December 5, 2009
Beginner's muck
by Tony Chamberlain/
The usual complaint was that a weekday forecast had hyped some cataclysmic storm that never materialized, keeping weekend skiers and boarders away in droves. Most people begin planning their weekend around midweek, and with TV weather “teams” trying to out-hype each other by scaring the heck out of their audiences, the decision to stay home was made long before said phantom storm fizzled.
“Someday,” I assure my snowbird friends and family members, “I may get old enough to consider joining you in Florida for the winter, but it’s going to be a very, very long time. Hell, I’m not even 70 yet.”
Now truth to tell, I do cave to family pressure every March for a whirlwind tour of aforementioned snowbird friends and family, a splash in the 74-degree ocean (not bad, really) and maybe a day off Jupiter harassing sailfish and such.
But then, it’s time to leave with the words, “You can find such great real estate bargains down here now,” ringing in my ears. Along with my standard retort: “Why buy real estate when I can mooch off you guys?”
But that’s not the real reason, of course. The real reason is: It’s March, the finest single month in our hemisphere to go skiing! The rivers are running, winter’s beginning to melt away, so what am I doing here in Florida?
Now I don’t really mean to knock the southland (well …) and the truth is I’m a winter person. Sure, I love sailing, swimming, growing tomatoes and all the rest, but that’s all in its season.
In winter, I want to ski and snowshoe and take those walks at night when the snow squeaks under your boot when you go out for firewood.
Even as I write this, I understand how many people dread the “onslaught” of winter — the cold, the slip-slide driving, shoveling snow … It may be just a little flippant to suggest that one could ease much of that pain by wearing warm clothes, driving a Subaru Outback, and hiring a high school kid to shovel the driveway.
Because, at bottom, there is a core of folks who just don’t dig winter. How they got stuck in northern climes in the first place is probably irrelevant at this point, but one thing is for sure — if they ever did feel the sheer exultant joy to be found in skiing and snowboarding, something just did not take. They are not retainers of the experience, which perhaps was not a good one in the first place.
I once talked another couple, friends of my family, into finally trying a ski weekend with us. They had never been skiing but were reasonably athletic. We water skied and did some jogging at local road races together. They also were pretty adventurous.
We chose King Ridge, in one of its last years — a sweet family area perfect for learning, in the Sunapee region of New Hampshire. All the pieces were in place for a nice introduction to skiing for our friends — bluebird weather, no wind, nice snow conditions. On my recommendation, they took a small group introductory lesson together. So far, so good.
But about halfway through Saturday morning, even as their two sons were starting to rip down Lobster Quadrille with my son, there was trouble in paradise.
Though she had been up the hill maybe half a dozen times, Mary could not get over her terrors of the chair lift. Come to find out, she had some vertigo, and did not realize that skiing involved “hanging up in the air,” as she put it.
Then I ran across Dick at the bottom of the hill with his skis off and boots pulled open. He’d gone through the process of renting, but his boots had been buckled down too tight at the start, and in two hours his feet were killing him.
“No hard feelings,” Dick said that night after he spent the afternoon reading a book, “I don’t think skiing is right for us.” Mary nodded in agreement. The next day we took their kids over to Sunapee while they went antiquing.
For a long time after that, I had slight guilt pangs and thought long and hard how I might have helped make their introduction to the sport better. The best thing I had done, it seemed, was urge them into a lesson and not try to teach them myself. My wife and I are not pros, and teaching skiing is a professional process.
The worst thing we did was to not pay close enough attention to them and really internalize the process they were going through. After all our decades at it, skiing came so naturally that we never quite focused on our friends as we should have.
Of course, a chairlift is a strange experience the first time, especially to a middle-ager with vertigo tendencies. But with close attention, she could have been talked through it a few times until she got used to the moves.
And, of course, boots can stop circulation until foot pain is unbearable. But this common problem could also have been handled with a little more attention and communication on my part.
So, we lost them. These impediments became so huge so fast, they never got to experience the utter joy that, through sensation and accomplishment, skiing and snowboarding give those of us for whom it is a lifestyle.
These are just a couple in the range of impediments that somehow keep our sport from growing. For the last generation now, the growth line has been flat, and somehow the industry has to find ways to do what we failed to do with our friends — make the experience strong enough to bring them back again.
More about that next month.
