A Skiing Fountain Pen

Cold smoke powder, Okemo style!

There’s an old joke among Jews that upon becoming a Bar Mitzvah, a young man announced “Today, I become a fountain pen.” There’s a lot of historical context to the joke that’s not particularly relevant to the modern, gentile world (legal adulthood and the right to sign for oneself), but its deep-seated meaning still cracks up those of us in the tribe. And not just when we’re skiing in the Catskills.

In a funny way (not funny ‘ha-ha’, more funny ‘hmmm’), I had the distinct pleasure of being involved in a series of events over the holiday week that culminated in a young man becoming a fountain pen, in the skiing sense. I taught a three hour private lesson one afternoon to a ten-year-old from New Jersey who was getting on skis for the first time – let’s just call him Chris. Before we even got started, Chris assured me that he wasn’t going to be very good and that I shouldn’t expect too much from him that day. Naturally, as an instructor, I viewed this as a challenge and told him as much. Needless to say, despite some struggles and crashes of the normal variety, Chris finished up his first ever three hours on skis by lapping our long beginner’s Magic Carpet lift and making some pretty nice wedge turns down the adjacent hill. In speaking with his somewhat overwhelmed parents afterwards, I made clear that my expectations were for him to move to the chairlift quickly the next time he skied, despite his significant fear of heights. From there, things just snowballed. On afternoon two, we moved from the carpet lift to chairlift (lots of giggling and knee slapping there when his fear quickly turned to thrill), we made a bunch of runs on the lower part of our mountain, cleaned up his balance and rounded out his turns, and generally had a grand old time. On afternoon three, with our poor snow cover so far this season limiting our terrain options, we stayed on the lower mountain and discovered how much our bodies appreciate it when our skis are parallel. Then came day four, the big one, all day together, for bragging rights and all the marbles (an expression I had to explain – I guess there is no Wii marbles game).  We practiced on easy terrain, took a deep breath, hopped on the summit quad, took in the distant views, and skied like champs from the top of the mountain on trails of ever-increasing difficulty.

This progression is nothing unusual or ground-breaking, I know, but there’s more. When we met on the morning of day four, Chris’s parents informed me that they’d given him enough money for the day to take me out for a nice lunch – also not terribly unusual. After several long runs, lunch loomed large in young Chris’s mind. Someone, something (definitely not me), had whispered the words “Kobe burger” in his ear and it stuck. Off we went. We entered Epic, the restaurant in our Solitude Day Lodge, and when we announced ourselves at the hostess stand, Chris and I conferred and agreed that given that he was buying and that he’d just spent the morning knocking ‘em dead on the big mountain, he should order only from the adults’ menu – no mac and cheese or chicken fingers for this little dude. In a very cute moment, he did apologize to me for ordering a kid size Pepsi, hoping it was OK.

We sat there for a while, chatting away like two buddies just catching up over a burger. Then he asked the waiter for the check, and it brought down the house. It could have been anywhere and we could have been anyone, and the normalcy of the two of us sitting there, ordering fancy-pants burgers off the adult menu in the middle of a ski day that involved such wonderful accomplishments as though it happened every day was just so cool, such a gift to both of us, that we spent a good chunk of the afternoon grinning like idiots.

It’s a running line of mine that we’re not making the world safe for democracy by teaching skiing and snowboarding; but sometimes, quietly, I do think we’re making the world safe for democracy by teaching skiing and snowboarding. In this case, though I don’t want to overstate the importance of our time together, I am confident that the experience of learning to ski, of getting on the lift, of succeeding in skiing from the summit, of ordering a great lunch and paying for it, like a man and not like some kid, was important to Chris for a million reasons that have nothing to do with skiing. It certainly wasn’t the first time I’ve taught a great kid how to ski and it won’t be the last. As the expression goes, this isn’t my first rodeo. At all times, skiing is a wonderful experience, and at the best of times skiing is merely a delivery mechanism for a wide range of other things, other experiences and opportunities. In this particular case with all of its circumstances, it was pretty darn cool to be there when my student became a fountain pen, a skiing fountain pen. With a big juicy Kobe burger to prove it.

