A snowy zen garden

A very good friend is riding in Utah right now.[1] They’ve gotten a lot of snow—70" in a few days—and the sun is finally out again. He’s been doing some “farming”, where you pick a clean field of powder and you lay down a track, using as little of the snow as you can. You go back up. You lay down another track, just like the first, but shifted. You’re making furrows; you’re farming the field.

Snowboard farming

I was telling other friends about this recently, when skiing in Klosters/Davos, I was explaining how I’d done it at Atzmännig on Christmas. No-one had disturbed my field then, either. I described it more as tending a zen-garden, a meditative activity. There is no goal to it. There is only a gentle suggestion of order, of pattern, on an otherwise chaotic activity. Does it matter? Certainly not.

The only benefit is that you have more untouched powder if you’re careful with it. The joy and reward is in the conversation of it, the parsimonious use of the available resources, taking what you need, but leaving as much as you can for those who follow. You’ll be delighted if that person is you. You’ll be thanking your past self for being so reasonable, and so generous.

If you do it right, then you don’t even need anything but snow and a slope, and your own effort to combat the gravity, walking up, converting kinetic to potential energy, then enjoying that reserve that you’ve built with your own effort, to farm another row.

Snowy staircase

Our culture generally only understands things that can be monetized. It doesn’t want us wasting time on non-pecuniary activities, which it deems lost opportunities for growth, for innovation, for profit. In order to prevent these inefficient activities, it convinces us that wanting to do them bespeaks mental illness and will result in exclusion from the herd. No-one wants to be excluded. Everyone wants to be accepted. These are the yokes that keep workers producing only that which can be marketed.

His ephemeral rows of art—man-made sastrugi—will be gone with the next wind, a load of human effort anchored forever in the four dimensions of time and space, but no longer to those of us who inexorably follow the arrow of time.