Action is more interesting than inaction. - Road trip, part 2.

Sunday morning, 11am or so. The fork in the road. The options are: impassable (down and to the right), sketchy (up and to the left), and ignominious (down the way I came). The trees are a little thinner just here. I can see that I am high now, for the rounded tops of mountains stretch into the distance at eye-height. They look only dusted with snow, though I know they must be like this, with a foot of it and only the ground under the trees still visible.

I may be dumb about driving winter roads, but I am not totally daft. I turn left.

This seems like more of the same for the first half-mile -- thick snow turning to slush on the roadway. Greasy is one of the descrptions Northerners have for slush over snow or ice, but this is worse than that: This is a frictionless surface. Not even the chains help much. I drive 3mph, trusting the all-wheel drive and the chains but tending toward the Up side of the road, where my worst-case is that I will slide into the slope. I'm into the trees again, so there's black forest on either side and bare needles on the ground. I stop for a moment to check my chains (AAA Tip!: Check your chains frequently. Driving with chains that are too loose can decrease their effective life by as much as 50%, and can damage your car. Glad I could help.) The world is cold and humid and silent and waiting, under here. I see a red squirrel only because I hear him rustling first.

I start climbing in earnest again, up and out of the trees. I am monitoring the twenty feet around the car: the mountainside is five feet from my shoulder as I drive; I can see there's a dip in the road because of the the F-150's tire ruts; the road drops off five feet from the passenger side; there's a small jog ahead. I look ahead for the next big move I'll have to make, maybe a hundred feet away. A curve.

What the road does is climb until it wraps around a shoulder of the mountain and disappears behind it. But what it seems ready to do is to trick the driver so that she comes close, and then to give a flick of its length and launch her into the bright sky. Only the tips of the trees below the curve are visible. My guess is that it's an 80-100 foot drop.

I stop. I don't want to. I want that curve so much. I want to climb and turn and see something new: more sky, more snow, more mountains far away. I want to own this road, and with it, own winter and freedom and the life I wish I had. I want to be stronger than fear, more clever than death. I want to return to the ground only when I am ready, and it's too soon. To be honest, no matter when I go back down will be too soon; but the longer I stay up here, the longer I can preserve the illusion that this -- the snow and solitude and self-sufficiency -- is enough for me.

But that shoulder, that road, the trees, the bare sky. This starts to slide into Totally Daft territory. Dying like this would be okay, I figure. This is something I love. But I would probably be only injured instead and then I would stop being quite so sanguine about dying, and then I would be eaten by bears.

But I have actually been driving roads this bad for the past hour-plus, and driving them close to 50- and 75-foot drops. The only difference here is me. I know this feeling, from climbing. I can climb a 13-foot V-2, no worries. I can climb a 14-foot V-2 next to it, and chicken out on the final move. What's the difference? Heart, and I value heart a lot. On the other hand, a lot of people would draw the line between courageous and stupid at a different place than I do, somewhere well below the 13-foot line and fire roads in winter.

But this is stupid. Seriously stupid. Anyone -- even crazy risk-takers I know -- would not do this. Anyone, even most of the risk-takers, would tell me I was insane to try. But some of them would have said, "Well, you know the drill." And some of them would have put the chains on, too. The man in the F-150 nags at me. He managed, which means it's possible.

I take my foot off the brake. The Forester inches forward. I go back to watching my shoulder, the road edge, the road ten feet ahead. I inch forward. I inch forward.

I slide two feet, slewing abruptly toward the drop. It's not about my skill. I am a pretty good driver in snow and ice. It's Acts of God, the secret physics of gravity (again, gravity) and friction and momentum across an irregular surface. If I fall, it's not going to be my fault, except for being up here in the first place. Whether I can or not, I should not do this.

There's no possible turnaround here, so I back down the slope I have just come up. This strikes me as ironic, since it's probably more dangerous than the road ahead would have been. And I know that what I have just come up is equally dangerous, so it's not as though I am getting out of danger. Forward actually means less of this than back does. A quarter-mile back I find a place where I can cut and file eighty thousand times to turn around. I creep back to the fork in the road.

I am chanting little aphorisms in my head: Sometimes the greatest courage is accept defeat. Wisdom trumps courage. The important part is that you tried. You don't have to prove anything to anyone, even yourself. These are just making me peevish, because for me, in my life, they're bullshit. I should believe these; any healthy person would; but I don't, they're for the weak, for the people who never would even have gotten up here. Even knowing the fallacy, I cling to it.

I don't want to land yet. I don't want to come back the the way I came. I don't want to lack heart. I want to do this.

I try again, make it ten feet closer to that curve, the sky. Back down again. And again. I do this four times, each time unhappier with myself, more distressed about my life, angrier at being sensible/lacking heart. The fourth time, I say, This time, you're not even slowing down at the fork; you are driving straight through and you are not stopping, not even to look for birds, until this madness passes.

And I do, and it does. Something is gone. It's once again a pretty drive through lovely country. I stop on the way down to look at the piles of colored rocks I had noticed before. When I get off the fire road, I am content to land, to drive on the county road that leads to the US highway that leads to the interstate. I am content with dinner at another drive-in, a quick visit to an antique mall to buy something for my dad for Christmas. I am content to come home and power my laptop back up, read my email, look at that doc file.

No, I am not. I am not content. I am still dreaming about the curve. I know it was 50-50, and that this was the right thing to do, that those of you who have read this far are full of "I'm so glad you didn't try," welcoming me back to the ground. But I am still hungry for it. I will not see it covered again in snow. It will be closed for the season soon enough, may already be. It will be next summer before I try again, and it will not be the same road, because I will not be the same person. I will be the person who didn't do it when it was white and dangerous and full of triumph.

Time for a change in life.