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| 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.
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