…to see what it could see. But when it got there, it wasn’t sure it wanted to see what was there.

At least the bear had been there before to see what she could see.

Let me back up.

Years ago, before we got married, I was traveling about Colorado with my climbing partner around Labor Day. We decided to leave the ropes behind one day and hike in RMNP. I believe it was Labor Day itself, which meant we followed a herd of cotton-clad dehydrated flat-landers up Flattop Mountain.

What I saw at the top of that mountain is firmly etched into my psyche twice over, and probably into my next lifetime. Whether the perpetrator/victim was a flat-lander or Colorado native, I’ll never know. Whether he was young and foolish or at the peak of a mid-life crisis, I’ll never know. I only know what I saw him do and the name his friend screamed out when things went so predictably wrong — Jordan.

In the mountains in early September, chances are quite good that there is no fresh snow to be found anywhere, freak summer squalls aside. It can snow any time of the year in the high country, but it just doesn’t last in late summer. Even the glaciers are dirty and unkempt, littered with rock debris at this time of year. Tyndall Glacier, which sits in a cirque next to and in full view of Flattop, is no exception.

I sat with my climbing partner on the summit, soaking in the late summer sun and the smug satisfaction anyone feels when they reach the top of anything. We looked over the valley at Hallett Peak and the glacier that slept between the two mountains and watched hikers, like ants, making the wide traverse around to Hallett. It looked like fun, but my butt was firmly planted on a rock on Flattop.

As we scouted out the various ants, one in particular caught our attention. One of the ants, it seemed, was inching its way to the top edge of the glacier.

“What’s that guy doing?”

“Is he carrying skis?”

The glacier was more brown than white.

“He’s carrying skis, I think.”

“Is he crazy?”

The glacier looked quite steep from our vantage point.

“He’s pausing.”

“Maybe he won’t do it.”

“Maybe he’s rethinking it.”

“God, I hope so.”

We weren’t the only ones who had noticed the rogue skier on the edge of the brown glacier. The herd of people on the summit — families, people with cameras and binoculars — were pointing at the top of the glacier and the tiny figure presumably fiddling with his skis. They were having conversations similar to ours.

But one photographer nearby with a huge lens wasn’t talking to anyone on the summit. He was talking excitedly with someone else on a walkie-talkie. The huge lens was fixed on the top of the glacier.

“That your buddy?” one of us asked.

“Yeah,” he said, grinning proudly for his bold friend.

He might have said more, but I simply can’t recall. I only remember his joy and pride, and how quickly it changed to panic and horror.

By now, all eyes — at least 50 pair — on Flattop Mountain were trained on the ant on skis at the top of Tyndall Glacier. Binoculars and cameras were trained on the ant; others shielded their eyes from the afternoon sun to get an unobstructed view. There was a collective holding of the breath.

The ant pushed off.

At first, he wasn’t going anywhere. Was there enough snow to ski on? Was he stuck on a rock? The collective anticipation grew. He pushed again. Finally, he was moving downhill in the way one expects a skier to move. He made a turn. This guy might actually ski this filthy hunk of summer ice, I thought.

The skier was near the top still when he fell. For one hopeful moment it looked like he’d just gotten stuck for a moment and could recover. Then he began to cartwheel down the glacier toward the rocky moraine hundreds of feet below.

“Oh shit oh shit oh shit!” the photographer whispered as he lowered his camera and rose to his feet to watch his friend tumble further and further, more and more out of control.

“Jordan!” he screamed.

From the top, it looked like the skier had landed in a contorted heap among the boulders of the moraine. All of the hikers on top of Flattop peered over the edge, watching Jordan, waiting.

Jordan did not move.

His photographer scrambled to gather his things into his pack and started down the side of the mountain in a beeline to Jordan. This didn’t look like a safe route to descend, and I wondered if the photographer would fall, too. Behind us, one of the hikers was trying to make a call with a weak cell phone signal.

Jordan still did not move.

Minutes passed. I removed my hands from in front of my mouth and remembered to breathe. We stared at the moraine and waited for something to happen.

