Taking the Weight Off My Shoulder ... Season

Body in off-season, feet on snow. Last week.

Normal people refer to the season in between summer and winter as “fall”, with “spring” on the other end of the year. Here in Vermont, we also refer to them as “stick season” and “mud season” respectively, which are accurate descriptions of the hillsides up here. Those of us who ski and snowboard year-round and never have summer simply refer to them, inclusively, as “shoulder season”.

Like all seasons, we can wax poetic about shoulder season being a time of renewal, a representation of the cycle of life and our place in the world, and the rhythm of the natural world. Over the last several years, my view of shoulder season has been a bit more pedestrian, and necessarily so. It’s been a time of intense administrative effort. A time to get the very big and very complex business of snow sports teaching either up and running or wound down and planned for the following year. Fall in particular is about getting the entire organization up to speed from a standing start, involving a ton of disparate moving pieces, none of them simple and most of them people. Not this year. This year, I’m squarely back in metaphor-land, shoulder season as a gradual transition of place, work, rest and activity, climate, culture, cuisine, time zone. This year also, the transition involves turning my attention to a wonderful combination of new and old details and activities, each of them familiar but all put together in new and different ways for a fresh start in the new season.

Having decided mid-way through my “summer winter” in New Zealand to leave behind management for the time being, my timetable and the way I experience the seasons is now quite different. It is far less rushed, the transition is far longer, and it is far less busy. I continued to work at Cardrona through the end of the NZ season and then remained in Wanaka for a couple of weeks to do, uhh, stuff. After a wonderful spring of skiing in the brilliant Kiwi sunshine and getting to experience the joys of an easy wind-down to an extraordinarily busy season, I’m pretty confident that I did in fact do some stuff down there. I can’t exactly put my finger on all of the stuff, but it definitely included some fun dinner parties, some nice walks in the hills, and a couple of road trips with good friends. I’m pretty sure. Oh, I may have occasionally drank beer in the sunshine on the deck of our house, and if that happened I’m pretty sure that we would have taken the time to watch the sun drop below the mountains in the distance. It would have been important. Regardless of how acute my recollection may or may not be, all of the stuff I may have done (or not done) definitely was healthy for my mind, body and spirit.

In one respect, this shoulder season is a toughy. Spring in Wanaka is stunning (oh man, it’s shocking down there) and I arrived home to Vermont post-foliage, post- warm weather, and pre-ski season. Still, it’s great to be home, in my own house, drinking brewed coffee, with easy access to decent sandwiches and excellent burritos, driving on the right side of the road, and sleeping in my own bed. More importantly, as I look ahead to winter, I’ll stay here at home, in my own home, in Ludlow.

After four successful and rewarding seasons as Director at Sugarbush, I’ll remain in Ludlow, work for the Okemo Ski & Ride School (not far from my front door), and generally give myself a break to enjoy the simple life of working as an instructor and coach. That happiness thing, it’s pesky, but I think I’m on to it. The longer, easier shoulder season seems, forgive me, to have taken the weight off my shoulders.

The only folks unhappy about my choice to remain home are the field mice. They apparently had their run of the house this summer winter, but in winter winter it is my domain and they’d better watch out.

Mishegoss in The Mountains

The view up the hill behind my house in Ludlow, Vermont

It’s mishegoss, I’m telling you. Snow sports teaching, as an industry, is crazy. We face a litany of issues for our long-term viability: climate change, the hyper-competitive market for discretionary vacation dollars, the behemoth Rocky Mountain corporation gobbling up resorts and having a disproportionate effect on all of us (wasn’t the asking price for Whistler about 10 zillion simoleans?) … I can go on. It seems that every time I attend an event for us management-types or get into a discussion through PSIA about the health of the profession, it turns into a hand-wringing, doomsday exercise. Let’s face it, on a microeconomic level, ski teaching is a brutal way to make a living. We remain devoted through it all because instructors generally are a passionate bunch, our guests really do love it and, seriously, we didn’t get into this to become wealthy.

Still, there is a lot of good news out there, I’m truly optimistic we’ll be OK, and the proof for me lies in some surprising places. Why the rosy mindset, particularly during stick season? Well, because I’m in the middle of some serious administrative drudgery right now, and it’s gotten me excited for my upcoming season dedicated to our craft. Yes, that’s some serious mishegoss, but please let me explain.

