software programs for years to do my taxes, pausing periodically to pay a CPA to "check my work" as we used to say in 7th-grade algebra class. The programs have gotten incredibly better since I paid over a hundred dollars for the first iteration of "Mac-in-Tax" back in the 1980s when the Apple Computer Company decided that color computing might be the Wave of the Future.

That first program was a joke. It was basically all the forms where you could fill in amounts, which got added and subtracted automatically so you wouldn't get audited for a math error. If you clicked the "help" button, it took you to the verbatim IRS instructions. I'm pretty sure there is not enough GIN in the world to make me read that verbiage. When you begin reading a sentence, you're pretty sure that it's in English, but by the time you get to the end of it, you're not so sure.

The programs got better over the years, and by the time I got laid off from my job in 2008, I was doing my taxes on my computer with flair and élan. Gone were the days when the computer would ask me, at two in the morning, for documentation for some obscure deduction and I would let out a primal scream and begin digging through the file cabinet for a statement that I was pretty sure we'd burned in the fireplace last October when the weather turned chilly. The scream would make the dog start barking, and that would wake my wife, and she'd come down to see if I was all right, then speculate about how much money we were going to get back on our taxes.

I wonder if law enforcement tracks an uptick in suicides and axe murders in the weeks leading up to April 15?

This year, we're having an accountant do our taxes. With two corporate structures as well as our personal taxes, I can't imagine what disdainful questions Turbo Tax would ask me in the "interview" process.

But getting your taxes done by a person is equally an experience of exquisite misery--similar to those early years of Mac-In-Tax. The accountants ask all the same questions that the programs do, but in a different order. They have their own forms. "So, wait," I ask, "You want us to fill out these forms so that you can put that information in the IRS forms. Why don't you give me the IRS forms?"

You can see where I'm going with this.

"We do this to make it easier for our clients."

Yeah, right, and I got a tan from that Blue Moon last December on New Year's Eve.

As we work to improve the High Mountain Lodge and make it a more welcoming place for guests, we plan to continue to focus on our hospitality, our food, and the comfort of our rooms. We have no intention of burdening our guests with our tax struggles (God knows, they have enough of their own). But if you book with us in the last days of Winter Park's season (they close on April 18), don't be surprised if we feed you champagne, brie, and caviar. There are adversities in life that cannot be avoided, and tax season is one of them. Just getting through it is a monumental feat, and it demands a celebration.

Silence

Something set Murphy the Lodgedog off this evening. I'd been having fun playing variations on hymns on the piano, and at first I figured it was the missed notes she was complaining about.

She spun around a couple of times in the sitting room, barking her head off, so I finally let her out, and followed her, just in case she was going to have a set-to with the neighborhood fox that she couldn't win.

She ran up and down the road barking and carrying on, but it was clear that her heart wasn't really in it. There was nothing there to bark at, and even she realized it, but like a politician, she kept up the sturm und drang for longer than necessary.

When she finally quit barking, I found myself standing on the deck of the lodge in absolute silence. The almost-full moon was shining through high clouds, and a fine ice-mist was in the air. The thermometer showed that it was just below thirty degrees, which in January in the high country is just short of the banana belt.

It was a perfect temperature, and a perfect silence. There really wasn't anything to see. Sheep Mountain to the west was enveloped in mist, though you could see its outline because of the moon glow. There were too many clouds to see stars.

I was shocked by the silence. The silence was the loudest thing in the valley.

The thing about silence is, you can't capture it with a camera and post a video of it on YouTube or a still  picture on your Facebook page. There's no laptop in existence that has a scratch-n-sniff screen to communicate how your other senses become heightened as the silence takes over: You can't describe the smell of the cold air or communicate the feel of the frozen mist falling on your skin or even begin to communicate the scent of silence. There's no way to describe the expansion of your soul as the cold settles in around you and replaces noise with a blanket of ice crystals and muted moonlight and a crisp cold.

Make no mistake, though. The silence of the high country doesn't equate to peace. Stay too long outside, and you become uncomfortably aware that the ice crystals falling on your arms are no longer pleasant; they're just cold. You can only equate silence with peace for a short time before you begin to miss the voices of loved ones and the laughter and the joy of human companionship.

Silence is always a corrective to noise, but it can never replace voices.

The Rhythms of Winter

In one of his early songs, Dan Fogleberg crooned:

The end of October, the sleepy brown woods
seem to bow down their heads to the winter.

This hasn't been our experience with winter at the High Mountain Lodge. Perhaps the woods are, indeed, asleep for the winter, but the light, the interplay of clouds with the landscape, and the patterns of the days and nights certainly are dynamic enough when they aren't downright dramatic. And the weather; lordy, the weather sure doesn't go to sleep for the winter.

There is a rhythm and a pattern to a day, just as our bodies have  rhythms. As we have been learning the patterns of innkeeping, we have also found our rhythms adjusting to those of the outside--what the English Romantic poets called "nature."

There are certain things that have to be done: there is breakfast to be prepared; rooms to be cleaned and tidied; laundry to be washed. If it snows, walks must be shoveled.

 The mornings never cease to surprise us. Years ago when our son, Mark, was a very little guy, he noticed a particularly dramatic sunset and called it a "pinkset." That usage has become currency in the family lexicon. We now have "pinkrises" in addition to pinksets.

On particularly cold mornings, moisture condenses into mist in the Spring Branch valley. It looks as if God had poured milk into the lowlands. But as the sun warms the landscape, the mist thins and rises and is not infrequently tinged pink by the early-morning alpenglow.

Even on the coldest of days--which around here get mighty cold, indeed--the sun will warm the deck between the guest lodge and the dining lodge that houses our office as well as our owners' quarters. By noon, when the low southern sun has warmed our unheated office enough that we can turn off the space heater, we are tempted to imagine that it's warm enough to get a tan out on the deck--until we step outside and the chill puts the lie to that fantasy.

Late afternoons and early winter evenings are perhaps the best time at the High Mountain Lodge. The sunsets can be dramatic, but usually they're not. God seems to save the visual evening sturm und drang for the summertime. This time of the year, the cold comes on quickly. It's a time for lighting fires, getting acquainted with guests, making new friends. Over a glass of wine, a beer, or a cup of hot chocolate, the next days exploits can be plotted before soaking the ski soreness out in the hot tub.

Night comes early at the High Mountain Lodge, but even though the days are short, they are filled with joy and light and adventure. Cold though it is, it's too soon to start yearning for spring. There's still too much fun to be had in the snow.