The Quiet Place
EARLY MORNING, sun still way below the horizon, the air has a cold, refreshing bite that I can feel deep into my lungs. Tall evergreens, their trunks furry with moss, reach tall into the purple sky. The only sounds are the steady zip-ziiiip…zip-ziiiip of our skins over a crusty snow surface, and our breath, appearing as vapor in the stillness and vanishing just as quickly. Other than our party of four—Beau Fredlund, Adam Clark, Noah Howell, and me—the only other sign of life is a set of moose tracks postholed deep into the snow. The animal has dropped several piles of scat, which look like Milk Duds, along the skin track.
“He’s eating the Old Man’s Beard off the trees,” says Fredlund, a ski guide in Cooke City, Montana, as he reaches up and pulls a small strand of stringy lichen dangling from the pine branches.
Fredlund, a tall and lean 35-year-old with thick yellow eyebrows and large Adam’s apple, stabs a dropping with the tip of his ski pole, testing its freshness to see if Alces alces might still be hanging around.
The moose turd responds to his pole with a solid thwack—frozen. We keep moving, periodically scanning the trees for the leggy beast. But our minds are primarily focused on the task of getting up and out to a place in the mountains far away from humanity, away from our cars, away from the noise and craziness that seems to have consumed daily life nearly everywhere we go.
of the bed you woke up on, there’s no denying that the world is slipping into a deep chasm of chaos and uncertainty. The political and social divisions of our time have generated deafening noise that penetrates our lives at almost every turn. There are people marching in the streets. We’re witnessing a full-fledged attack on the environment, the press, and our healthcare.
