Mustard Yellow Under the Work Jacket

The first cabin does not leave until eight. I unlock the maintenance door at six thirty, when the valley is still blue and the floodlights over the bull wheel are the only bright thing on the mountain. My breath goes straight up. No wind yet. That is how I know the day hasn't properly started.

Under the dark brown work jacket I wear the mustard sweater my aunt knit two winters ago. It is thick, uneven at the shoulders, and too warm for anything except standing still at minus nine. Nobody sees it except me and the cable. That suits me.

The Six-Forty Inspection

Inspection is a list I say out loud to myself: grip force, sheave liners, the emergency brake that has never once been needed. I tap each sheave with a hammer and listen. A good liner rings clean. A tired one answers flat, like a coin dropped on wood, and I write it down before I can talk myself out of it.

A tired liner doesn't shout. It just sounds a little less like itself.

By seven forty the shed smells of grease and cold metal, and my hands have already lost the argument with soap. I keep an old watch in my chest pocket instead of on my wrist, because a strap in a gearbox is a mistake you only make once. It was my grandfather's. It runs four minutes fast and I have stopped correcting it.

The lift operator arrives, stamps snow off his boots, asks about the weather. I tell him what the ridge told me: wind from the north, building after ten. The mountain is more punctual than any payroll I have signed. It has never once forgotten to be cold in February.

First Cabin, Eight O'Clock

At eight the motor takes the load and the cable begins to move, and the empty cabins go up one by one like a sentence being written. Somebody down at the ticket window complains about the price. That's fine. I would complain too, if I hadn't seen what it costs to keep the whole thing honest in the wind.

The sweater smells of machine oil now. I wear it anyway.

At lunch I sit on the concrete step with the sun on my back and eat what I brought: bread, cheese, a pear from the box under the counter. Tourists photograph the peaks. I photograph nothing. The peaks are in the same place every day, and I have learned that is not the same thing as knowing them.

In the evening I walk down instead of taking the cable. My knees complain, my boots are heavy, and near the treeline the wind finally arrives, early, as promised, pushing the cold under my collar. I do up the top button. Tomorrow the mustard goes back under the jacket and nobody will know, and that is the part I like.