Making an impression

Winter Carnival, 1978. I was a freshman in college and everyone was going skiing. Now I hadn’t grow up around snow – at least not snow present on the ground during most of winter, not snow that piled in drifts on mountains, not snow that people skied on. In fact, I had only skied once before and that was on a hill that a person could sled down almost as fast as ski.

My lack of experience, however, did not matter. The guys in my dorm were heading out to the local ski area and they asked me to come along. So I bought a very used pair of boots and skis, tucked my legs inside long underwear and old pair of jeans, and unpacked a hat that was uglier than it was bright.

I was not the only inexperienced skier in the group. There was Spider, my roommate; he hailed from the west coast. And there was Robert. An Australian, Robert had been hitchhiking along the east coast and, based on a series of random rides, had found his way to our dorm and some vacant floor space for his sleeping bag.

Apparently, the conditions were not very good; many of the runs had exposed ice. “Not much powda,” Robert noted to one of my friends. “Those skis are pretty long,” he added. The measurement comment was intended for me. My battered skis reached well over my head.

“Fifty bucks,” I smiled. I shook a black boot at him. “And that included the boots.”

“Do they fit?” someone asked. I shrugged. “Fifty bucks,” someone else answered for me.

With that we clambered aboard the chair lift. If you’ve ever learned to ski, you know that getting on and off the chair lift can be the most treacherous part of the experience, especially with skis that are too long and with toes that have no feeling. No worries, however. I figured it out, mostly by just jumping into place like some frog without much spring in its legs. Spider wasn’t so fortunate. He managed to fall pretty much every time the chair came swinging into place behind him.

Once atop the first run, the guys who had convinced me to spend fifty bucks on old equipment did not feel compelled to help me figure out how to use it. They raced each other down the hill as if they had skied as long as they’d walked. I also discovered that Australia wasn’t an entirely flat continent; for the most part, Robert seemed to have no trouble keeping up with the others. Before I could wipe the fog off my sun glasses, everyone but Spider was gone. And Spider made me look like I was a pro. While he navigated side to side, advancing downward what seemed to be only a matter of yards each time, I pointed the tips of my extra long skis straight down the hill. When it seemed like I was going faster than I should, I slammed on the brakes in a jump stop, the way I had seen some others do it on the chair ride up. Surprisingly, the technique worked. My confidence was bolstered. “Come on, Spider,” I hollered. “I’ll meet you down there.”

“Down there” was a mid-way section of the hill, one to two hundred yards ahead. Gathering momentum, I spotted a few of my dorm friends gathered together, leaning on their poles. I decided to show off my newfound ability to make an efficient ski stop. :Leave me behind?” I thought. “Well, here comes some powder for you.”

You can get going pretty fast on skis, if you aren’t careful. The speed can cause a novice to misjudge stopping distance. First they were there, pretty far away. Then they were closer, not so far. Yep, those were my dorm mates and, with them, Robert. There was also someone else – girl from California named Muffin. I had never met Muffin. She was beautiful. So were her skis, the ones that I went sliding over at a fairly good clip when the ice that wasn’t powder prevented me from stopping. There was the scraping sound of skis on ice, the realization that I was not going to stop in time but was instead going to pass right through the group, and the look of, well, fear-become-distain that Muffin gave the guy in jeans, fogged sunglasses, and old brown skis who had just sailed across the tails of her pink and yellow skis.

I kept going – once I picked myself up as if I had done exactly what I’d planned to do. It was Robert and Freddy K who followed me. I beat them to the chair lift, and quickly jumped onto an open chair. They managed to almost catch me, getting on the lift a few chairs behind.

That was pretty stupid, I told myself. Well at least I didn’t hit anyone.

Just then another friend hollered as he skied the moguls beneath the chair lift. I looked down to see him lose his balance, lean forward, and flip in the air, landing on his skis, as if it was planned. He continued on, his cheer echoing across the mountain side. And that’s when Robert called out to me, from a few chairs back.

“Hey Mark!” I heard him say, in his distinctively Aussie accent. “You really impressed her with that one, Mark!”

A minute later, he reminded me again of my spectacular feat. “Mark, really impressed her for sure!”

Somewhere behind me, the two of them were laughing hysterically. I was about to turn and say something in a very adolescent male 1970s genre, regardless of who was sitting in the chairs between us, when I heard my name called from a different direction. It was Spider. My roommate had not progressed very far from where I had left him. But he had figured out something important: how to turn. He was still going side to side, from one edge of the run to the other. Except now, each time he successfully got to a tree line and managed to reverse his direction, he let out a loud whoop. Those were real whoops of joy.

It’s strange how a memory can linger. I’ve lived a lot of years since that cold winter day in 1978. And, once or twice during that time, I’ve skied better (although not very much better). Yet despite the decades, I can still hear Robert’s accented call to me up the mountain side, and Spider’s series of whoops to the world, as if it was yesterday. He was a kind person, the traveling Australian; he clearly identified with my discomfort. And Spider may have only completed one run down the hill the entire afternoon. But both had lifelong messages for me that wonderful solitary chairlift ride, a set of hollers and calls which, regardless of the circumstances, were so full of resonance – and so free of time:

1. Don’t try to impress, especially if you aren’t ready.
2. Grow into skills, instead of strapping them on.
3. A girl named Muffin will never talk with you if you gouge the ends of her skis while trying to show off for your friends.
4. Punctuate the turns of life with loud and hearty whoops.