Whose woods these are, I think I know. His trailer’s in the village, though. He will not see me stoppin’ here To smoke a butt and drink some beer.

• Nathan and Jennifer Hartswick, ca. 1998, with apologies to Frost

Where do I belong, and where am I welcome?

These are the interlocking questions that occur to me on this Sunday morning at the edge of winter, as the last leaves dangle from one tenacious Norway maple, making a mockery of our attempts to rake. Skiing enters my mind this time of year. I make my preparations. I turn my mind to past experiences. I question - again and again, like skipping vinyl - if there is real value to the practice of careening down mountains on highly-engineered planks. If there is spirituality or meaning to it.

I am close to the ground here in Vermont. I’ve ranged these mountains and forests since before I could walk. I know them better than I do any place else on Earth. To the extent that I can feel like a landscape belongs to me, this is the one I claim. But it isn’t mine in any real sense.

Paper

The structures of land tenure law dictate that I own a tenth of an acre here in the foothills, and I feel mighty partial to the five acres of scraggy woodland in the Northeastern highlands on which my parents live. Ira Allen came through long ago and laid down plots to be sold off to folk from Connecticut and New Hampshire. I’ve now got a title to a subdivision of a subdivision of one of those plots, and I’m lucky. But the groundwater doesn’t give a damn about my piece of paper, it just flows through. Same with the winds and the snows.

Blood

In the birthright sense, the longevity sense, this land belongs to the Western Abenaki tribes and bands. Archaeological and glacial records tell us that this corner of the continent was the last part settled by humans after the ice sheet retreated, making Odanak and Nulhegan relative newcomers, but even they have ten millennia on this land. My ancestors are interlopers and conquerors, come from far away. The fact that they - mostly the much-aggrieved Irish - were themselves conquered doesn’t absolve them or me for visiting the same on new places.

Exploits

The lens of exploration gives this land to whoever scales its mountains, levels its forests, plants its fields, and surveys its waterways. It’s an old European style of ownership. It’s a gentleman with a theodelite in the Himalayas, it’s a ship bristling with cannons in a river delta, it’s a torch and a herd of cattle. It’s a colonial impulse, and - raised with the associated literature - I have often succumbed to this framing as I scramble to a summit. “This is mine because I climbed it” (never mind the many of my own kind who have been on these peaks before me).

Belonging

My blood doesn’t give me this land. My actions and documents don’t give me this land. Nothing really makes it mine. But perhaps I belong to the land.

This sense of the land having ownership over me rather than the converse is perhaps similar to the First Nations approach, but I won’t colonise that idea too. My sense of it is one of a privilege earned, not by conquest, history, or even personal tenure exactly, but by inhabitation. I feel woven into these verdant hills, and - maybe just as importantly - can’t imagine that warp and weft anywhere else. So, if I’m lucky, I belong here. I belong in and to the Green Mountains.

Larger questions haunt the edges of this one. I’m in no position to say what it means to belong to the Samarian Hills, or Cap Haitian, or Gujarat, or - and this one hurts - to famine-abandoned villages in Donegal. If I imagine what it would feel like to be moved from this place and to no longer belong to it, I can only begin to sense the pain involved.

Welcoming

Welcome is not the same as belonging, but it’s what brings the world into focus. I have been and remain welcome in many places to which I do not belong. I’m welcome with my in-laws in Boston, with mountaineers in Colorado, with musicians in Brooklyn, with colleagues in Cardiff and Valencia. I don’t belong to any of those places, but the people there greet me warmly and make me comfortable. My gratitude for this is incalculable, and I am fierce in my determination to extend that welcome to those who come to this place to which I belong.

Snow

I ramble, but now back to skiing, because by happy accident it brings this framing together.

Vanessa Chavarriaga Posada speaks about the immigrant experience in the U.S. outdoor community, and more broadly about her relationship with the mountains of her Colombian homeland. She has pioneered ski descents there and around the world, questioning her propriety along the way. Her sense of belonging is complex, and maybe unmoored. She’s a child of the mountains, but which ones, and among which people? Skiing is one of the channels she uses to try to get those answers.

Giray Dadali is a Turkish American skier who has inadvertently addressed my questions head on in his ski journeys to Türkiye. He situates them in the human landscape:

Which has a greater influence; the heritage from which you descended or the culture in which you were raised?

These skiers use their abilities to explore, yes, but also to connect. They seek welcome and belonging.

Skiing is one of the ways I express my own belonging, my own weave in these mountains. And truthfully my explorations beyond the Appalachian range have been small and furtive. But as I hone in on what it would mean for me to ski in Japan, in Peru, or in Scotland, I begin to see the contours of seeking welcome without ownership and without belonging, and returning the favor. Maybe knowing the difference is one of the ways that skiing can be meaningful.