Some thoughts on my one night stand with skiing a very long time ago

My older brother, now pushing 70, was (and I think still is) an extreme skier, competitively so in his youth. That means I grew up surrounded by the various indicia of the skiing life: equipment, magazines, posters etc. All that, stacked into my childhood home, had that ubiquitous vibe of alpine rock and snow and pine. That was, and still is, intoxicating to me. So, at 10 or 15 or whatever, I was like: “I want that…”  My problem was, I suppose: lethargy, procrastination, enervation, and other distractions. At 15 or 20 or 30 or 40 I would always tell myself “yeah! Let's go, I still want it, but, um, later.”

Finally, when I was, idk, 48 or so, I took my oldest daughter to Afton Alps (river bluff ski area in MN, now a feeder to Vail, low hills with 30 or so runs). I don’t remember her age but maybe 7 or 8?? She picked it up in, let’s say, 5 minutes. I watched her do that and then I directly shamed myself: “wtf m f’r, what is wrong with you, you’ve been thinking about this for what? 40 years?” That self-whip was effective. I literally went out the next afternoon, booked a lesson and learned the rudiments in maybe 30 minutes. Having played hockey helped because the movement pattern is not radically dissimilar.  

I was 200% hooked. The feel was incredible, and I went back as often as I could. Let’s call it 2-3 times per week in that winter or what remained of it. I did that "thing" for 2 winters. And then that was the end. At the two year mark my marriage fell apart and I decamped for FL under a fraudulent premise and I never went back home again. Note that the highest promontory in FL within 6 hours of me is 256 feet (sugarloaf “mountain”) ...and there is, obviously, no snow.

I did, in 2010, try to recapture the feel again. This was hilarious, though. Here is how it played out. I had worked every run at Afton. I had, in an organized way, confronted all my fears and systematically figured out how to ski the runs that I feared the most (remembering that these were all tiny). But I threw myself into what scared me the most and dealt with it. This is a highly recommended path for men.  I mean, I had my favorites, sure, but there were maybe 3 runs that pretty much intimidated me…and so I focused myself on those and burnt them to the ground.

Then in 2010 I was in FL and “I love skiing” re-emerged into my mind. “Aha! I’ll go to Vail. My HS friend is a city councilman there.” Made sense. I was a committed skier. I went. Instantiated in Vail village one night, I wanted to be the first on the gondola the next morning and I wanted to ski all day. "I am a king skier!" Heh. So I was then, in fact, first up the next morning and hit the gondola at 9:29.

I went up...and had a great run down. I went up again and had a moderately good run down. I went up again and as I was coming down, I thought “ummm, my legs are getting a bit rubbery…oops," and then I had a hard fall. I mean really hard. Wish I’d had a helmet. Jarred my body bigly. It hurt a lot. But it was not yet even 11 am yet! I picked myself up, restrapped the skis, wiped the blood off my face, got down the hill, returned the rentals, limped to the Chalet, ordered an Irish coffee, and… I have not skied since. Not because I don’t want to but rather for lack of proximity and delayed ambition. End-to-end let’s call my skiing "career" or dalliance 2 years. That delay and weakness now annoys me. 

God damn that dalliance though. It infected my brain. I am certain I will do this again.  I remember watching a 90 year old man once slide past me at Lutsen Mountain once and thinking: “yep, that’s a positive sign.” Otoh, I rebuke myself for my lack of recent action. What would it take? A plane ticket and a lesson or so? Easy. Would that I had done that. Or will. TBD.

But here were some take-aways from my long ago one-night-stand with skiing:

• 1.     Even though I took on a fear of heights (unrelated to skiing) a few years ago for reasons I still do not understand, I am still attracted to the steeps, rock, snow, and pine. That kind of view trumps, for me, beach and palm in 10 million ways,
  
  
• 2.     I learned in skiing, in ways I had not in my swimming or lifting, to connect myself to my body and to the earth and to movement,
  
  
• 3.    The thing about skiing, for me, is that it was/is an interaction between the self and the abyss. Confronting that abyss, one often recoils but the recoil, i.e., leaning back into the hill, guarantees one's fails and falls. In order to use the purpose of the modern shaped ski one must surrender to the void and the fear and therefore fall forward and lean into the abyss and the shaped ski. This is what makes the boot-ski work and gives joy to the enterprise and the carve,
  
  
• 4.    The goal is not always strictly the run. Sure, that run is zen and athletics and excitement, yes. But the whole experience matters. I found as much joy on the lift up, watching the pine and snow and shadow and rock and deer, as I did in the athleticism of the runs down. To ski is to hold the entire hill in the hand of one’s mind,
  
  
• 5.     The young maybe have no fear. Fine. I’ll grant them that. Me? I started at 49 and so I had some fear. But confronting that and systematically disabusing myself of that was extraordinarily constructive. Embracing it and running it to ground was a great thing. In addition to the systematic deconstruction of Afton above, I also remember once going up the Gondola of Lutsen Mountain. My daughter and her friend immediately jumped off and buzzed down the main run. Me? Well, the run had an edge to it that looked like the "end of the world" with nothing but an infinite fall between the "edge" and lake superior 1500 feet below. I won’t say I crawled on my hands and knees to the edge but I kinda did. What did I see over the edge? Well, basically just a gentle slope.  I learned to ignore the indicia of fear and just launch myself and trust the process. It was fun after that and me mocking my own fear on that run later made it even better. This comment is about more than just skiing and "edges."
  
  
• 6.    This bullet is a bit unnecessary and will rile some but the the whole skiing social vibe was attractive to me. I once thought as follows in sequential binary comparisons: take a woman in a bikini. Is she more attractive than entirely un-attired? Yes. How about with jeans and a shirt? Yes. How about in formal dress? Yes. How about fully ensconced in bibs and hat and jacket. Yes. One can see form and character and personality through a thousand layers. I always enjoyed that kind of ski vibe as Neanderthal as it may be. I mean, at 64 it’s dumb to say and my loyalty to my super solid gf moots my point but I am just describing what once was.

Ok, so my daughters and gf will likely murder me for that last comment but I will say that no one can ever deprive me of my attraction to the whole gestalt of hill and snow. That I am moving north again next year from the land of flat and sand and mangrove and palm to the place of rock and snow and altitude and pine pleases me. Yes, I get that northerners sometimes want beaches in February but there are some of us that want to flow backwards towards the snow. Allow me that one thing for a minute. Maybe I’ll regret my choices but nah, maybe not. Give me a little cold, a little snow, and then allow me to cast myself into the abyss at least a couple times more.