During the pandemic, nature calls (where there are no doorknobs, faucets and handles that have been touched by others)

Now and then, there is a day where things go right because you let them. When, for whatever reason, you get out of your way. You don’t take into account anything that doesn’t matter. You don’t set expectations within the context of time, money or energy available. You don’t let the hooks flying at you in the form of annoyances or anxieties come anywhere near flesh.

The concerns of the day bounce off you like the steel of your resolve toward the pure experience you want, and you get. Because now and then, you haven’t skipped any steps or put in too many, and sometimes it happens on the same day to you as to the dog, and everyone eats breakfast and is heading to the mountains like we’re never going back home.

I remember a day like this with Cogswell in the back seat and only good songs on the radio. Every light in town was green, or else we didn’t notice that the world was conspiring against us like on a Monday morning when they are red, red, red. And you jerk to a stop again with the angst of a caged animal wearing slacks and a blouse, only, as a friend reminds me, no one uses these terms anymore.

“Actually,” she said, “no one has said blouse since before you were born.”

I’m sticking with the word. Any article of clothing so fragile it only makes sense to wear in temperature-controlled buildings — and also great for waving like a flag out the window of a car leaving the last light in town with the radio blasting “Free Bird” — is not just a shirt.

We were free of drag — the total sum of the things in life that keep you buttoned down. We had our shotguns and our snowshoes. The temperature was still below freezing at that early hour. In a hundred more miles on the road, the sun would hit the north-facing slopes, and the light would glint off the snowscape like diamonds. We’d be in heaven, and we wouldn’t care if it was precisely the right temperature or not.

Things could go wrong, but those thoughts didn’t enter our minds. We could find another party at our spot. The snow could be too soft or too hard for Cogswell’s paws. The birds could have moved down or up or over.

Sometimes it’s worth it to have a conversation about what-if-but-then. But, from the time we woke up to the sun coming through the slats in the blinds before 8 a.m., we focused on what the day would bring and not what it could take away.

No one wears a blouse on the beach just as no one wears them in the mountains. In March, the high slopes feel like a warm coast with the wide-open reflected light and the amplitude of snow so much like waves.

A day like this comes after weeks of reading statements about COVID-19 from a variety of organizations. I watched a woman put 25 containers of anti-bacterial soap in her cart in increments of five. She would pause after five and then add five more. I wondered what she was counting. The shelves were empty when I went back to the store at lunch.

A plague of emails and social media posts suggested washing hands. Another answer that came to mind is an unlikely one, but it made the most sense to me. If you immerse yourself in nature away from the human world as much as possible, you are less likely to contract COVID-19.

You are more likely to connect to the natural world, experience the symbiotic link and realities of weather and wildlife.

As a side benefit, nature gets you out of the house, office and aisles. You are away from crowds. Yet, unlike being trapped indoors and experiencing the great alone of social media, you are never alone outside.

There are no doorknobs, faucets and handles that have been touched by others before the last snow and wind scrubbed the surface. A wide-open field of snow is the vision of cleanness.

The dogs are never as clean when they leave the groomers as they are when they return from a run in the mountains. Some people call it a snow bath. After a roll in fresh snow, there is not even the scent of oatmeal shampoo.

When Hugo and Winchester unloaded from the truck this past weekend, they plunged into snow in splashes of white. Cogswell, dashing as he is, has never dashed. When Steve and I walked up the mountain in deep snow behind this dapper chap of a dog and into mountain light, I enjoyed his plodding pace.

Just at the treeline, as we decided the snow was too deep and thought we ought to head back, Cogswell stumbled upon a willow ptarmigan. The sureness registered in his body as something primal told him to stop and stand still.

As the person who knows that no one trained Cogswell to point a sitting bird — he’s always been more of a grouse-in-the-trees dog — it was impressive to watch him sort out the experience for the first time.

The ptarmigan flew in the only direction that presented a shot, and Cogswell ran to the downed bird. He picked it up, and because it was one of those days in which everything goes right, he brought the bird directly to me. He opened his mouth to let me have the bird, and it had been carried more gently than any bird a dog has given me.

Cogswell’s eyes were bright in the sun, and he sat next to me on the hillside. He seemed proud of himself, and we were both grateful. We sat a while with the white slopes above us like stadium lights. The cool draft from the snow beneath us was like air conditioning under a hot summer sky.

We were not in a crowd or enduring in isolation what E.O. Wilson has called the age of loneliness.

For better or worse, the outdoors offers less danger than cure and precaution. We had escaped the human world for a moment, immersed ourselves in the high country, and felt a whole lot better.

Christine Cunningham is a lifelong Alaskan and avid shooter who lives in Kenai.