The managers of the Okemo Ski & Ride School have taken pity on me by sliding me some work to get me through stick season. Wanting to be useful, I identified what I thought would be the best thing for me to do to make their lives easier and it’s the worst eye exam of a paperwork task that snow sports schools have to endure each fall. Yes, folks, it’s inputting instructor schedules into the computer scheduling and sales system. With software upgrades and web access, this is a lot easier than it used to be, but it’s still grunt work nonetheless. Each individual instructor submits their work days for the entire season; each has to be reviewed to make sure the needs of the school and their guests are likely to be met; and each has to be input manually so the sales staff and supervisors can do their jobs.

Vermont’s major resorts - Okemo, Sugarbush, Stratton, Mount Snow, Killington and Stowe - all have over three hundred instructors in their schools, the vast majority of whom work part-time for the season. Full-time schedules are easy: they pick the same day off each week, and they otherwise work every day and don’t get days off during the busy periods. Part-time staff schedules are another story altogether. Part-time instructor schedules can look a bit like they were placed on a tree during deer hunting season and shot through with buckshot. There’s no criticism there - these part-time folks have other conventional careers, kids in school and all kinds of family obligations or are in college themselves, have long drives to the resort and, seriously, normal lives that make it tough to sacrifice their weekends and holidays for six months a year in order to do wedge turns in our frigid Green Mountain winters. And seriously, just imagine a college kid who sacrifices all of the vacation time to work outside in the cold while making less money than they could at Starbucks and you get the idea. This is precisely why putting the part-time staff schedules into the system can be genuinely inspirational. Yep, it’s time to look up “mishegoss” in your Yiddish dictionary.

Here’s the point, finally. Schedule after schedule of part-time instructors are actually pretty simple. They include virtually every weekend all winter with one or two set aside for the “real world”, a PSIA update or some freeski time, and then a few mid-week days during the busy December holidays or Presidents Week. Boom, done. Some of these people have drives to Vermont as long as three or four hours every time they want to put their skis or boards on their feet, and yet they’ll be there at lineup and in the morning training clinics rearing to go, enthusiastic, and spreading the joy to our guests without flinching. It’s downright amazing, and that’s without even considering that they do all of it without any profit motive, which I’m sure would leave my undergraduate economics professors speechless.

Sure, these folks are getting older. Yes, I’d love to see many of them become a bit more open to continuing their evolution as skiers, riders and teachers. Of course, I wish that a greater number of them were equally dedicated young folks, filled with a passion for teaching snow sports and to their own ongoing, continuing professional development. More importantly, I do very much wish it were easier to keep the many amazing young folks we do have working in the industry – we need to hang onto them with two hands and give them every opportunity we can to succeed (a/k/a serve the Kool-Aid but not let it result in professional sugar crashes). Still, what these part-time instructors do and their thankless dedication to it cannot be underestimated and shouldn’t be left unappreciated. Ever.

Every Friday night this winter, the highways of the northeastern United States will be filled with an enormous number of dedicated instructors (and coaches, park staffs, lifties, patrollers, etc.) on their way to their second jobs in the mountains that they really love. I used to joke that if you want to see the best collection of race coaches I knew, sit in a booth at the Friendly’s restaurant in Greenfield, Massachusetts all night on a Friday night in winter, and they’ll be wandering in for a mid-trip hot meal on their way north. We are all working very hard to solve the vexing issues in our industry, but our hard-working part-time pros are the beating heart of it and they’re keeping it all together. It shows in their paperwork, plain and simple. And I may need another cup of coffee before doing the next batch of schedules.

A Rolling Stone Gathers No … Stitches?

The view from along the Cardrona Road today, September 14.

One of my graduate school professors had a game he liked to play, just for fun. If you presented him with a pithy aphorism, he’d respond with another one that had precisely the opposite meaning as the first. Try it: good fences make good neighbors; a rolling stone gathers no moss; a stitch in time saves nine; and, my current favorite, for every complex question there’s a simple answer that’s wrong. While I’m in New Zealand, I become acutely aware of the volume of folksy American expressions in my everyday speech, and I’ve been thinking about Professor Paul’s game a bit to entertain myself.

