And now for a winter break…..At
about 18, I went on my first ski trip with my friend, Steve. We drove to Snow Bowl outside of Flagstaff
where we rented ski equipment, bought a lift ticket, and headed for the
slopes. I had no idea what I was doing
except to say that the skis clamped on the ski boots and pointed downhill, and
you went along for the ride. In fact,
that is just what happened. After putting
on the skis and shuffling to the rope tow, I made my slippery way to the top of
the bunny hill and then headed down. As
an invincible teenager, I figured I would pick it up on the way and because my
progress was accompanied by several spills, I wasn’t in much danger of being
out of control. Stopping, of course, is
the problem. Controlling speed is a
corollary. I finally got the skis under me and began to slightly understand
turning and continued downhill past the lodge.
I looked around and saw no way to
get back up the hill and noticed I was accelerating down the hill, and so not
completely understanding the theory of the snow plow technique, I did the only
thing I could figure out at the time, and that was to wipe out. In those days, ski brakes hadn’t evolved, and
a safety strap was fastened around each ankle to prevent the ski from running
away. My wipe-out had seemingly spun the
skis around each other and were so tangled that the only hope I had of sorting
them out was to take off one of the straps.
I was attempting to accomplish this in thigh deep snow, and when I
finally got one strap untangled from the other and put the ski aside, the unsupervised
ski took off down the hill like a bullet.
There I was, buried in the snow, still fastened to one ski with the
other leaving a thin but distinctive track down through the woods. Skiers will tell you that this is very poor etiquette
as an out-of-control ski can hurt someone that it happens to run into at high
speed. That realization began to come to
me as well as the fact that I had to retrieve it. I got to my feet, stuck the other ski in the
snow tail down, and started following the track. Circumstances could have been much worse, I
now realize. I might have actually
pointed it down the ski slope and it might have been gone forever, or the
police might have shown up looking for the idiot who had killed someone by
sending a ski down the hill alone. Fortunately,
I had inadvertently pointed the ski to the side and it made its way through the
woods for an interminable distance until it came to rest against a blessed
tree. Post-holing all the way, I
followed the track to the tree and recovered the ski, and then set about
climbing back up the hill carrying the ski through thigh-deep snow in uncomfortable
and hard to walk in ski boots. I thought
I was in good shape, but when I got back to my lone-standing ski, I was
completely exhausted. That didn’t really
matter though, because, exhausted or not, I still had to climb the slope back
up to the lodge carrying both skis. I
finally arrived at what seemed to be a level path and not wanting to appear to
be the complete idiot that I was, I put the skis back on and coasted to the
rental return and figured that I had gotten my half-day’s use out of them and I
was really just contented to collapse.
The valuable lesson I learned is that lessons really do have a purpose,
whether you are an invincible teenager or not.
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