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On Not-Skiing
by Nick Mancuso I do not ski. I never have, and shy of a three hour lesson when I was fourteen at Powder Ridge in Southington, in which I learned absolutely nothing, I still to this day don’t. I had no idea what a ski vacation was. The word vacation alone makes me think of sunglasses and palm trees and drinking entirely too much rum at seventeen years old. My definition of vacation is something I’ve associated through my own experiences with family vacations, weeks spent in the Caribbean, or the Bahamas, long silent days by turquoise waters tearing through pulpy novels. When my partner of six years, Lisa, came home from work one day excitedly waving a raffle-won, embossed gift certificate for a two-night stay at a luxury ski resort in Deer Valley, Utah, I, a non-skier, albeit someone who relishes such luxurious things, (especially ones that have explicitly the word luxury in their titles) begged to go. Upon assuming we were going together (perhaps incorrectly) I realized that my attendance on this trip was hardly assured, she politely and sweetly told me she’d let me know. I eventually discovered that due to my lack of interest in skiing, I was only one of many competitors to go with her to Utah for this stay. There are a myriad of reasons as to why I don’t ski. Firstly, there are the chairlifts. I have a mild (read: extreme) fear of heights. If I’m not contained in something, like a balcony with a railing, or a hefty roller coaster harness, where I’m strapped in and spot-checked by a hungover teenager at an amusement park, I’m positively riddled with fear. I suddenly get dizzy, or imagine, vividly, falling from the height. Once, I rode a chairlift, during the aforementioned three-hour-ski-lesson-when-I-was-fourteen and the lift stopped with a grinding halt, and our chair swung there, suspended eighty feet up, swaying with the breeze, as I, with twenty pounds of polycarbonate carbon fiber hanging off my dangling feet, was paralyzed with fear for the ninety seconds until it continued moving. I ended up hurtling down the mountain beside the instructor who just kept yelling “Make pizza not French fries!” and I yelled in return “SEND FOR HELP!” I’m sure it doesn’t necessitate me saying this directly, but I also am the most physically uncoordinated a human can be. It took me three full summers to learn how to balance to ride a bicycle, and even the most casual of ice skating eludes me. I also don’t like that the word ski is one letter away from being the word “skin,” something I can only imagine in this context is in verb form. Didn’t Sonny Bono die skiing? My disinterest in skiing aside, Lisa, being the wonderful partner she is, happily informed me a few hours later that she would love if I came with her, and suggested I spend the weekend writing in the resort while she took to the slopes. I, overjoyed, imagined myself in the lap of luxury, eating gourmet meals and being on (to paraphrase a song my undergrad roommate sung often) “a twenty-four-hour champagne diet.” I did not, prior to arriving at the hotel understand how equally important the word “ski” was to the phrase “luxury ski resort.” Also, I should note, that before the five hour flight and the hour long drive to the airport, I truly did not know how much skiing meant to Lisa. When we met, in college, poverty stricken, forced to drink vodka so cheap it could stand in for rubbing-alcohol, she mentioned she liked skiing and I nodded along, thinking that was a thing people said but didn’t really mean, like, I like the outdoors, and I voted for Mitt Romney. Little did I know, her lack of skiing in undergrad was a direct result of our abject student poverty. Six years later, during the eight hours of transit together from Boston to Utah, Lisa extolled how much she loved skiing, recanted great skiing trips she took with her family, all over northern New Hampshire and Maine. She explained how in her family, as soon as a baby could walk, they would put them on skis. For a brief while, my mind was besieged with images of two-year olds in onesies, barely walking, toddling, skidding down the side of a mountain, goggles askew. Driving from Salt Lake City airport to the hotel, we ascended a mountain, my ears popping three times as we drove, and discovered this enormous complex nestled in the crux of two peaks, overlooking the valley for miles. Upon arriving at the resort, in the lobby I spotted a positively enormous pile of slender bags, containing, yes you guessed it, skis. There had to be fifteen or twenty pairs. I hadn’t any idea that ski-culture was a thing. I’m astonished that people have whole shops and dedicated channels and specialty magazines about skiing. Okay, strike that last one, there are specialty magazines for everything, ergo the existence of Miniature Donkey Magazine. The more Lisa explained, the more I began to see the differences in our upbringings. Her family, were ski people. They savored the winter, took ski vacations, opened the windows during the snow to take long breaths, enjoying the “crispness” of the air. My family, we were different, we were swim people. We took vacations to tropical destinations, we wore sunglasses and got suntans, drank mojitos and rode jet-skis. We’d sit out in the sun all day, rising from our lounges to change position and even our tans. Ski people are a different breed altogether. At lunch at the hotel, I first noticed them, duck-footed in their ski boots, their steps wide, their ankles immobilized. They all walked like zombies, snowsuits half-off, their