Today, as I enjoy a rare second consecutive day out of ski boots, enjoying the sunshine in town, the two somewhat competing maxims that come to mind are “the devil is in the details” and “Heaven shows itself one detail at a time”. In the dark days of the early part of the New Zealand winter, each detail seems to confirm winter’s wintery-ness. Wake up in a cold house, eat breakfast in a down coat, leave the house in the dark of night and return long after sunset, always clothed in layers like an onion. “Turn on the bed”, for crying out loud, meaning give the electric blanket a bit of time to warm the sheets before getting in and hunkering down for the night. In spring, it’s quite the opposite, and with each passing day more details emerge to help us appreciate having moved on from the depth of winter. First, we can actually see our colleagues as we wait for the early morning staff transport. Then, we observe the street lights turn off as we stand waiting. Then, the sun is above the horizon when we arrive at work. We don sunglasses when we arrive at the resort, and then need them first at the bottom of the access road and eventually in town on the way there. Now, after returning to town at the end of the day, it’s actually not the end of the day – the sun remains up for a while, warming us as we enjoy the stunning spring views across Lake Wanaka from town. In September, the great statistic is that we add something in the neighborhood of six additional minutes of sunlight every day here in Wanaka, and we certainly can tell. As they say here in New Zealand, that’s awesome with an “o”.

All of this is particularly meaningful for me this year. Over the past several Southern Winters seasons, I’ve had to leave Wanaka in early September to head home and begin working in Vermont. Not this year. This year, I get to experience the slow wind-down from a very busy ski season and make the most of a proper Kiwi spring. I’ve moved on from my Director position at Sugarbush and aim to make the most of the decision, beginning with getting my flip-flops some badly needed outside time. Notably, the best thing about walking around in flip-flops is that to do so safely requires moving slowly, which is part of the point.

It’s been a banner season for me teaching skiing at Cardrona Alpine Resort, and I’ll continue working through early October and then remain here in Wanaka for a couple of weeks. Some travel, some hiking, and lots of time contemplating my next move (a/k/a my continuing tour of the cafes of Wanaka) is all in the cards. After all, how can I adequately pay attention to the many glimpses of Heaven that show themselves every day here, one at a time, if I’m in a rush to leave. You’ll just have to speak a bit louder because the birds in my neighborhood are creating quite a racket this morning. They must be the early birds ...

Ode on a Beach Chair

This year, for the first time since becoming Director of the Sugarbush Ski & Ride School, I had some real time off between the end of my season in Vermont and my departure for my “summer” in New Zealand. My time involved a range of things in a number of places, but it was principally dedicated to two inanimate objects that have important roles in my life. Both embody a certain philosophy and an approach to my personal time; both harbor lots of memories going back a long time; and both comfort my mind, body and spirit. One, my bicycle, involves exertion, suffering and euphoria, constant movement, and speed. The other is the opposite, by design. It’s my beloved old beach chair.

My beach chair is nothing special at first glance. It’s a clunky old-style chair that sits close to the ground with an aluminum tube frame, wood arm rests, an adjustable back, and an odd and really pretty ugly sliced fruit design on the fabric seat and back. It doesn’t have a handle or a shoulder strap, it has no snazzy bag it slips into, it has no brand, and it doesn’t advertise anything. My chair doesn’t have a name (I’m not prone to anthropomorphist tendencies). It is simply “my beach chair”. And it is mine. All mine.

The story of the acquisition of my beach chair is a part of its allure for me, but just a part. I bought it while strolling to take a ferry to an island in the middle of Long Island Sound to spend a very hot 4^th of July. It was in the middle of a very busy and incredibly stressful period in my former working life (that is, my life prior to seeing the light and becoming a ski professional). That day and my chair were part of a bigger point to make about where my priorities were (and weren’t) at the time. I headed out in morning with notes for the work project that was still in process, a fully charged cell phone, the New York Times, a good sandwich from the local deli, flip flops, hat, sunblock and the like. I walked directly to the neighborhood hardware store, bought the chair and sat in it for the entire day. That was almost twenty years ago and the chair has been a part of my life ever since.

The thing that makes a great beach chair so wonderful is what it’s not. It is a beach chair, not a lawn chair, a deck chair or a piece of outdoor furniture. It’s not particularly mobile, so it’s not the sort of thing one can bring anywhere requiring a lot of walking. It’s low-slung style and casual posture makes it unworthy as a dining chair for meals with friends on the patio in summer. It’s a bit tough to get in and out of so it’s not ideal for watching sporting events. It is however, perfect for short strolls to village greens to watch 4^th of July fireworks, listening to outdoor concerts, outings to not-very-distant beaches, reading the entire newspaper in the local park, and generally listening to the wind in the trees and watching the world go by. It’s also exceptional for that particularly indispensable warm-weather activity: the impromptu nap while “reading”.

