Shooting from the prone position at the U.S. National Biathlon Championships
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NICK OREDSON: INTERNATIONAL TERRORIST
The taxi deposited me at Newark International with an impossibly large pile of stuff. Multiple pairs of skis, poles, clothing, waxes and a portable ski bench only rounded out half the load. The other half included various shooting accessories including, of course, my rifle. During my years of working summers in Alaska I transported firearms regularly during travels to the last frontier. However, no matter how many times you do it, there is nothing like walking through a crowded airport with a fully functional firearm and hundreds of rounds of ammunition in your bags. It never ceases to amaze me that you can just casually walk up to the baggage check, and say, "There is a firearm in the black case." The check-in people will not even bat an eye. They ask you if it is unloaded, they open the case and look at the gun (you can't have more than 100 rounds of ammo in the case with the firearm itself), and then send it down the little conveyor belt to go into the plane. You can't joke about having a gun in your carry-on, but you can check an assault rifle, five handguns and 1,000 rounds of ammo in your checked bags if you really want to.
So I get on the jet and scream down the runway, going through the motions of having "fun" on my "vacation," but all the time wondering when this will stop feeling like something insane and start feeling like something that makes any kind of sense.
WORRY
All the way from Newark to Dallas I worry. I worry about my job. I worry about money. I worry about my family — all the usual stuff that just seems to build up regardless of what I do. We layover in Dallas, I make some phone calls back east, and it doesn't help — the wall of worry is still lingering at the fringes and pestering me just for spite. We take off again out of Dallas and head north over Kansas and the heartland before hitting some serious Rockies.
It is incredibly beautiful, and the snow slowly covers more and more of the mountains as we go north, until the entire surface of the Earth is white as far as the eye can see. This is definitely not New Jersey anymore and I feel my shoulder relax a notch or two. The plane lands in Jackson Hole, and I experience the immense pleasure of navigating an airport terminal that is only about 100 feet long. Walk 50 feet, get your luggage. Turn, walk 20 feet to the pay phone. Turn, walk 20 feet to the rental car window that has no line and a bright and helpful person behind the counter.
Contrast this with the Dallas or Newark airports, which sprawl for miles and miles and require their own mass transit systems to navigate. Things seem to be looking up. My feeble credit card thankfully is not declined and I am actually able to get my car without an incredible battle, a confusing and enraging argument, or some unexpected monstrous charge. They just run my card and give me the keys and directions how to get to West Yellowstone. Unbelievable.
So I happily drive out through Jackson, up over the incredible Teton pass (hammering the little chainsaw engine they put in this pipsqueak car as it tries in vain to find the right gear for going 70 mph up a 10 percent grade). I savagely step on the gas and dare it to blow a gasket, reveling in the guilt-free/worry-free magic of a rental car. I come over the hill into Idaho, not really knowing what to expect. To my left are the shining Rocky Mountains, sun glinting down through the clouds, a tremendous early spring day. To my right and up ahead it looks like the frozen wastes of Kamchatka.
Five feet of snow covers the low rolling hills, and the only clues that the area is farmland are the combines and grain elevators strategically placed along the side of the road. The hills roll on and on, blending with the dark storm clouds in a ever-deepening gray gradient in which the horizon never comes. The map tells me to take the road leading directly into the darkest, grayest, coldest-looking section of the entire horizon, and I pause for a moment at the junction heading north. But I am encouraged by my scrappy little orange Sunfire and its full tank of gas, so I step on it and plunge headlong into the gray. The sunlit mountains fade slowly behind me, and I enter a cold world, hoping that spring is just around the corner. It is beautiful, as only nature's adversity can be.
QUIET
West Yellowstone is a slow town this time of year. It has big, wide streets, plenty of places to park, lots of hotels and gas stations, but no actual people, cars, dogs or anything else visibly moving.
I'm sure the hordes will be back, but the innkeep explains that this is the dreaded shoulder season in this part of the country. The winter attractions are all but over, the summer is still a month or two off. So I have come at a marginal time for a marginal sport on a marginal budget during a marginal time in my life. Great.
I meander through town, actually having arrived ahead of schedule, driving up and down the streets looking for some sign of life. I realize what a nonstop blast of movement, noise, conflict, talking, laughing, yelling, cell-phoning, honking and jackhammering I am subjected to during every single second of my current urban existence. I find myself on a quiet street, in a quiet town in a quiet part of the country during a quiet time of year. I stop the car in the middle of a main street, just to see if anything will happen. Sixty seconds — nothing. Two minutes — nothing. Five minutes — nothing. Finally, after I don't know how long, a lone pickup truck comes up the road. I watch in the rearview mirror as he approaches, and casually drives past me, giving me a mildly quizzical look, and keeps going on down around the road. I contrast this with the instant fusillade of honking, yelling, fist-waving and litigation that a microsecond of hesitation during any traffic maneuver elicits in my current metro area of residence. This clears up any doubt that I am far away from home. I get out and walk around, just to get a sense of the place.