Paradise Lost; Paradise Found

Aspen trees just about to burst into green in early May

 “What’s your definition of Paradise?"

In the many years when I would ski and occasionally coach in Taos Ski Valley, New Mexico, I was privileged to have become good friends with some legendary characters. Most glamourous among them was Elzabeth Brownell, and one of her wonderful stories has been on my mind lately.

Elizabeth was the owner and proprietor of the Thunderbird Lodge, a landmark Taos ski hotel with great food and a welcoming, convivial atmosphere – her countrymen in Bavaria would have called it a truly gemütlich place. She arrived in Taos early in the resort’s life in the 1960’s and she carved out her own successful life and business in that remote and beautiful corner of the Rocky Mountains with grit, determination, and copious amounts of charm and good humor. Elizabeth’s loyal staff referred to her behind her back as “the velvet fist”.

Elizabeth was a keen world traveler in summer and when I visited Taos we would always plan dinner or drinks at the Thunderbird so she could tell stories and show photos of the far-flung places she had been that year, always in her stubbornly present but gently time-worn German voice. Moving slowly through the details, from start to finish of any story she always made clear that it was the people who captured her interest and who were her source for learning and growth.

Skiing with Elizabeth Brownell in Taos Ski Valley always felt a bit like being elevated to the status of minor celebrity. “Hey, I saw you skiing with Elizabeth today!” Runs were non-stop, unhurried but never slow, and although everyone knew her and would say hello to her by name when we loaded or off-loaded the lifts, nobody outside that day’s ski posse would dare ask to join.

One of our Spring ski days together looms as among my most memorable. Deep, fresh, impossibly light New Mexico powder. Blue skies without a blemish of clouds, the mountain uncrowded as always in Taos, with the entire place and everyone in it seemingly lulled into a calm, joyful ease of mind. Impossible to forget, Elizabeth, probably just over seventy years old at the time, wore a classic canary yellow Bogner one piece ski suit and white knit hat that day, and every turn she made was equally stylish. I simply can’t express how it felt to be skiing with my friend, in her orbit, on that day. I treasure the memory.

Sitting together on one of the resort’s long, slow chair lifts, Elizabeth told me a story about a recent trip to Tahiti. One day while sitting around a fire with some locals on the beach in a small fishing village, she asked about their culture’s concept of “paradise”. Perplexed, they needed an explanation of what she meant. After listening to her description, they each looked at their surroundings and each other, their community, and made clear that they felt as though were in it, living in paradise. They wanted for nothing. And then, Elizabeth looked right at me, extended out both arms to indicate her embrace of the mountains she called home, and told me that on that day, in that snow, skiing together in that place, amongst that community, was at that moment her personal paradise.

It’s very easy to vacation in wonderful places and romanticize about life there, to imagine that a simpler way of life would be a better and easier way to find meaning. That can be equally true for our guests in Aspen Snowmass basking in the powder day sunshine as it was for Elizabeth on the beach in Tahiti. Still, even if only for a moment through rose-tinted lenses, there is truth revealed in the feeling of it. How my friend felt, what she expressed was real, was meaningful, and clearly stayed with me. It continues as an important guidepost in my own life and work in the mountains. Lately, the concept of paradise has been on my mind as I consider the political and religious views of some of those Americans who have been attracting a great deal of media attention.

My friend Elizabeth’s question is apt when considering all that has cleaved our own society at this moment in time: What is your concept of paradise? What is mine? Do we make our own paradise here on Earth or achieve it in an afterlife? To what sort of society do we aspire? Are we helping move forward toward that idealized place of peace and harmony or acting to move further from it? Are we doing our part or are we psychologically committed to a chronic myopia that narrows our focus to only our material needs and wants, or our fears? Is our concept of paradise inclusive of only ourselves or do we envision it as a place inclusive of our whole community, or even all humankind? In this query, I hope we are each answerable only to our own consciences and to the Almighty rather than to the judgement of the loudest voices in the room - I hope but I am not certain. My daily read of the newspapers tests this frame of mind and often leaves me concerned about the world we live in and the people who surround me. With apologies to Dante Alighieri, whether our society has lost the path to paradise or found it remains as yet undetermined.

I spend a great deal of time with people visiting the mountains for recreation, and it is one of several indicia of the success of our time together when they begin to ponder these and other, similar questions. In that way, I aspire to provide a little of what Elizabeth and others have given to me, what the Tahitian villagers gave to her. Even if only while skiing light, dry snow in the high alpine sunshine together. As for the rest of our nation and the world, I am answerable only to my own conscience and to my own standards, and I find peace and solace in those who share them.