There are times you’re confronted with the culmination of your career as an active human and you end up wishing you’d have had a better showing.
Sure it’s hard to learn new skills but you wish you weren’t quite as bad. Didn’t you used to be able to grab rim? Haven’t you packed heavy loads up and down mountains on slick terrain? Shouldn’t you be better at this?
I pondered these things as the lift took my wife and I up to a network of green- and blue-rated slopes at Eaglecrest last Friday. The forecast for a wintry mix was dead on so by the time I had finished the pre-game warmups on the kiddie slopes my face was already numb and my wet hunting pants turned ski pants were emitting a subtle fragrance of sweat and blacktail deer.
I had downhill skied twice (both before I graduated high school) and skinned into a yurt in Colorado a few years ago so I had experience, but not enough for it to be of much value. Still, I hoped to be a quick learner. Not a natural, because that’s too much to ask, but I didn’t want to perpetually feel like it was my first minute on the mountain. Watching little kids going full french fry down the mountain with a casual stance that looks almost like the mountain is moving under them while they are simply standing in place with skis on, had me impressed and encouraged.
But I made pizza for the first two days, fat, juicy, no-sharing slices of pizza. There’s no shame in this as it’s the first stage and an important part of self-preservation. I struggled, as newbies do, trying to figure out how to get the uphill ski to run parallel to the downslope one. As a former basketball coach it was easy to break down the mechanics of a jumper. Elbow, wrist, shooter’s pocket, all that is pretty objective as far as location and function. But a sport like skiing takes a lot more feel and I spent a good amount of time on YouTube looking for concrete instructions. What exactly was I supposed to do with my hips? How much weight should be on what ski? I found one video of some dude from overseas who was making parallel turns by stabbing his ski pole into the slope and using it to pivot. I didn’t bother to read the comments.
Turning by driving the outside ski in front of me then parallel to the mountain made me turn, but the other leg wandered without purpose. I tried giving it direction and was rewarded with a face full of snow.
For the most part I was skiing and successfully staying upright which was a tremendous confidence booster. I really was having a lot of fun and fell on average less than once per run. But since I was succeeding in the basics, I wanted to move up and improve. I wanted more french fries and less pizza.
My wife asked if I wanted to take on one of the blue slopes, but I felt that would be like working on step-back 3-pointers when I only shoot 30% taking regular 3s. Roll casting a two-nymph rig complete with an indicator and shot on my first day fly fishing. I stayed with my greens, trying to figure out how to ski rather than check off slopes.
It took me three days, but the last run, just before the lift closed, I crushed it. Well, relatively speaking. French fries. Slow cooked. But french fries nonetheless.
• Jeff Lund is a freelance writer based in Ketchikan. His book, “A Miserable Paradise: Life in Southeast Alaska,” is available in local bookstores and at Amazon.com. “I Went to the Woods” appears twice per month in the Sports & Outdoors section of the Juneau Empire.