When you spend time in the mountains, you see things you don’t want to see. I once saw a helicopter disappear into the Maroon Bells to recover a climber’s body; a limb hung from the helicopter’s basket when it returned. In Montana, I saw a ranger just after he’d been charged by a grizzly bear. His pack was thrown far from his body, and he was physically unharmed but seriously shaken. “Go!” he’d said. We sent. We saw the bear running above us not far down the trail, and bears run fast — really fast. He blew past some elk; we blew past more people on the trail. Eventually, rangers on horseback with rifles came up the trail toward us.

“Excuse me, ma’am,” the lead ranger said. “Bear emergency.”

On Flattop, the lady with the cell phone had successfully reached someone. Jordan’s friends reached him, presumably safely, but from so far above them we couldn’t tell what was going on. Jordan still wasn’t moving. I’m not sure how much time had passed, but the day was fading and we needed to get down the mountain.

Below treeline, we heard the whipping echo of a helicopter bouncing off towering walls. It was a sound I didn’t want to hear again after that bright morning at the Maroon Bells. (It was the first break in the weather since we’d arrived; the climber had been dead on the mountain for days.)

Was the helicopter coming in to recover Jordan’s body or rush him, still alive, to a hospital? We could only wonder.

That night we stared into the fire at our nearby campsite and processed the day. I suddenly remembered a dream I’d had a few weeks ago. My climbing partner wanted to climb Snowmass Mountain, which has a massive snowfield on one side. I’d seen a shadowy figure cartwheeling down the side of a huge snowslope, and the fuzzy apparition scared me. I thought it was him falling down Snowmass at the time.

“My dream,” I said, and we stared at each other slack-jawed with the realization that I’d seen poor Jordan fall weeks ago.

This past Saturday, Jeremy and I headed up Flattop Mountain in snowshoes. There were no helicopters, no fallen skiers, and only a few people on the mountain. Tyndall Glacier was bright white, and the cornice on the edge of Flattop was shedding snow in the warm spring sun. It was so still up there I could hear the snow slope below the cornice melting. And I thought of Jordan and wonder if he lived. Lower down the mountain, backcountry skiiers were flashing white smiles and taking advantage of the last of the spring snow on gentler slopes as we slogged through the slush in our snowshoes. I was exhausted from repeatedly sliding and catching myself in the snow. My knees stiffened, my ankles gave, my hands ached from gripping my trekking poles. But Saturday, no one faced death. No one screamed a friend’s name in horror. No one fell down the mountain.

My friend at Egads! and I decided to write blogs with the same title tonight and see what happens. This could be an exercise in synonyms for “splat.” Here’s mine:

My college boyfriend lived on the seventh and top floor of our dorm, at the very end of the hall. The window at the end of the hall was easy to open, and there was no screen.
Seven stories below was the dirty blacktop behind our dining hall and its dumpsters. And sometimes, bananas from the dining hall would splatter with the force of seven stories of acceleration on that blacktop beneath the boys’ window.

(For the record, I believe a cantaloupe was flung out the window once, by whom I don’t recall, but much to everyone’s dismay, it was not promptly hosed away by the poor staff of our residence hall. It sat shattered and rotting for days. But at least no one was injured.)

Why did they do it? Part curiosity, part entertainment. It’s true that cats usually carry the curiosity capital in our lexicon, but I suppose college students and humans in general cash in at a close second to our feline friends.

There are, of course, more sophisticated versions of human curiosity that don’t involve hoisting produce out a window to see what happens. Meditation, for example: we sit on cushions, look at our minds and see what happens. Sometimes it’s just as thrilling as the thwack of a melon hitting the pavement from high above. But usually, it’s more like stepping on an obliterated three-day-old banana peel.

That’s where the entertainment factor comes in. After an all-day zazen back in my Zen days, I got so bored with myself I couldn’t take it anymore. I was just so sick of being in my head. I am so boring, oy! As I sat frozen on that cushion waiting for the bell, I would have given anything to drop something off the top of a tall building and watch it go splat with that satisfying twack and giggle to myself in the mindless joy of simple entertainment.

Fortunately, my curiosity about the human mind was renewed later, and I returned to the cushion to see what would happen. But sometimes it’s too much. Sometimes humans need a break to see something ridiculous, like what a curious cat will do with a paper bag for hours on end, or what would happen if you threw a Twinkie off a building.

