Thursday March 31, 2011
From Spring skiing to Summer skiing?
Oh, yeah. Bloody hell. I'm sweating in here. Roasting. Boiling. Baking. Sweltering. It's like a sauna. Furnace. You can fry an egg on my stomach. Ohh, who wouldn't lap this up? It's ridiculous. Tremendous. Fantastic. Fan-dabby-dozy-tastic.
The main character, Gal, is living in Spain; the first scene shows him in a disturbingly small golden Speedo, lying on his back sun-tanning, with a bag of ice for to cool off his twig and berries, as it were. Gal is not in what is called in the U.S. “shape.”
So what does this do to snow? The highest runs were mostly good, if slow; the lower runs were ok with hot spots where the snow was sticky and literally would grab your ski. I explained it to someone as “imagine you are skating and you skate onto a rug.” By mid afternoon all the bottom flat runs were absolute hell: like snow from a 7-11 slushy machine.
So, not the best skiing day. However, as a day for getting your skis waxed, drinking a beer, basking in the sun with about 100 skiers, writing at a café table and trying to scam some food from the employee appreciation luncheon – it was pretty much perfect. I skied in a t-shirt, no helmet, no jacket, no gloves. Totally liberating. And there were at least three bikini tops today that (in my humble opinion) really got top marks for excellent snow and skin combo. No guys in speedos though. Or the cast of characters from last year’s Spring Ski scene: no Frodo, no Mario from Nintendo, no cute furry Fox, no Wizard. And no Jesus. Pity. I loved skiing with Jesus last year. I realized: if Jesus came back to Earth seriously EVERYONE would want a picture with him.
I skied 5, 6, 11, 1, 2, 3 and 4, and each was different. And at the end of the day I was literally leaning as far back as I could, to put all my weight on the back of my skis so that they didn’t stick. It felt incredibly strange, literally pulling the ski up with my toes, and it reminded me that at the end of last year I really hurt my toe (I lost the nail on my left big toe) and was more or less skiing on one ski…with the weight pulled all the way back. Almost like water skiing.
It would be easy enough to imagine each of these snow conditions having its own name. Dry pow. Extra sticky. Cascade concrete.
2
I met Marten today, a Polish man who at 57 learned to ski this year. He was a delight to talk with. I found him sitting up on top of 2, and started a conversation with him partly as a way to savor the weather and not ski directly down. We talked about Poland, and the communists, and how he used to go to Germany once a month and bring back things to sell in the weekend market. “But only little, not lots, not greedy.” He told me he’d come to California from Poland on a vacation in 1987, and “I’m still on vacation!” Marten has a great big smile, and he broke it down for me on his second hand gear: skis $70, boots $20, poles $4. He skied 6 and 10 for the first time today, and then he told me he’d only first skied in February!
I waved goodbye to him, and pushed off down Magic Carpet…and seriously, it was as if the thing WAS a carpet. I went about that fast.
Today was Opening Day in baseball, so while I my skis were being waxed I hit the bar and watched the Yankees win. Adrian was there, a guy I’d met at New Year’s, and we talked Red Sox (he was sporting the old school definitely a fan Sox hat) and how we both played outfield back in the day. I told him stories of Massachusetts baseball practices with snow on the field, and he told me that coming from Texas, that was pretty much not happening for him in high school. We finished beers and tried to explain why baseball has a dimensionality to it that football lacks, and then he went off to ski The Wall and I brought a draft beer to the guy who waxed my skis, making me popular and getting me a discount.
Back at the bar, getting ready to head out, I was struck by the fact that the baseball games were on screen but without sound, and that the music was on low enough so that it only took up about half of the audio space. The rest was human conversation, the rough and ready community of Those At The Bar. Bar talk has a rattle and hum element to it, so that A is talking to B but knows that at least three other barflies may or may not be listening.
For the second day in a row, there were boarders in the bar who were utterly played, exhausted, heads down on the tables. I almost felt like I was back teaching.
At the end of the day I was thiking about boots. I always walk home in my ski boots, and today they were clicking right along on the hard pavement, in almost military parade style. When I first learned to ski, one of the true pleasures was taking off my ill-fitting ski boots. On occasion, it was like freeing the prisoners in the Bastille; I felt like smoking a Galois, drinking nouveau Beaujolais, dancing to accordion music, hitting a mime. That good. Now that I own my own boots and have skied a lot of days here, taking boots off is not the peak experience it once was, which is a funny way of saying that when things get easier you lose something.
About fifty yards from my turnoff I saw a guy sitting on a camp stool next to his truck, struggling to and then succeeding in taking off his left boot. He sat there with the boot suspended in the air, a huge smile of relief playing over his face. I caught his eye and commented on boots, and how good it feels to remove them; he commenced tugging at the right boot, got it off, held it up in the air like a trophy, and said, “Oh, yeaaaaahhhhhh.”
Indeed. Many are the pleasures in this life, and not always where you might think of looking.
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