I was a child pyromaniac. The shocked expression on my mother’s face, as she asked about the blackened portion of our pink stucco garage, drove home the fact that happy dancing fire also destroyed things. Shoot. Destruction is such an unfortunate byproduct of Gaia-based thrills.

Having grown up, mainly by remaining alive, I learned to control my fascination with uncontrolled nature. Once, Joe Bernfeld and I camped on the terminal moraine on Teton Glacier, where the Grand’s North Face, Teewinot’s garbage southern exposures, and the massif in between all tend to fall apart.

It was the ugly part of spring, April-ish, rotten of snow and grim of sky. Conditions were good for just one thing, high-speed geology. When you awake in a high place with only time to kill, it’s already a good trip. We moraine-lounged. The night’s freeze warmed on schedule.

The dead amphitheater proceeded to kvetch. Safe upon our perch we spectated huge tumbling rocks, solo at first but gathering a mob on the way down. No-name gullies were further creased by turd-colored rivers of thundering muck. For a finale, a long low rumble emitted from all directions. (This puzzling racket is familiar to all Teton Range explorers: mass wasting or Jackson Hole Airport?) We finally spotted, in the distance, an enormous block of granite, about the size and shape of a bus, moseying down the glacier at a walking pace. That strange, sharp ozone smell of self-destructing stone filled the air.

Where was I? Oh yeah. Walking. I’m trying to link my modest collection of war stories to the fact that winter pedestrianism can be a source of adrenaline. It offers instant interactivity with the elements with a soupçon of mortal peril. Even if the term “wind chill factor” suffers from macho abuse, a windy sub-zero day re-shocks you into realizing the utter remorselessness of winter’s cold. To demonstrate how cold it can get, some days they went so far as to pause construction.

I am a hypocrite here; I drive nearly every day. However, were I the Post-Apolcalyptic Lord Master God Who Decides All (aka The Decider) I’d apply dwindling resources to Jackson Hole’s burgeoning pathways first. In a healthy albeit nearly broke society, walkers and bicyclists would cruise on flat, smooth paths while the few people who could afford gasoline would in fact need four-wheel drive on crumbling, potholed highways.

Among other things, this would save critters. (If nothing else, for dinner.) Underneath the snow here

is a paved pathway. The snow reveals a human-and-ungulate crossroad. Off to the right are the manifold shrubberies of the Rafter J subdivision; off to the left is the five-lane. Off to the right deer and moose nibble on mine and my neighbors’ foliage; off to the left ravens occasionally snack on roadkill.

Deep winter of ‘08 stayed cold like the old days with no melt until mid-February. Then came the mini-treacheries of black ice. One dusk on the way home I was thinking, with all the gravitas that is middle-age experience, “These are black ice conditions.” I had just about dotted the period in that sentence when the ground began moving sideways and upwards at about 50 feet per second. During the unpretty splits I was performing, I calculated that once the hospital bill came in, the number of graunch noises emitting from various knee, hip and ankle joints would average $1,000 per graunch. Weirdly, I got up and walked, only to walk more the next day.

I never get tired of quoting James Howard Kunstler: “In our society, anything that interferes with motoring pleasure is considered perverse and illegitimate.” Whopper snowstorms, which are expressly designed to keep people in their homes catching up on Proust, are now just another Fellini movie. Drivers peering through snow portholes. Low-riders high-centered, the drivers of these ill-adapted rides haplessly wearing “I’m still cool” thought balloons. Snow plow drivers berated after their all-nighters because the wind moves snow faster than they can.

Then the weather lifts, snow gets ironed into the pavement, and now we have two-ton battering rams on wheels. At speed. On ice. Ask me if I’m a man of faith and I’d have to reply, “Well, I walked along Highway 89 at rush hour when the pavement gleamed like it’d been Zambonied.”

A top-heavy four-wheel drive gives a driver more than confidence. It gives him overconfidence. I kept count. Every belly-up vehicle I saw this winter and last was a hefty SUV.

Upside: highway swag is pretty good. Around here a lot of guys use pure magic to dispense with their trash. They toss it into the back of the pickup, floor it at High School Road, and voilà! A lot of drywall is disposed of this way. Maybe the practice will cease once a splintered 2×4 impales some poor tyke along the pathway. But I’ve gained Pony clamps, bungee cords, and so far four terrycloth bath sheets. World-class shop rags, those.

It’s a circle-of-life thing, those fine and free shop rags. They sit in the corner of the garage to sop up the melt from my own car. They save the environment in that it saves my environment; the garage walls won’t rot so soon. I’m more likely to burn it down.