How to Move Mountains--Snow Tires Pending (The Year That Was)

“Honey, I’m home!” I holler as I prance through the door to my igloo. “Today was the shit!”

The day was really just as banal as any other but without cable you have to turn it up a notch. There was the ordinary shit. I usually have to yell at one of the local wolves who wants to eat me alive. Probably because I’ve put on a few pounds, or, as my mother describes it, “Holy shit Scott! What the fuck happened to you!” And then, there’s the Yeti who lives down the ice sheet people refer to as a road here. Try making daily conversation with a Yeti. It’s tough.

But today there was something rather exceptional as well. All day I was aware that I would be coming home to a house an igloo full of puppies. Or, as I like to think of them, little people with lots of back fuzz.

“Puppies!” I roar, as I grasp them all up into my arms like someone who wasn’t hugged enough as a child and will forever over-compensate with his own children. Part of my joy in these little minions is that I have great visions of starting my own dog-sled business. However, I am also well aware that I don’t have the motivation to turn this idea into a reality. Instead, I’ll probably train them to boil rice (my staple food) as I become yet another parent who is satisfied with the mediocrity of his offspring. I mean, it clearly worked for my parents.

“How do your parents feel about their new grandchildren?” I ask Sherman. “Are they thrilled, Angelina?”

“I’m not Angelina Jolie. Stop calling me that!” Sherman barks. “And you’re no Brad Pitt either!”

“Well, I’m not Angelina Jolie. I don’t have her bone-structure. You do. We have seven children. Ergo,” I say, bobbing my head. “Deal with it Angie.”

“At best you’re Roseanne Barr,” Sherman rationalizes.

“I guess that makes you John Goodman,” I counter. Joke’s on Sherman. I actually find John Goodman oddly alluring. Especially up here in the Arctic. Body heat, check.

 “Whatever,” he huffs. “And no, I have not told my parents about the puppies.”

“Well, get on it,” I suggest. “We’re going to have to bring them with us when we go back down south for the holidays.”

“We’re not going down south for the holidays,” he snarls.

“Fucking right we are,” I proclaim like a politician talking about cleaning up city streets or lowering taxes. “There is no way I am staying here with nothing to do.”

“This place isn’t so bad,” Sherman says, defensively. “With global warming, it isn’t even that cold.”

 “The cold is to here like Susan Boyle is to singing,” I gripe. “Extreme.” This is kind of like complaining about Andre the Giant’s height or Michael Phelps’s ability to swim, in that you don't really notice how much more extreme an outlier is after a certain point, but in retrospect, you long for the days when they were just a little ahead of the pack.

Trying to change the subject, I pick up the runt of the litter of rabid dogs I have brought home and stare at him. “I think we’ll call you Yuri, after the guy from Dr. Zhivago.” Then I hand him to Miss Richard Hatch, the cat I have brought up here from civilization. “Here Miss Richard—Happy Holidays!”

“Your cat doesn’t want a rabid dog!” Sherman howls. "Plus, that dog is a female. Get your eyes checked."

“Sure she does,” I protest, petting Ms Richard's mangy coat. “She is lonely. Look, she is shedding from stress.”

“She is shedding because of her Jenny Craig weight loss program,” Sherman rebuttals.

“Who comes to the arctic to lose weight? Miss Richard, go out and find that back-fat. It keeps me warm at night.”

“Why did you name her after a moderate celebrity from a game show again?” Sherman asks. He already knows the answer though.

“Because she is large and in charge!” I howl. This seems to excited Ms. Yuri, who then bites me.

“Have you never regretted that decision?” Sherman asks, choosing to ignore the fiasco going on around him.

“Neverrr,” I say, parroting my collegiate art students.

I know it’s kind of a douchey stunt to name your pet after a super-star, and I don’t usually like to name-drop unless we are talking about Roseanne Barr, or, as I like to think of her, the place heaven hid happiness. However, it really does work for Miss Richard.

Come to think of it, the one thing more ridiculous than naming your pets after celebrities is quoting them. Celebrities. Not pets. I am all for quoting pets.

I snuggle into Sherman’s big, hairy, lap and cradle Miss Richard Hatch in one arm and Miss Yuri Zhivago in the other. “The point isn’t to live without any regrets. The point is to not hate ourselves for having them…We need to learn to love the flawed, imperfect things that we create and to forgive ourselves for creating them. Regret doesn’t remind us that we did badly. It reminds us that we can do better,” I whisper. “That’s Kathryn Schulz,” I blabber on, as though I am ahead of Sherman on some cutting-edge intellectual race. This is obviously ridiculous, as he then proceeds to point out.

“I know who said it, fat ass. You aren’t the only one who YouTubes TedTalks, you know. Besides, you totally butchered that quote, considering you call yourself a journalist.”

“A yellow journalist,” I say in my defence.

But then Sherman ponders that flawed, imperfect, quote for a second. He holds it up against the year that has been and the future that still awaits us. In the short span of six months, he met me in the woods, we visited his parents at the zoo, we’ve moved to the Arctic Circle together, I went from being unemployable to being a fourth-tier college art professor stand-in, and we just adopted a rabid puppy to keep Ms. Richard Hatch warm at night.

“Besides the fact that Ms. Richard Hatch is not a lesbian, and therefore has no interest in a rabid female dog named Yuri, I don’t regret a single thing that’s happened this year,” he says, embracing me further and kissing me on my third eye. “You know…we have been engaged for a month and a half now. What do you say we take the Air Otter over to Alaska and try to get a Sarah Palin look-a-like to officiate for us?”

“Un-fucking-believable,” I mutter to myself.

“I thought you’d like that,” Sherman says, a little bewildered.

“Oh, I do!” I exclaim, jumping up to grab my parka before this silly polar bear changes his mind. “It’s my dream come true. Right down to the Sarah Palin look-a-like. It’s just so unbelievable that you would think so too.” It is unbelievable, and yet, here it is. “Now let’s go. I want to be legal before Yuri starts foaming at the mouth.”

As I close the door to our conjugal igloo—the one with the sun roof in a land that only has three hours of daylight—I think about the other great writer who I’ve chanced upon this year. David Foster Wallace once told a school of new graduates that real freedom “involves attention and awareness and discipline and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad, petty, little, unsexy ways, everyday” whether we see them or not.

 I thought it sounded nice at the time. Quaint even. The way a person does when they call something a mantra or post it to their Facebook page but never get around to living it. But now, as I look around at this land, I think I get at least a hint of what Wallace really meant.

When we love people we move mountains for them. Not real mountains. Not metaphorical ones either. When we really love the people around us we care about who they are in the banal, imperfect moments of their everyday lives. We move mountains within ourselves to make space for them. We climb over our stereotypes and detonate our long-held perceptions of how we saw the world before they entered our field of vision. We change the landscape of our hearts because they become a part of how we see the one thing we always thought was unchangeable—ourselves.

Or, maybe it is they who move the mountains inside of us. Because it is their presence within us that changes us in ways our eyes and minds have yet to understand. They become a part of us and we are forever different in subtle, grafted, foundational ways that defy the logic of our misbegotten world.

Sometimes it just takes a little time and the application of a few snow tires to get over those mountains, especially when they first appear so daunting. Often those are the mountains most worth excavating though.

As I close the frosty door to this cavern in the tundra, I don’t know what comes next. What I do know is that the me that will find out is part polar bear, part rabid dog and a little bit Ms. Richard Hatch, because those are the people that moved the mountains inside of me this year. They changed my world and became a part of my soul. The world might not be able to see that, but the track-marks exist in parts of me I never understood before, in a land covered in frozen water: a land where all the mountains of my former self have dissolved.