Skiing the Edge: Humor, Humiliation, Holiness, and Heart

jules

HUMOR

Carnage

Lori Knowles

It’s February 16, 1991, my 24th birthday. I’ve been guiding a pair of Hong Kong high rollers around Blackcomb all week. Today — their final day — we’re bound for Whistler.

A trip up the Peak Chair — correction, the old Peak Chair; a rickety, fixed-grip triple so high it makes Charlie Sheen seem grounded — is the icing on their Canadian vacation cake. Skiing The Peak is the story they want to take back to their buddies. Skiing The Peak confirms the considerable size of their cajones… Capiche?

"The toughest part about Skiing The Peak, I explain in the liftline, isn’t the steeps, the ice or the Mini Cooper moguls. The Hong Kong high rollers are nodding, their eyes wide. It’s not even the cliffs or the dropping-in off cornices… More eager nodding. Or the crevasses. Eyes getting wider, heads still bobbing. Though, you might want to watch those crevasses." I pause for effect.

Nope, I continue, "the toughest part is riding the chair. The Hong Kong guys concurrently raise their eyebrows. There’s this midstation, see? It’s got this ramp, see? And if you let your poles dangle while you pass over the ramp, they’ll snap. Bust right off!"

I make a sharp, breaking gesture with my hands; the Hong Kong guys flinch. "Then, you’ll have to ski the steeps without poles. Trust me, you don’t wanna do that. Happened to me last week and… well, just trust me. I’m a ski pro, and even I found it tough."

Heads bobble; the guys agree completely and absolutely.

Approaching mid-station, we’re focused on lifting our poles. We’re concentrating. Entirely engaged. We approach the ramp, I give the word, simultaneously we lift up, and we sail smoothly over midstation — not a single snap.

Yes! I say, High fives! (Give me a break; it was 1991).

And then the chair stops. We’re still loudly praising our (my) good pole sense when I hear a distinctly unfriendly voice.

Hey! You, in the Blackcomb uniform. [Sidebar: 1991 pre-dates the amalgamation of Blackcomb and Whistler; relations between the two mountains’ staffs are as chilly as Tremblant in January.]

Me? I say, twisting to talk to the liftie on the midstation ramp about ten feet back.

Who else? he asks. See anyone ahead of you? I twist forward to a long line of empty chairs disappearing in the fog ahead of me.

FOG! I holler, startling the Hong Kong high rollers. "There’s FOG!"

Right, says the liftie. Which means The Peak is closed. You were supposed to get off at midstation. Can’t you read signs? Or don’t they care if instructors can read at Blackcomb?

Yes… I mean, no, I splutter, not admitting I was too intent on the bloody pole lecture to read any bloody signs. Can’t you just back us up so we can get off?

"Uh, no. I can’t just back you up." He does the D’uh thing, also popular in the early ‘90s. You’ll have to go to the top, get off, get on again, then download.

"All the way to the bottom?" I ask, incredulous.

All the way to the bottom.

We ride the rest of the way up in total silence. We offload at the top. I endure another rebuke from a second smirking liftie. Then, after assuring me he’ll radio down to alert the base crew to slow this fixed-grip so we can offload safely, we board the chair again… and drop down into… into fog.

Things get worse when we pass that wretched midstation and meet upward-bound smart-ass skiers. The catcalls are cutting.

Couldn’t handle The Peak, eh? Aren’t you a Blackcomb instructor?

Whatsa-matter, Blackie? Whistler steeps too steep for ya?

Then we reach the second lift tower from the base. There are two lifties on the ground: one in the shed… snoozing, I swear; the other mindlessly loading chairs. Neither notices our approach. [Sidebar 2: Remember, it’s a fixed-grip lift. Chairs sail full speed around the bullwheel, then slip quickly under riders’ bums. It’s next to impossible to get off if you don’t slow the freakin’ chair down.]

They have no idea we’re coming! I frantically shout. The Hong Kong guys are not yet getting what’s about to happen. Liftie! I howl. I swing my poles wildly. "LIFTIE!"

Nothing.

My clients get it about the time our skis slap the snow. We’re Mach-3ing along the ground toward the whirling bullwheel, a long liftline of astonished skiers staring at us, mouths wide open.