After a long season of constantly running around, looking after the best interests of our guests, my staff, and lots of other folks in weather and under circumstances that can be challenging in a good winter, my chair looms in my imagination. Don’t make too many plans and make them all stress free; commit to doing things that are open-ended by design; eat when hungry, sleep when tired; spend time with people of your own choosing; rotate every so often to face the sun; spend hours contemplating your next move – not your next professional move, social move, or intellectual one. Water or ice tea, or maybe that ice cold Miller High Life hiding in the back of the fridge. It’s a big decision, so don’t rush it. Above all, be present, be aware of your surroundings but at one with them, and be yourself. My beach chair promotes all of this and, in particular, this mode of thinking.

We've had a good few weeks, my beach chair and I, and I’m grateful for it. Unfortunately, my beach chair cannot come where I am going and it wouldn’t be very useful there anyway. I’m on my way to New Zealand for my next winter, but I’ll look forward to reconnecting with my beach chair when I come home and to finding the peace of mind it promotes. In the interim, my tenth Kiwi winter starts next week and it won’t exactly be a hardship!

Some Time in the ICU

Breckenridge, Colroado last week

I love being a ski instructor. As a Director, it's an essential component of my work to create for my staff an environment that facilitates their own love of being instructors. Often, that means being the cheerleader-in-chief and this was never more true than during the 2015-16 season, now in its waning days. This season was a serious test of the depths of my enthusiasm reservoir. It’s hard to explain in succinct fashion just how tough it was – little natural snow and any snowfall followed immediately by buckets of rain; digit-numbing cold followed immediately by unseasonably warm weather; beige granular passing for beginner teaching surfaces; mud-crusted rental boots; frozen pond ice that only was skiable by means of divine intervention; and a notable drop in business levels making it tough for our staff to get enough work. And that was just in December and January! My running joke during the December to January holidays was that it was like the plagues upon Egypt and that I was just waiting for the locusts to show up. My job, first and foremost, was to keep the instructors of the Sugarbush Ski & Ride School engaged, focused, enthusiastic, happy and busy. I’m confident that it worked, I’m incredibly proud of our entire staff from top to bottom, but it took an awful lot of effort and it really did wear me out. How on earth does a ski school director recover from all of that? It’s simple: I've just returned from the S.P.I.C.U – the Ski Professional Intensive Care Unit, also known as the PSIA National Academy at Breckenridge!

In the little corner of the universe inhabited by ski and snowboard instructors, PSIA National Academy is a very big deal. It’s basically an intensive training week involving on-hill clinics all day every day, indoor presentations, and plenty of fun, all conducted by a collection of coaches that is simply the best in the business. The coaches come from around the country and the world and include current and former members of the National Teams of the Professional Ski Instructors of America and the American Association of Snowboard Instructors, some international coaches who share our American guest-centered view of teaching, some members of the coaching staff of the U.S. Ski Team, some close friends I hadn’t seen in a long while, and some genuine living legends who’ve had a major impact on the sport (for pros and recreational skiers alike). The participants and the coaches also included some of my favorite people on the planet and several who have had a direct impact on my own career and on my deep-seeded passion for what I do. It helped that Breckenridge really put its best foot forward, that the conditions were terrific and then it snowed two feet. We had plenty of sunshine as only Colorado can deliver it, they served beer, and we were based in a hotel famous for its free chocolate chip cookies. Any questions?

In a season that was a true test of my ability to inspire instructors, being in Breckenridge was a vital reverse of course where I was on the receiving end. Yes, it was professional development. Yes, I trained hard and skied hard, focusing on learning and improving in a way that will allow me to continue my growth as an instructor and as a Director. Yes, it’ll provide ample fodder for me to work with our trainers at Sugarbush to bring our staff of pros to the next level of teaching and skiing. And yes, it saved me. The Academy was like a transfusion that cleared my system and nourished my mind, body and spirit. Can you tell how much I loved it?!

Sugarbush is holding on here. We’ll remain open through this weekend and reopen for the first weekend in May – our normal operating schedule, remarkable in a season that definitely has not been normal. In a season that has been among the worst in the long history of skiing in Vermont, there have been some definitely highlights and there is ample cause for optimism – for our sports, for our profession, and certainly for the Sugarbush Ski & Ride School. Having returned from the S.P.I.C.U., I am in a position to see those highlights with clarity and to look forward to next winter. I’m also reinvigorated enough to be very excited for my next season in this endless winter, and t's coming right up in a little over a month on the other side of the globe. in Wanaka, New Zealand. I can’t wait!

