40 • FEATURE WE DON'T DO LIFT TICKETS
WE DON'T DO LIFT LINES
And what happens when you scissor in half a Möbius strip? Voilá, you get another Möbius strip, linked to the first. Same soul, next journey.
The Walkabout
Now you’re there, this is the place where light and darkness meet, the seam in the Mobius Strip. Go ahead; stick your head in there. What have you got to lose? —Winston Branko Churchill Winston began his walkabout on June 20, 2008, at the start of the Colorado Trail southwest of Denver. The Colorado Trail spans about 500 miles, mostly above 10,000 feet in elevation and far from towns or supplies, and terminates in Durango. Through-hikers carry what they need to survive, and occasionally trek into towns to re-supply; this is what Winston did. His friend Jonathan Wrobel sent him essentials, mailing them to post offices along the route. In August, Winston picked up a last cache of provisions in Creede. He had veered off the Colorado Trail after hiking alone, with only his dog for company, for weeks. He kept a journal that he mailed to his sister, and continued to write and document his journey. His words, a mix of fantasy and reality, are a glimpse into his mind, full of determination and genius and madness. Winston www.TellurideMagazine.com
W E D O N ' T D O P O W D E R D AY S
resolved to leave civilization behind and to continue on some clear and unadulterated path to salvation— his, he believed, and the world’s. His last known location is Lake City, also off the Colorado Trail. He leaves his dog at the Visitor Center, and phones his ex-girlfriend and asks her to find a good home for his dog. And he calls Wrobel, and leaves a message that chills his friend: “Dude, I don’t need anything anymore. Thanks for everything.” Winston’s body wasn’t found until the following summer in 2009, despite search efforts, a website set up to try to track his whereabouts, missing person posters, and the desperate attempts by his family and friends to locate him. His remains were found in Porphyry Basin, a quarter of a mile from his campsite, outside a small cabin. The cabin was unlocked, and stocked with food, fuel, and a stove. But Winston chose not to enter it. Instead, he inexplicably spent his remaining 40 or so days on earth fasting again, from what could be pieced together from his camera, journals, and clues from his campsite. He died of starvation and hypothermia,
WINTER/SPRING 2016-2017
despite the relatively mild temperatures in October. He had come to the end of his long, winding path, but he wanted his death to mean something. He wrote in his journal: “Please don’t forget about me and all we’ve done, ‘cause I don’t want to die if no one’s listening … if you hear me then I have hope … I don’t need to know you or that you even exist, just fix it and do it some good, this is your creation, I just know you wouldn’t just let it all slip by, because somehow we’re all connected.”
When Time Becomes a Loop
You end where you began, and then you start again, there is no end. The strip is a constant linear plane, representative of life, and time. —Winston Branko Churchill The principle of a Möbius strip is that it is a surface with only one side and only one boundary. Mathematicians and physicists still ponder it: they plot it in Euclidean space, it is the basis for Nikola Tesla’s resistor in an electronic circuit, and it’s used to represent the space between twonote chords in orbifold music theory.
I don’t have that kind of understanding of it, not the perspective of a mathematician or a physicist or even Winston, who compares it to a lifetime. To peer over its edge would be to see the rest of the Möbius: If your life were the same, it would mean peering over the edge and seeing the parts of your journey that are unknowable, because you are at a fixed point in time. We can’t see the future. We have just a vague memory of the past. Maybe Winston was mentally ill, or maybe he was enlightened. Perhaps he spent so much of his life zig-zagging along the edge that he caught sight of something that most people can’t see. I still regret letting Winston remain anonymous in that long-ago letter. So maybe this is redemption, telling his story now. He wanted so desperately for his death to have significance, for his words and beliefs to be shared. But he was wrong. It was his life, not his death, that bears that burden. His 40 years, his time here on the loop with us, is the only part we can see. ***With gratitude to Mark-Scott Nash, author of Forty Demons, and Jovanka Mersman, Winston’s sister. \
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