Mission Ridge at Night

Thanksgiving night. The air is crisp up in the mountains. I'm at a friend's house for Thanksgiving, since Jen is out of town. Our friend lives in East Wenatchee, up at the base of Badger Mountain, maybe at like 3,000 feet. There are some remnants of last week's snow in her front yard. (It only rained in Wenatchee.) In the darkness, our friend points to the mountains on the opposite bank of the Columbia, barely visible in the dusk. She points at a rectangle of lights, seemingly floating in space. From this distance it looks like Christmas lights on junipers in front of someone's house.

"The ski resort is lit up on Mission Ridge," she says. "They must be getting ready for tomorrow," when the season opens.

This tiny rectangle of pin points hovers in the surrounding darkness of the mountainside like a constellation. Below is the neon, argon, xenon glow and hum of Wenatchee, stretched out the length of the valley, all of it visible from this height, pale yellows and ivories polkadotted with pinks and blues and magentas. And above it all, nothing but darkness, where the mountains block out the fading sunset--a visible demarcation between "civilization" and "wilderness." All except for Mission Ridge.