For those not curious enough to watch the video, I’ll tell you — it’s not much. But it brought the videographers child-like, temporary joy.

For those of you — you know who you are — who are tired of White House spin, here’s the Chinese version. Do you ever wonder how many people are fooled by spin? Or who falls for it, in our country or others?

(Right now, I’m also wondering if by linking to a story about Tibet on Xinhua will automatically tag me as a troublemaker, and whether this means I’ll end up in prison should I ever travel to China or Tibet.)

Maybe everyone knows it’s spin, and it’s acknowledged as spin and ignored, like an ad for night creme. But if that’s true, why do they keep spinning?

If you read my last post, you know I was on a mission to do nothing last week and just stare at a twig.

Instead of staring at twigs all weekend, I ran over them. Quickly.

Until Sunday, when I arrived first at the coffee shop in Lyons Jeremy and I had agreed to meet at mid-ride. I ordered drinks for both of us and sat and stared out into the cliffs around Lyons and attempted to rub the helmet marks off my forehead.

So I didn’t stare at a twig, per se, but I got Susan’s point about staring at twigs. I realized that in my week of nothing, I didn’t do much twig-staring.

Instead of looking at twigs right now, I should be looking for a job. That’s the problem with this whole business of looking at twigs. There’s no time for looking at twigs, because looking at a twig is not productive.

When I told my mom I was having a week of nothing, she said:

“Okay, but don’t get too used to it.”

Mom travels at least one million miles per minute, and she usually does so on her cell phone. I suspect the only way to get her to stare at a twig is to stick it in her eye. Even this would only command her attention momentarily, though. She simply does not have time to stare at a twig, even if it is the only thing in her field of vision.
When I told my dad about the week of nothing, his reply was:

“Well, yeah, I can see where you’d need to do that.”

Dad could stare at twigs. He’s a night owl, and it’s possible that this is what he does in the middle of the night.

I fall somewhere between the two extremes. Maybe this is good — a middle way.

Or maybe I’m simply waffling, at odds with both. I can’t say my week of nothing was a success, because I didn’t achieve true “nothing” until the end of the week. However, maybe it made me realize the dualistic view involved in trying to do nothing versus something. Gonzo nothing indeed.

Next: how to do nothing and something at the same time.

I’m doing nothing for a while.

Okay, so I’m sitting here writing, so that’s something. But that big to-do list in my head? It’s staying there, un-acted upon for the rest of the week.

That’s right, nothing. My deaconess pal called me tonight, and when I told her I’m doing nothing this week, she said:

“I envy your lifestyle.”

But it’s actually tough. We’re all so busy, and we dream of doing nothing, but when we get the chance, what do we do? We do all the things that are next on the list. I finished my master’s degree last week and am unemployed. I’ll give you three guesses as to what’s next on my list. You can imagine, it looms large.

But the degree was hell. So I bumped “nothing” up to the top of the list. It seemed like the sane thing to do.

This nothing business was inspired by a friend of the family (who has been so for such a long time that she’s now part of the family). Susan was a teacher, and after stressing over renumbering my entire MA book late one night in Columbia, she told me about watching twigs.

When school ended in the summer, she and her husband would go to the library with a grocery bag and fill it with trash, she said. They would go home and do nothing but read the trashy books for three weeks. The only thing that occasionally interrupted the reading of trash was:

“Hey, you might want to read this one when you’re done.”

Or, looking at a twig. Do you ever just look at a twig, Jenn? she asked. Nope, not lately. Sometimes I just look at the sky, but even then, I’m on a walk or hike or riding my bike, so I have to look at where I’m going every so often so I don’t crash.

I’ve been so busy looking where I’m going next that I rarely stop to look where I am. Perhaps in front of a twig. I wouldn’t even know. I’m sure I’ve run over plenty of innocent, annonymous twigs with my bicycle.
So this week, with my MA completed, it’s time to do nothing. It’s been a little chilly for looking at twigs, but the week isn’t over yet, and I’m sure I can find something to look at indoors. Like trash on tv — check. Or unread books (good ones, no trash) — check again. Or a dust bunny. But the real trick is to see the twig (or bunny) and not the long, looming to-do list in my head whilst blankly staring at the twig.

Fortunately, I don’t like to dust.