Out of Our Depth, And Into It

This afternoon was a pretty typical one for me on a weekend in between my New Zealand season at Cardrona and my New England season once we’re skiing at Sugarbush. We call it stick season here for a reason - all of the foliage for which Vermont is justly famous sits on the forest floor and the hillsides are barren until the arrival of winter’s snow, hopefully just a short time away. On these weekends, I often walk up to the summit of the mountain behind my home in Ludlow. I walk along Mountain Road, an actual road in summer and a ski trail in winter that winds its way around the peak, making for a gentle but still lengthy jaunt. Getting to the road from my house requires some bush-whacking, which today meant being shin deep in leaves. Being "up to my shins in it" brought to mind some peculiar bits of nomenclature that are particular to those of us committed to a life in the mountains.

Outside the ski industry, being “in deep” doesn’t necessarily have a positive connotation. Before getting “in deep”, we warily “dip a toe in the water” before “wading in”. “I’ve had it up to my neck”, "I’m up to my waist in …”, and being “over your head” are definitely not flattering states of affairs. You get the picture. I’ll rely on linguists and sociologists to analyze why it is that depth became such a bad thing. A bad thing, that is, unless, of course, you’re a skier or snowboarder.

For skiers and snowboarders, anything “boot-top deep” is considered excellent. We use classic East Coast sarcasm to describe small storms as leaving us “edge-deep” or “sidewall deep” in powder. Anything deeper than our boot-tops is truly exceptional. “Knee Deep” works because the  alliteration matches the poetry of the conditions. The feeling of being “up to our guts in it” simply defies description. Being “over your head” is beyond our capacity to dream, but for the presence of YouTube videos that show us what it’s like to actually be over your head in powder (cue the Hokkaido ski videos). I have skied over my head in powder and I just can’t talk about it right now. Hold on, I need a minute to collect myself.

The other, more colorful language that is an essential part of the skiing and snowboarding lexicon but that fails to conform to conventional usage has to do with flu symptoms, bodily functions, and the severity of storms. I wonder sometimes what it would be like to have skied all day in the middle of a big storm and to have to explain to someone new to the sport that the fact that it was “absolutely puking” out there is a good thing. “Absolutely puking” is a notch up (in severity, depth and our excitement) from “totally dumping”. Once in a while, we experience storms that are so strong that we describe them as “shiXting on us”, meaning that it was so severe that we couldn’t even ski or ride. That’s “shiXting”, as distinct from “dumping”. “Pissing” is reserved for severe liquid precipitation (I refrain from using the “r” word whenever possible). Oddly enough, “shiXting” also can be used to describe liquid precip that is overwhelmingly drenching. I hope this isn’t offensive, but that’s precisely my point. Around the world, in dozens of languages, in remote mountain huts, tiny alpine villages, and run-down much-loved ski town bars, devoted skiers and snowboarders express how much they can’t wait for it to absolutely puke on us this winter, and that’s not a reference to the results of too much stick season tequila.

Today, I was up to my shins in leaves. Tomorrow, Monday, I’ll be up to my neck in the pre-season work of getting the Sugarbush Ski & Ride School ready for another winter. We all hope that soon we’ll be up to our gills, choking on it, and happy as could possibly be as a result. With any luck, this winter will be "totally sick".

Stone Pie (a/k/a The Yelling of the Pizza)

Fig 1 below is a photo of a slice of pizza. Fig 2 is also a slice of pizza. Fig 3 is located at Pisa. Pictured in Fig 4 are the Pisas. Fig 5 is Alex Polizzi. Fig 6 is the frozen pizza section of my local supermarket in Vermont. Everything in the freezer pictured is pizza.

Fig. 1

Fig. 2

Fig. 3

Fig. 4

 

 

Fig. 5

Fig. 6

Even a five-year-old child would understand the difference between each of these photos and that they’re all pizza, Pisa or Polizzi. Still, take that same five-year-old, put a beanie on their head and then shove their head into what was their older sibling’s helmet, put a pair of goggles on their face that schmushes their face a bit, and make sure that they are wearing enough winter clothing so as to make it impossible for them to nod their head without all their base layers coming untucked, then send them down a snowy slope in ski equipment that is not their own and in which they have spent little time, and their ability to discern the difference between each of the foregoing pizza-like things disappears. Completely. They won’t know the difference between Alex Polizzi and Little Caesar’s, and they won’t care.

