Early last Monday, before daylight, somebody set fires on top of Vail Mountain. Two Elk, the big restaurant up top, burned to the ground. So did the ski patrol headquarters, and some other buildings, and some of the lifts were damaged.

Everybody in Colorado has been reading about it all week. A group calling itself the Earth Liberation Front says they did it, for the lynx, because of the big expansion there that people have been arguing about for years.

I don't know anybody on patrol at Vail. But I know what's in a patrol headquarters. Everybody's lockers. Boots and radios and spare gloves. The sleds. A coffee maker somebody brought from home. The board where the old-timers wrote down the snow totals for twenty years. Somebody's kid's drawing taped up by the door.

I've heard people at the bar this week say the expansion was a mistake, and some of them have a point. The lynx were here first. So were the elk. But you don't settle it by burning a building in the dark where people work. Nobody was hurt. That's luck, not planning.

Gilley put a new padlock on our shack Wednesday. It's from the hardware store in town. It wouldn't stop anybody. I think he just needed something to do with his hands.

A letter came for me at the patrol office. From Texas.

It's from his mother. Four pages, both sides, blue pen. She said she'd been trying to write it since March and couldn't. She said he's going back to school this fall. He's working at a lumber yard this summer. He doesn't remember anything from that afternoon after he fell. He says he's not going to ride in the trees anymore, and she doesn't believe him. She thanked Huntley too, and "the young lady with the blankets," who was Becky Faris, first one there with the sled.

I read it in the truck in the parking lot. Then I read it again. Then I drove home and gave it to Shannon and went out and pulled weeds in our bedsheet of a yard for an hour.

He wrote one line at the bottom himself. I'm not going to put it here. It's his. I've read it maybe forty times.

Moved. Shannon has opinions about where a couch goes. I've learned I don't.

Trail crew again, rebuilding the switchbacks the runoff tore out on the back side. Same pick, same shovel. The new kids on the crew are nineteen and call me sir. I've asked them not to. They keep doing it.

Craig called. Harvest is early this year. He asked if I was coming. I said I couldn't: the crew's short, I just signed a lease, I can't lose the two weeks. All true. He said okay. Then nobody said anything. Wheat's under three dollars. Some fields won't pay back the seed. I sent him a check, which he'll cash out of pride and then send half back out of more pride.

Afterward I went out on the front step and Shannon came and sat down next to me. She said, "You feel bad you left." I said no. She said, "You feel bad you don't feel bad." That's closer.

Closing day. No pond skim for me this year. I worked the pond in waders, fishing people out.

Season two, final: 108 days, 51 sleds, and Thursday the fifth of March.

Shannon and I signed a lease. Half a duplex down valley, two bedrooms, a yard the size of a bedsheet, and a landlord who said no dogs and then asked if we were getting one. We move June first. Mom asked on the phone if we're getting married. I said not yet. She said, "Not yet isn't no," and handed the phone to Dad, who said, "Your mother's happy."

Talked to the counselor with Huntley and the others. She was all right. She said what I already knew from the ambulance: that it's normal not to sleep, that you go over it and over it, that you think about all the ways it nearly went the other way. I knew all that. It helped to hear somebody else say it out loud anyway.

What I didn't tell her is how close I came to skiing past. Two seconds. One more turn and I'd have been below it.

On sweep now I look in every tree well I pass. Every one. Huntley says I'm going to make sweep take an hour. Gilley heard him and said I can take as long as I want.

Shannon doesn't ask about it. She sits with me in the truck after work with the heater going and doesn't ask. Last night she said, "You know where that kid is right now? Texas. Eating supper." I don't know why that helped so much. It did.

SEASON: 97 days, 49 sleds

I've started this three times.

Thursday, on sweep, I found a young man upside down in a tree well in the Silverjack glades.

For people who don't ski: under a big spruce, the branches keep the snow from packing in around the trunk, so there's a deep soft hole there, sometimes six or eight feet, hidden under the branches and the new snow. If you go into one head first you can't get yourself out, and the snow comes in around you. It doesn't take long.

His snowboard was sticking out of the snow. Just the tail, a foot of it, about the color of the bark. I was going past. I almost didn't look. I looked because of what Shannon said last March, about how I really look in every one, and I've been doing it ever since, partly so it would be true.

I called it in and started digging with my hands. Huntley was sweeping the next run over and got there in a few minutes. I don't know how many. We got his face clear. He wasn't breathing.

I'm not going to write the next part out. We did what we're trained to do. It took a while. Then he coughed, and then he was breathing on his own, and then there were six patrollers in the trees and a sled, and later the helicopter on the flat by the base, and he was gone to Denver.

His friend had come down an hour before and waited at the bottom and figured he'd gone to the bar. Nobody reported him missing.

He's alive. That's what they told us last night. He's twenty-three, from Texas, and he's alive.

Gilley says we'll all sit down Monday with a counselor who comes up from Denver for this kind of thing. I said I was fine. Gilley said, "That's what everybody says." I haven't slept much, Thursday or last night.

SEASON: 86 days, 44 sleds. I'm not counting Thursday as a sled. I don't know what to count it as.

Shannon is from Wisconsin. I've said that. What I haven't said is that she owns a foam cheese hat.

Yesterday the Broncos beat the Packers in the Super Bowl, 31 to 24. Shannon watched it at the bar in town in her cheese hat, surrounded by two hundred people in orange. When it was over the whole town drove up and down the main street honking. She sat in my truck with the hat in her lap.

This morning at the top of Number 4, I'd guess every third person getting off the lift said something to her about it. She ran that lift eight hours with the hat on and a face like a fence post. I've never been so proud of anybody.

At sweep there was a little orange Broncos flag stuck in the snow at the top of Lode, where she'd see it from the lift shack. I took it down before she came out. Don't tell anybody.

SEASON: 52 days, 27 sleds

Christmas week. Forty-four sleds for the patrol in four days. I took nine.

The one I'll remember wasn't a sled. A man got off Number 2 at about two o'clock, turned around, and his boy wasn't on the next chair. Six years old, red snowsuit. It went out on the radio and every patroller and lifty on the mountain stopped what they were doing. Lifties checked every chair coming up. We swept the runs under the lift. I've been on the ambulance for a lost kid before, and the worst part is always the parents' faces, and this father's was as bad as I've seen.

Fifty minutes later somebody found him in the cafeteria at the base lodge, eating French fries a lady had bought him "because he looked hungry." He'd got off at the mid-station, skied down to the lodge and gone in out of the cold like a sensible person. His dad sat down on the cafeteria floor in his ski boots and cried. The boy offered him a fry.

Christmas Day was ours off, both of us, first time. Shannon knit me a hat. It's blue and lumpy and I'm going to wear it until it falls apart. I gave her gloves, good ones, the kind lifties can't afford, and she put them on and didn't take them off through supper.

SEASON: 31 days, 17 sleds

Second season. Refresher week again, and this time I'm the one showing the rookies where the sleds live.

(I learned how to make the red bars over the dates. A lady at the library showed me. She also said my page was very plain. I said so am I.)

Raise to $8.50. Huntley had his knee scoped over the summer and is on the hill anyway. Gilley gave me Number 4 and the north side as my regular post, which means the top shack, which means Shannon's lift. I didn't ask for it. I don't think I did.

Twelve inches last week. Everybody in town is walking around looking up.

SEASON: refresher, 0 days, 0 sleds