First Cabin at 5:40

The valley is still black at five in the morning, and the streetlights on the way to the station only make it look colder. I walk the same fifteen minutes every day: past the bakery with the shutters down, past the fence where the same dog barks at me. Nobody is at the station when I arrive. That is the part I like.

Before the first light

The routine does not change. The haul rope, the sheaves, the brakes, the door contacts. I run my hand along the rope where it comes off the bull wheel and look for small things — a broken wire, a spot of rust, grease that has gone the wrong colour overnight. Twenty minutes, maybe thirty if the wind was strong.

A cable never tells you it is tired. You have to go and look.

There is a small tin of coffee powder in the bottom of my toolbox, next to the callipers. I boil water on the stove in the workshop and drink it standing in the doorway, facing the mountain. The wind up here takes the steam away before I can taste anything. I have never once considered fixing that.

At five forty the machinery room begins to hum and the first cabin moves out of the station. That is the moment I actually wake up — not the alarm, not the coffee. The rope turns, the cabin sways once, and the whole valley becomes a working thing with a timetable.

What the wind does

On the north side the wind comes over the ridge with nothing to stop it. In February it can push a cabin enough that the passengers laugh, and then stop laughing. I know the numbers. I still go up and stand at the top station and watch one cabin come in before I trust the day.

There is an old man who takes the first cabin every morning, in a green jacket, with a folded newspaper he never opens. He nods at me. I do not know his name and I have never asked. Four winters now. When he is not there, I notice, and I do not like it.

By afternoon it is over. The mountain belongs to the skiers, the machinery room is warm and loud and ordinary. I walk home in a kind of light I never see on the way in. Boots by the door, soup, sleep by nine. Tomorrow it starts again at five.