A QUESTION OF BALANCE

Davinius did not set out seeking to groom a perfect ski trail, he knew that was beyond his reach. Grooming with a snowmobile, compaction drag and ginzu groomer, he could not dominate the snowscape the way a piston bully boy could. When nature worked hard against him, he was often just screwed. He couldn’t chew up the frozen snow and and then spit it back out as a perfect corduroy carpet. What he was seeking was more a question of balance, a total gestalt that was more than the sum of its parts.  On Wednesday, he worked on the Trail to the Lake.  Sculpting the snow with four passes of the drag under a sun drenched blue sky, he felt that the scales were finally tipping back in his favor. Icy hardness was balanced out by the cushy snow carpet he had scraped up, and the chaotic tippy concave trail had taken on the shape of a flat planar surface. Of course, the modest ski trail through the woods was not technically perfect, the corduroy ridges on the skate lane were not really crisp, and the classic tracks weren’t quite “classical”. But when he added in lunch by the lake with the pretty girl from the village, where the sounds of silence were punctuated only the wing beats of a raven passing overhead and the soft moaning of freezing ice, he decided that the total experience was beyond compare and perhaps, if possible, even better than perfection.