I get it, I really do. When we create a wedge with our skis they form a shape similar to that of a slice of Neapolitan pizza. And, granted, some of the kids among our clientele in Vermont and in Wanaka actually know and can identify the difference between Neapolitan and Sicilian pizza slices. Especially the kids from New Haven, Connecticut. Still, through all that gear, straight lining an icy slope, careening headlong towards the fence or base area condo, there isn’t a single child on the planet can process the word “pizza” being yelled at them from behind by an agitated adult. They certainly can’t make the analogical leap to the leg turning movements necessary to create a wedge with their skis in order to slow down or stop. Yelling “pizza” simply is not a recipe for success, and it’s not even a recipe for decent pizza, going to Pisa or to the Pisas, or for figuring out when we can watch Alex Polizzi on television. Having said that, after fruitlessly yelling “pizza, pizza” again and again, we may actually succeed in making the skiing child hungry. For that, again, I recommend New Haven.

As a general rule, it takes some time for young children to develop the ability to analogize on their own. My view is that this general rule holds true in the classroom among children who are wearing school clothing and don’t have their beanie-clad senses isolated from the outside world inside their big brother’s ski helmet. Under those circumstances, the ability to analogize freely happens far later in life, and then only fleetingly. Bear in mind also, all kidding aside, that from inside a helmet kids’ sensory awareness is especially limited – young children really can’t process a wide range of sights and sounds from anywhere but immediately in front of them. These are just a few of the reasons that experienced, well-trained ski instructors try their best to always look kids in the face when giving instructions and find success by telling kids specifically what to do, as in what movements to make.

There are a lot of benefits to skiing in a wedge (formerly known as “snowplow”, “chasse neige” to the French). Though some ski schools in the past have played with ‘direct to parallel’ teaching, the wedge remains an integral part of learning to ski for the first time. In the American teaching system, where we focus on the skills of skiing and develop them from a guest’s very first moments on snow, the skills we use to create a wedge, to manipulate its size, and then to make a wedge turn are skills that remain essential through every skiers entire evolution, from the very beginning to Olympic glory. The skill we use is “rotary”, meaning the twisting of the legs inside of our hips. Twisting of the hips is otherwise known as “shaking your money maker”, but that’s another story.

When we stand next to a child, show them how we twist our legs towards each other to make a wedge while standing still (“toes in, heels out”, etc.), and ask them to do it themselves with plenty of repetition, they learn to do it on their own. When we redo the same process again while sliding slowly together on very gentle terrain, one inch at a time at first, focusing on the movements and not the position, we find still more success. We can call the shape made by our skis whatever we want – wedge, slice of cake, pizza, cucumber, home base, dinosaur teeth, Alex Polizzi, anything – but as long as we make clear at the outset that the goal is to make the movements of turning both their legs inward at the same time to create the shape, and that it results in our being able to slow down and stop, kids will understand and be able to replicate those movements. Once they can make these movements, we quickly progress to turning both legs in the same direction at the same time (“aim your skis over here at me”, etc.), making turns and using those turns to control our speed and to stop. The ability to make a wedge but with balance so poor that a skier cannot yet turn results in what we call “The Death Wedge”, also another story altogether.

Obviously, I’m biased in favor of professionals whose training and experience makes them experts at delivering technically valid, achievable, fun, and safe instruction to kids. Communicating with young children in a way that ensures comprehension, provides enough repetition to generate comfort and confidence, all in a fun way that teaches kids to control where they go and how fast requires great skill on the part of instructors. The upside is, when done well, kids realize quickly that they are responsible for their own destiny on skis - the moment when that happens is a biggie! It’s a liberating and exciting experience, for them and for us.  When we don’t simply yell “pizza, pizza” at them, when we understand and appreciate their skills and abilities as kids in a respectful way, when we deliver the skiing goods to them and open the door to all that skiing can bring, they’ll follow us anywhere as long as we live up to the standard of empowerment we’ve already set. It’s amazingly satisfying to those of us who teach skiing for a living. And, as an aside, that’s all equally true for teaching adults, but you don’t often see kids yelling “pizza, pizza” at their beginner parents.

At the end of the day, as I like to tell kids, I love pizza, I really do, but too much pizza gives me a stomach ache. Let’s leave the pizza for eating, or at least make sure we’re understood when we talk about it. Speaking of which, how far is New Haven from here? I just got back from New Zealand and I desperately need a decent slice of stone pie.