Snow falls on granite

The place was fall-meets-winter, with golden-red leaves falling over magnificent snowscapes, bold blue skies, thundering granite mountainscapes and an astounding purple sunset reflecting off Half Dome.

On Saturday night, we huddled around a roaring fire, wondering about our lives and the life of our country, thinking that we’d probably be the last to know who would be the next president. I considered the possibility that Tom Wolfe was correct when he wrote, in his Harper’s essay “The Billion Footed Beast,” that the truth in modern America has become so astonishing as to make fiction a bore.

Somehow this brings us round to this week’s cover package, wherein we offer you the SN&R’s Winter Guide, with cold weather stories on subjects ranging from the evolution of extreme winter sports to the psychological impact on Sacramento of the dreaded Pineapple Express. Finally, we provide a winter calendar of events for the region, the presence of which begs the question: How will you spend your winter 2000/2001?

Years from now, when I’m asked where I was during that strange season—when we were supposed to, but somehow didn’t yet have a president-elect—I’ll tell them about the amazing, snowy walk my husband and I took under an impossibly towering El Capitan, realizing how tiny we all are to the universe and that anything can happen, anything can happen.