Kafka Was Not a Ski Bum

A little blue sky as one of this week's storms clears at the top of Cardrona.

Now that we’ve completed the very busy few weeks of the Australian and New Zealand school holidays, I’m finally able to slow down enough to take stock of the past year, and it certainly was an interesting one. At home in the USA, I had four or five different jobs (depending on how you count) across several mountain ranges and in several different uniforms in the 2017-18 season. In my two short stints away from home and in Aspen, I had to learn my way around four different mountain resorts that were totally new to me and had to adapt to a very different working environment. It meant a lot of long days, long trips, suitcase-living, cold, wet, unfamiliar territory, all while focusing 100% on honing my craft as an instructor and coach while providing the best guest experiences I possibly can, to say nothing of working on my skiing. And now I’m in New Zealand where I have on uniform, one workplace, and one home … Phew, I made it.

My life here so far away, living in Wanaka, New Zealand and working at Cardrona Alpine Resort is terrific but I do wonder from time to time about having been brought here, having traveled all this way just to work. It’s another dimension to a question that my time in Aspen brought to mind and that stayed front-and-center for me this winter in Vermont. The question is a classic Kafka’esque dilemma, and it’s not a particularly rosy one – not at first.

The overly-simplified description of the Kafka dilemma I have in mind involves considering, for example, a ride at the zoo: is it intended to give the people a view of the animals or to give the animals a view of the people. Kafka wrote about this sort of scenario as genuine dilemmas in the sense that there is not a concrete answer, only the discussion from which we learn. Yes, although you are welcome to see this as just another piece of hyper-complicated gobble-de-gook from me, I do have a point to make about skiing, ski towns, and our relationships with our guests.

This Kafka concept first came to mind during a morning bus ride from where I was staying in Snowmass Village to work at Aspen Highlands – a commute of about 30 minutes. My daily bus route was along the one highway on the valley floor that enters Aspen from ‘down valley’. It should be no surprise that Aspen’s an incredibly expensive place, so down valley towns like Basalt and Carbondale are far more affordable places for the working folks that provide all of the labor for the busy resort and all of its supporting businesses, and everyone travels this same road. As the resort began to get busy and crowded for the December holidays, one particularly Aspen-y aspect of the commute was the airport, right along-side the highway, which began to stack up with triple parked private jets, more than I’d ever seen in one place and at one time. Sitting on the bus, ogling the countless jets on one side while on the other was the slow-moving traffic of old Hondas, hard-working pickups, and late model minivans filled with the resort workers was what brought Kafka to mind. Are we all commuting in to serve the jet people or have we brought them here to provide us with work and an income?

The dilemma unnerved me a bit, and I arrived at the Aspen Highlands locker room early in a contemplative state. My morning locker room routine often includes tuning my skis, something that always relaxes me and clears my head, and a positive minded conclusion started to take shape in my mind as I chatted with Aspen’s Director who also was in there tuning his skis - he’s a gifted staff trainer that I’ve known for a while and he’s always supremely level-headed. He asked how everything was going for me there and I told him the truth: that it was a wonderful experience for me but that I’d had my uncomfortable Kafka thought that morning. As expected, he helped me put a fine point on the positive and sincere conclusion.

The answer to the dilemma was that it wasn’t ‘us and them’, nobody was there to serve or be served. The right mindset, the one that makes the incredibly wide financial gap between the wealthy visitors and the hard-working day laborers, is one of welcoming all comers to a shared mountain experience. We make them feel welcome – the ski towns where I ply my craft are sought-after by the wealthy for the same reasons I’ve made them my home(s), and whether I’m on the hill with my guests in a lesson or out and about in town, making them feel welcome makes me appreciate where I am and what I do all the more. The experiences I have working and spending time with our guests is at least as valuable to me as the experiences I help provide for them,. The guest and the staff experiences in great ski towns like Ludlow, Vermont, Wanaka, New Zealand and Aspen Colorado run parallel 100% of the time and, thankfully, it feels egalitarian in truth and in spirit for all of us.

We’re all in this together in our mountain communities, we depend upon each other for our safety and for the quality of our experience. Kafka was wrong in this way: it’s not that one is there to look at or to serve the other; it’s that we’re drinking from the same spring, basking in the same sunshine, and sharing with each other all that our mountains offer us.