Emily Brisse

When I was a child, my favorite book was The Cross-Country Cat . No wonder: cross-country skiing held a mythic importance in my family. The snow-covered treks my parents would tell of their pre-children years were the stuff of lore to my brother and I, full of blizzards and coyotes and an unabashed love of the fresh air. We two were on skis as soon as we could run. It's because of this, surely, that I cannot remember a winter growing up without hearing the slice of my stride atop crisp, perfect snow, without recalling a deep-woods quiet so absolute it soaked into my bones and left me light. So it was a bit of a shock to lock into my skis on Saturday night and push off not into some rural forest, but into a steady parade of thousands of people zipping across the groomed trails in their skis and snowshoes, all in celebration of the Luminary Loppet . Quiet, it was not. Isolated, it was not (the festival took place on Minneapolis' Lake of the Isles, the city skyline shrouded by ...