Nordic skiing was more awesome in the past

This weekend I took a cross-country skiing trip up to Mt. Hood to celebrate the ends of finals week. I have not been cross-country skiing in a long time. Standing there in my bright orange jacket, wool hat, perched barely on two slender slats of wood and flailing desperately while making a movement that resembled stabbing a slab of beef with a pole and sliding my feet crookedly across it–I felt kind of Scandinavian. But a damaged kind of Scandinavian. I felt, I guess, Finnish.

Cross-country skiing was such fun. We shooshed up into the snow-dusted woods and sped down through bright, white meadows. As snow silted down from the trees and the afternoon sun fell through in streaks, we stopped in a clearing for a light lunch of peanut-butter sandwiches. I looked at the tall trees and heard the snowbirds sing. I felt something indefinable and true rising up in me, something no doubt related to fresh mountain air and hard physical labor that makes one feel alive. Suddenly I felt the urge to try to give at least rudimentary voice to this overwhelming sentiment. I glanced from one rosy-cheeked friend to another, trying to grasp the words. I finally grasped them. “This,” I said, raising my gaze from the soft snow in front of me where a delicate snowspider crossed over the tiny tracks of a baby squirrel now gone by, “is so gay.”