snow pants making whooshing sounds against each other as they passed in the pub at the resort. They chattered about equipment, nodded and cheersed over local beer so bad you can tell Utah was a dry state until 1996. In their commonality they have a lexicon all their own, things I didn’t realize meant things aside from their dictionary definition. For example, moguls: not mighty industry leaders, instead; smallish bumps to ski over. A black diamond is not a dark-colored blood diamond, instead the hardest ski-trail. A binding is not the spine of a book, instead the clasp mechanism for their boots. My personal favorite; runs, not in this case a synonym for diarrhea, and apparently are a trip down a mountain, not to a waiting toilet. Ski people are different though. Conversing in this common language is a universalizing thing we swim people don’t have. Oh sure, we can explain a preference for breast-stroke over butterfly, but that about taps out our conversation on the topic of swimming. Everyone can know how to swim to survive, but not everyone can ski. In a resort of the size it was, as Lisa went out for her ‘runs,’ not-skiing gave me an opportunity to explore the magnitude of this compound, discover the outdoor pool, and sit to have coffee on the balcony of our room while I heard the skiing masses whoosh by. There was an unspoken recognition between us non-skiers, those left behind. The bond was incomparable to the intra-skier relationship, much less camaraderie. In the lounge overlooking the valley, I passed a man sitting by the fire with a laptop, his lower leg casted in white and up on the coffee table. We exchanged a nod, as if to recognize that we were both not out on the slopes. I wanted to sit down with him and talk, find out how he broke his leg (realistically probably from skiing) build our own commonality in non-skiing. Maybe we could make fun of the passing skiers. We didn’t. Utah is strange. Smoking is, apparently, still a thing here. The airport has smoking sections, and I even watched someone light up a cigarette in the lobby of the hotel. The state seems obsessed with bees, everything seems mildly bee-themed, from the “Buzz” coffee shops to the beehive symbols on the highway signs. I don’t understand why. They ask at restaurants if you’d like a wine list instead of just bringing it with the menu, and how many are in your Valentine’s Day dinner reservation, as if for some reason, it’s for more than two. Beyond the borders of the ski mountains, there isn’t a lot in Utah, and Park City is a lot smaller than I thought, the downtown area is one street, a quarter of a mile long. In the windows beyond the coffee shop where we had lunch, skiers clomp, lead-footed in helmets, carrying skis by. Things are much further apart here. We drove twenty miles to a German themed steak-house one night. We crossed back through the dark valley, the night so thick the mountains blocked the stars. There aren’t a lot of trees in the valley, it’s almost like a desert. Up in the mountains, there are these vast forests of birch and pine trees that slope down the valleys. The third day we were there, I went for a walk early in the morning, my biological clock still two hours ahead. The sun had just started to come up, sneaking from behind a faraway mountain and the valley was bright, I could see for miles, a low fog clung around the mountain tops. I walked a bit down the mountain road as the sun came up over the valley. I was out there alone, with the mountains and the sun, and my breath frosting a cloud. Maybe I don’t understand skiing. Maybe I can’t. Maybe people were right, maybe Lisa should have brought someone else, someone who can appreciate the majesty of this, enjoy the rush downhill ‘carving’ through the ‘powder.’ Maybe this was wasted on me. Maybe my quiet moment on the morning mountain was just a tiny piece of what it means to ski. Maybe, just maybe, watching the skiers relish their post-slopes awful beer, maybe their toasts and their camaraderie made me feel a little left out of their shared satisfaction of a day truly conquered. The human achievement urge is so powerful, that these bold (or stupid) people braved a rickety chairlift, to the top of the peaks of the Rocky Mountains, and slid gracefully down it, claiming it as their own, their blades carving their mark into this titan of nature, this elemental component of topography. Back, even before dark, they slayed their day, did the impossible, had an experience unlike any other. They were (however clichéd) on top of the world. It’s the same achievement as climbing mountains, or sailing across the sea, “You skied Deer Valley? Impressive!” It was another badge of success that Lisa could pin to her cluttered sash like a girl scout, alongside local mountains, Gunstock, Okemo, Sunday River, and Pawtuckaway, this one would make a fine centerpiece. A trip like this for people like us is rare. We’re young, we don’t make a lot of money. A chance to ski one of the most prime mountains in the world may never come again, and I’m glad Lisa got the chance to do it. We’re on our nighttime flight back to Boston now. My reading light is casting a narrow pillar of yellow light onto my lap as Lisa snoozes beside me, blissfully exhausted. As she slept contentedly, I thought about how happy she looked when she came back from the slopes at the end of the day, how breathless, excited, and rosy cheeked after a day of prime skiing. Maybe I don’t understand skiing, but the jealousy I felt for her surprised even myself. |
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