Click your heels 3 times

I finally came back down to Earth this week.

For the past four months, I’ve been walking on a couple feet of packed snow.

Not everywhere, but certainly everywhere in my yard.

Unless I wanted to wallow through three feet or so of unpacked snow, I stayed on the trails. The dogs made them. I improved them. And until the snow set up about a month ago, our travels in the yard were confined to them.

It sure wasn’t my first rodeo. I learned years earlier to stay on the trails when there was snow on the ground. While untracked snow is a blast at speed on skis or snow machines, it makes walking difficult if not entirely impossible.

I always followed elk trails through the snow in the spring while hunting shed antlers. Besides being the only way to get through deep snow on foot, they also offered the occasional shed horn in the middle of the trail. They were never easy to negotiate. In deep snow, elk step in the same print. A couple hundred elk may have taken the trail, but they leave only a single set of tracks.

Trying to step where they did is easier said than done. Boots don’t fit well in hoof tracks, and my natural stride is a bit shy of that made by elk. It was never easy going, but it beat the alternative.

There was usually a narrow window of time each day in the spring when travel was actually easy. If the days were warm enough to melt the snow a bit, it would set up overnight like concrete. For a few hours in the morning, it was like walking on pavement. Then it would get rotten and I’d begin to fall through every other step or so.

There was a week this spring that the snow in the yard set up like that. I took advantage to check out the more remote reaches of my realm, corners of the yard I hadn’t seen since last fall. Then it all got rotten and I began to fall through on the trails.

Now I’m back on the ground, and I miss the higher perspective the snow gave me. I can no longer see so easily over the fence nor can I look in the windows of the house and scare my wife.

The bare ground I’d been so long in anticipating is gooey with a mix of mud and dog droppings. I already miss the sterility of the snow-covered landscape.

It was nice – if only for a few months – to be above it all.

Parker Heinlein is at [email protected]