Today’s sermon is on the virtues of the Daily Double.
Not the McDonald’s cheeseburger. Not the parimutuel wager on two horse or two greyhound races. Not the bonus feature on television’s “Jeopardy” game show.
Not any of those things, though what I have in mind is delicious, it’s something of a gamble, and it is a bonus to a day in ski country.
Here’s the Daily Double I do every once in a while:
Take the morning at a downhill area. You know its pleasures and how they are multiplied when you start the day early: Better snow, beautiful runs on corduroy grooming, no lift lines, and no drunks suffering from last night’s hangover. Overall, a beautiful experience and, in truth, a morning — just a morning sometimes — doing downhill skiing is satisfying enough. Then, quit.
Have lunch. I’m partial to a bowl of soup but maybe you go for heartier fare — a burger perhaps, with a sleeve of fries, maybe a mug of HoCho with a beautifully crafted tuft of whipped cream, and always a cookie, chocolate chip preferred. We all like lunch. Sometimes it’s the best part of the ski day, especially if your brother picks up the tab the way your mother used to.
Now the encore, the element that makes the Daily Double a daily delight.
Get out your cross-country boots. Remark on how sleek they are, how easy they are to put on, how comfortable they are to walk in, how it’s actually possible to travel in an automobile, in the driver’s seat, in ski boots. No slipping in the parking lot: A miracle on ice, you might say, if you are of a sporting turn of mind.
Grab your cross-country skis. Take delight in how light they are, even though they’re harder to keep together — to create what you might call a ski bundle — than your downhill models. Throw them in the car. Remark on how you can actually throw XC skis in the car without throwing out your shoulder or crushing the contents of your trunk.
And head to the woods.
I realize that the readers of this column predominantly are downhill enthusiasts. The writer of this column is as well. But the barriers to entry into the cross-country world are so minimal that even I have succumbed. Listen to how John Caldwell, a veteran of the 1952 Olympic Winter Games, and the man known as the guru of nordic skiing, described his sport in 1964’s “The New Cross-Country Ski Book:”
“The range of possibilities for enjoyment is unlimited. You can ski anywhere there’s snow, you can use a wide variety of equipment, you can ski alone or with a group, you can use the very best technique while wearing the clothes you just picked up from the local rummage sale, or you can wear the latest styles and invent your own technique.”
Now here is the delicious part: Remember how the wind howled on your morning ski, how the snow blew in your face, how the flat light — actually it felt like 4 p.m. in northern Quebec — made it impossible to see in front of you and hard to see that mogul that seemed to be stuck, randomly, in the trail by some malevolent enemy of mankind? And never mind social distancing, that irritating vestige of COVID. It was impossible on the slopes because you never knew where the next guy was.
Why is that worth thinking about as you unpack your lightweight XC skis? Because none of that applies in your afternoon reverie. Wind? You can’t feel it in the woods. Blowing snow? It’s somewhere else. Flat light? What the heck, the trail is flat, so who cares how flat the light is?
Think of your afternoon on a cross-country trail through the woods as dessert.
Dessert, that is, without the calories, for what you are doing after your downhill day is over, after that burger’s calories have attached themselves to your thigh and belly, is working off calories. Not a few calories. A lot of them. They fly off your body as you skid along the trail. It is magic. It is cross-country skiing.
The late, great ski historian and journalist Morten Lund — raised in Augusta, Maine, by Norwegian parents, a graduate of Bowdoin College, a co-founder of Skiing Heritage magazine, a contributor to every great ski publication of the age — was fond of both forms of skiing. And in his classic 1972 book, “The Pleasures of Cross-Country Skiing,” he set out the difference between the two genres, contrasting those setting out to learn the downhill version (“The pupils, by and large, start out scared”) with those trying XC for the first time:
“Look in on a class in ski touring. You’ll find grandmothers, grandfathers, and children setting out confidently over level ground on soft, easy snow, or going out into good-looking country without any more strain than going to church.”
That, by the way, is why I recommend cross-country second. You’re tired from your downhill morning. This is a walk in the woods. In fact, if golf is “a good walk spoiled,” then skiing this way is a good walk enhanced. As your day will be enhanced.
Remember all those groundbreaking Wrigley’s advertisements for Doublemint gum?
They began in 1939, the year Toni Matt schussed the Headwall on Mount Washington’s Tuckerman Ravine in the famous third Inferno ski race. First on the radio, then on television, the ads always featured twins, and the jingle was unforgettable: “Double your pleasure, double your fun, with Doublemint Gum.” First it was an ad campaign, now it is a skiing lifestyle choice: Double your pleasure, double your fun.
Also this: Double the chance you’ll fall asleep on the couch by 5 p.m. Really, what could be better at the end of a double-barreled ski day?
David M. Shribman, executive editor emeritus of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, did not win his Pulitzer Prize for ski writing. He has skied in 14 states, three Canadian provinces and five countries — and, frequently, after classes at Dartmouth College.
