KEEPING MY PACKED POWDER DRY Skiing. I Could Think Of No Good Reason To Go Back Up There.

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KEEPING MY PACKED POWDER DRY

Skiing.

I could think of no good reason to go back up there.

I didn’t have to deplete last week’s discretionary funds or risk
humiliation, broken limbs and frostbite to pay the mortgage,
re-stock the refrigerator or tune-up the truck. There were no debt
collectors waiting at the summit, no groceries lining the trails, no
service stations holding a bay open at the base lodge.

Yes, I could’ve easily passed the day in these Vermont boonies
just LOOKING at the mountain outside my window...the
snow-brushed dense woods gracing its pristine slope and the thin
clouds winnowing across its peak...without dusting the cobwebs
from my long-closeted ski equipment and schussing down the resort
on its other side.

No, I couldn’t think of one good reason to impoverish, mortify,
fracture or freeze myself for the sake of another ride in the chariots
of the Nordic Gods.

Not one...’cept the pure hellish adventure of it.

It was the same inner, double-daring voice that echoed from my
childhood---the spiritual pitchfork that once prodded me to stick my
tongue on a sub-zero metal flagpole, pee on an electric fence, and
force a fire department head & neck lube job to extricate my
groundhog-chasing cranium from a storm drain.

My first outing on skis may not have been a wide-eyed,
pinwheeling skid down the backyard hill in rubber mukluks whilst
clotheslined into barrel staves and clutching broom handle poles,
but that’s how I remember it.

I am sure, however, of the last three things I heard and saw and
felt the first time I attempted to ski. In chronological order:

1. My Dad hollering, “Bend your knees!”

2. The lilac bushes.

3. Bent knees.

Next comes a recollection of my first trip going up a snowy
surface on a rope tow, now all but extinct, and for good reason.
They were more hazardous than any imaginable trip down,
especially when one falls, panics, forgets to let go, and is dragged
halfway up the hill with his left ski tip in his right ear.

Fast forward to last week. In my adulthood interim I’ve
occasioned to go snow-skiing, usually for all the wrong reasons (see:
flagpoles, fences and groundhogs). Then, after suffering the alpine
equivalent of a skinned lingua, high-voltage groin, and the dreaded,
boyhood “ostrich head,” I remember why I’d not majored in
Downhill Racing in the curriculum o’ Life:

I ski like a tongue-less ostrich with its zipper on fire.

Reason enough, in my selective memory of truth &
consequences, to pack up the gear and head for the hill. But, I
soon began to remember everything I’d forgotten....

The price of an all-day lift ticket confirmed my fear that the
yearly tune-up, monthly mortgage and weekly grub would have to
wait. No matter. By day’s end I’d surely be fortune-bound as
tabloid fodder and a talk show headliner:

“MAN IMPALED ON MOUNTAIN LILACS GETS KNEE
TRANSPLANTS FROM HIS OWN SKULL BONES....”

Michael Jackson would pay millions for the rights to the plaster
casts alone.

Next came ski apparel. I hadn’t updated it since my last trip up
there. Sure, I layered my clothing like one does in snow country,
wearing six sets of everything. But, I felt and I’m sure I looked like
what happens when an incontinent Baby Huey meets Frankenstein
the Eskimo Pie salesman.

Even where one faces the perils of wind-chill, avalanches,
bottomless crevasses, pre-adolescent lift attendants, and the
prospect of having one’s knee and skull bones meet in a looping
hyperflexion around a mountain shrubbery, fashion is a factor.

I didn’t care. I came to have a hellish adventure. I was warm
without Spandex. Snug without Velcro. Visible without Day-Glo.
And, I’d already crashed into the public toilet attempting to turn
around in ski boots.

It’s impossible, by the way, to walk while wearing ski boots.
About all one can do safely while inserted in ski boots and
unattached to skis, is plant one’s self in front of a urinal and try to
sell a few Eskimo Pies. One must camouflage this action by
imitating a teetering Baby Huey peeling back six layers of
unfashionable thermal diapers just in time.

There had been another change in the ski world since I’d last hit
the slopes. I discovered, upon exiting the chairlift at the summit,
that ski areas will avoid using the word “icy” at all costs.

Down below, conditions at the top had been reported as “thin
cover,” and/or “frozen granular.”

An icy rose by any other name.

This resulted in a two thousand-foot sideways glissade---a
hellishly adventurous cartoon monster skimming akimbo o’er a
thin cover of frozen granulation, wrapped in a dull and
freeze-drying cocoon of piecemeal long-johns.

This trip was interrupted once about halfway down by an
unscheduled but gloriously executed application of Sir Isaac
Newton’s little known Fourth Law, the “Butt Over Bandbox
Theorem,” i.e.:

“Any cold and damp irrational object setting itself in a rapidly
descending motion after a five-year hiatus in a warm and dry
reasonable dwelling, must come to a full & complete stop at least
once before hobbling back to the parking lot.”

Okay, besides skiing, there are two things one can do safely in
ski boots....


Copyright 1998 B. Elwin Sherman. www.toolkitinparadise.com All rights reserved.

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