In a normal year the lodge becomes The Cottonwood Club: for one night as many of the company staff as possible crowd into camp to dance, drink, and play ping pong. Cocktail attire and eccentric outfits are strongly encouraged, and dedicated attendees coordinate multiple costume changes. Because of covid, the remaining ten or so of us turned the evening into a tent-pub crawl: in festive garments, our happy mob traipsed from tent to tent for a beverage and a surprise. We drank grape-juice mimosas and watched anime; sipped Dark & Stormys while learning our love languages; fired off postcards to our future selves with hard spicy kombucha; scribbled poetry with watermelon gin; played Pass the Face, contorting our expressions 'round the room with rummy ice cream; performed an impromptu talent show with red wine + Coke; and stuffed our mouths with marshmallows after hot chocolate with whiskey. And after all that, tipsy ping pong to keep up tradition.
The next day we moved out of our tents, cleaned up a bit, and read and dozed in the woodfire-warm lodge. A feeling of slack tide prevailed -- sated from a full summer, we paused before a long exhale, then departure, flowing outward in disparate directions. Clean up, put away, talk over the season now passed, last hike, last kayak, last dinner, goodbye.
September is a transitional month. Already the Chugash mountaintops had frosted over. Back in Michigan it has been beach-summery and chill-rainy and in between. I'm glad that when I get to Coldfoot it will be definitively winter, the drear death of autumn already mercifully cloaked by snow.
