Beyond the Ordinary

I had skied groomed runs for thirty years and told myself that was the ceiling. Red Camellia put me with a guide who did not once make me feel like a project. On the fourth morning I skied a bowl off the Schilthorn in fresh snow and had to stop halfway down because I was crying. I have booked the same week again. I am not treating it as a one-off any more, I am treating it as the thing I do.

My marriage ended in the February and I booked this in the March, mostly out of spite. I told them I wanted somewhere nobody would ask me about it. What I got was a country where I was interesting because I had arrived, not because of what had happened to me. I ate dinner alone in Bukhara without once feeling conspicuous. I came back knowing I could do the rest of it on my own, which was not the question I went out there to answer.

Fifteen days on a train with my mother sounded like a threat. There is no wifi, so by day three we had run out of small talk and started on the real conversations, the ones we had been circling for about a decade. We finished in a tented camp with the migration going past at dawn and neither of us said anything for twenty minutes. She is seventy-four. I am glad we did not wait.