Winter? Already?

What?

Resslin' Around, by Casey Ressler

There are two different types of citizens in the Valley, and Alaska in general -- those who look forward to the melting of snow because with it comes fishing, golf and other fun things of summer, and those who woke up Friday morning thinking they had died and gone to heaven.

I have to admit, I'm in the first group. I woke up Friday and saw the snow on my lawn -- a lawn I mowed just three days before -- and thought, "Oh, the humanity of it all. By God, it's only Sept. 20. Please, spare us another week or two of fall before this. It just isn't fair."

Just the night before, I was talking to a friend in Anchorage. We were making plans for the weekend, trying to get one last camping trip and trout-finding adventure in before the winter.

"Did you see how far down Pioneer Peak the snow was today?" I asked him. "It's only a matter of weeks now."

Yeah, right. That's why my future as a weatherman is partly cloudy, although getting things wrong seems like a job requirement for them. I should have said it's only a matter of hours. Hours until summer is ripped from my hands like my fly line was just a few weeks ago.

It's just too soon, and I say that every year, whether it snows in September or January. I'm just not ever ready for the white stuff to hit.

For every person like me, who despises the coming of winter for no other reason than it means the end of summer, there is someone like my dad. He's a motorhead from the word go, and he's got a fleet of snowmachines sitting on the trailer, just waiting to go when the snow hits. I know this for fact -- I watched him load them on that trailer in the middle of July, just because he heard a cold front was moving in.

He's got all the right toys to enjoy the entire year -- a nice boat makes things "bearable" for him in the summer -- but winter is as close to his heart as anything. Every year, he has to get a new sled because the one before just "wasn't exactly what I was looking for." He's got the truck (and like every hard-core snowmachiner, in the window he has that ridiculous Calvin cartoon in which the character is going to the bathroom on one those "lesser brand" of snowmachines), the enclosed trailer, the cabin up in Petersville and just about every other accessory he needs to make the winter well.

Around August, when the new sleds make their debut, he starts praying for snow. He starts firing up those snowmachines in the garage, just to get the fumes circulating. If you could bottle that snowmachine exhaust smell, you could smack some flashy stickers on it and sell it to him as cologne -- in a real man's scent.

This summer, I've spent nearly every weekend on the banks of streams and rivers -- this winter, he'll spend nearly every weekend up at his cabin, riding in the hills. He just turned 50, but when it snows, you can look at the grin on his face and think he was an 18-year-old who just conned his parents out of the sports car in the garage.

Friday morning was a way to ease both of us -- and others who either love or hate the winter -- into the season. Those who love the coming of winter got to dream of white weekends spent outdoors, while the rest of us groaned and watched happily as the snow melted in the morning.

I still headed out camping, but when I got home, the gear was put a little deeper in the shed than it had been before. Like right behind the snowblower.

Casey Ressler (valleylife@frontiersman.com) is the Valley Life editor. He refuses to put his fly rod away for the winter.