The lifties continue to load and sleep, load and sleep.

Think! I order myself. Think. Fast.

Then, a solution.

JUMP OFF! I scream at my clients. But the Hong Kong high rollers are too stunned to move. They’re frozen. So, like any real ski pro would, I dump them. Totally. I abandon the chair just as it hooks onto the bullwheel.

My compadres, cajones completely shrunk, careen around the spinning wheel with the force and speed of a twister. Eyes are really wide now.

Meanwhile, a threesome of intermediate skiers has glided unwittingly onto the loading ramp. They look back, expecting to lodge their rumps on an empty chair. Instead, they see two guys in green neon, flailing their skis, thrashing their poles, desperate to exit this gawdawful beast.

The waiting riders hurl themselves sideways, frantically trying to clear the track. One takes out the liftie. One biffs into the skiers in line behind him. They all go flying.

My shrieking clients bash into the one poor sod left standing on the ramp. Ping. PingPing. PingPingPing. Skiers are going down like bowling pins. Hats, mitts, poles, skis… it ain’t pretty. It’s carnage.

I slip quietly into the liftline and observe the slaughter. I count up the tips I’m not going to get from my wealthy clients.

Then I shrug. At least, I think, my poles haven’t snapped.

Old Dog, New Trick

G.D. Maxwell

How old is too old to learn to ski? Beats me… but be careful. First steps may lead to unexpected consequences.

I was 35 years old the first time I clicked into a ski binding. But even before that first step, I listened in disbelief to the cocksure, impossibly young instructor kick off my half-day lesson in ski survival. The first thing you’re going to learn is how to fall, he said. "There are two good reasons for this. First, you’re going to fall, so it’s better if you know how to do it without hurting yourself. Second, it’s the easiest way to stop yourself if you find you’re out of control."

Out of control?

The look on my face must have said, You’re kidding, right? but in considerably more colorful language.

Eyeing my ‘ski’ outfit — slick nylon K-Way pants and a way-too-warm parka — the instructor shot me a ‘stupid old guy’ look and said, For you, we’ll need a different strategy. If you fall wearing those, you’ll slide to the bottom of the mountain.

Condescension in one so young is unbecoming.

Eventually, I learned to fall, sliding on nylon coming naturally, without any training. Even with my admittedly porous memory, that’s about all I learned in that particular lesson.

Maybe this is a good time to explain how I found myself, smack in the middle of middle age, about to begin my downhill slide.

Days after the Christmas I first inflicted my family on my new partner, she and my younger sister, in the throes of advanced eggnog poisoning, conspired to pull a practical joke on me. They decided to take me skiing.

I had never been skiing. I’d almost been skiing in high school, but a day or two before I was set to go, my natural clumsiness reared its head, and I spent most of the rest of that school year limping; I’d performed self-surgery on my right knee with a blunt instrument… asphalt roadway.

During my university years — all right, my university decade — skiing was out of the question, having developed a fondness for eating and a sense of moral obligation to pay rent. I sublimated my mountain jones by climbing and bouldering on the mountain outside my home in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The same mountain on which I was now about to humiliate myself.

Until 24 hours before the moment of truth, I thought riding chairs and sliding down on waxed boards was a pretty wussy way to earn your mountain. Anything short of hiking up and glissading down at the edge of the illusion of control seemed, well, froufrou.

But the women had arranged equipment and said they’d teach me, so I agreed to go. Well, actually they called me a coward, belittled my manhood and made those awful clucking chicken sounds when I told them they were out of their minds, so, really, I didn’t have much choice.

Having climbed and hiked virtually every nook and cranny of Sandia Mountain, I felt supremely comfortable taking up their challenge. It was my mountain after all, at least the rugged side not adorned with chairlifts.

That all changed the fateful moment I finally clicked into my bindings. At that point, it became the Twilight Zone… and I became Zippy The Spaceman From Another Planet

On the planet I was from, gravity was a more benign force. It tended to keep one affixed to the ground. But on Planet Sandia, gravity sped residents out of control, hurtling toward painful oblivion.

On my planet, a wise man named Newton discovered