A Snow-Deprived Stupor

New Year's Day sunrise, 2012

It's been an interesting season so far. A late start, some pretty dicey conditions, oddly warm weather and serious challenges for all of us in the ski business. Thanks to some good luck, a healthy dose of help from my friends and clients, and some perseverance, I managed to have had an exceptionally busy and fruitful holiday period from which I am pretty exhausted. I'll free ski a bit this week, catch up on some work, teach a little, run some staff clinics, and generally get my head together and recover. When all that happens, I'm hoping that my writer's cramp disappears and that I'll find some interesting and pithy way of sharing some of what I've been thinking about over the past month. Until then, I'm experimenting with a new way of cooking pasta sauce that demands my attention and an early bed time that is looming.

Best wishes to everyone for a healthy, happy, and exceptionally snowy 2012.

Making Snow

In more conventional neighborhoods than the one in which I live, in more conventional careers, towns, lives, having high pressure air and water cannons blasting away in the dark of night with a sound audible for a great distance would be a bad thing. My home here in Vermont is on the flank of Okemo, at an elevation just slightly above the main base area of the resort and above town, and tonight I can hear the snow guns and the compressors firing away. No, it’s not an annoyance, not even close. It’s music to my ears, and the same is true for the many people depending on our resort for their livelihood, both directly and indirectly in the many businesses in town.

Okemo has been open for the winter season since Thanksgiving Day, one week ago. Our originally scheduled opening day was on the prior weekend and it’s only due to the vigilance and dedicated hard work of our mountain operations team that we were able to open when we did and that we have been able to stay open. We’ve had a bit of rain in the last few days and temperatures here have been unseasonably warm (though in the modern world perhaps we need to consider what we mean by ‘unseasonably’, in the sense of needing to define the ‘new normal’), so the challenges for our snowmakers have not gotten lighter. Until tonight. The clouds moved out, the sun set, the temperatures dropped, the call went out, and our guys have been making a meal of it up there on the mountain.

Fire away, team! Give ‘em hell! Make as much noise as you want, fire up those compressors, and beat Mother Nature at her own game! Wile E. Coyote may have a good idea, but thankfully we’re not that desperate here at Okemo and we have a team of experts who really know how to make it happen.

Thanksgiving

While dozing off on the couch at some point nearing half-time of the Green Bay Packers / Detroit Lions football game today, I received a holiday wishes phone call from a close friend in the UK. She asked what I was doing and, when I told her, she expressed alarm that I was lounging on the couch in front of a televised football game instead of feasting. Silly Brit, how can she not have known that dozing off on the couch during a Packers / Lions game while the turkey roasts in the oven is simply one of many essential components of a successful Thanksgiving holiday?!

Okemo opened for the 2011-12 season today, finally. Given the nature of working in the snow sports industry, this means that over the next five months it'll be near impossible for me to travel to visit friends and family. As a consequence, Thanksgiving is not merely one of the few times during the year when my family gathers under one roof, but it is really the last time that I'll be able to set aside the ski boots and the thermals, and spend my time with people who genuinely don't care one bit about the technical considerations of edge angles, hip angulation, femoral rotation, and dorsiflexion. It'll be the longest stretch during which I do not have to consider my attire in terms of number and nature of layers. For these things, I am very thankful.

On a more somber note, in the midst of getting ready for the season and working to keep busy, there have been a few events in our community of Ludlow, Vermont and at Okemo Mountain Resort that have affected us deeply. Not the least of these was the tragic death this week of our friend and colleague John Donahue. "JD" was a mere 42 years old and leaves behind a wife and baby daughter. On this Thanksgiving, while so many of us are feasting and enjoying time with family and friends, my thoughts go out to JD's family. Some community efforts to help support his family are in the works now, and I'll post information about them here when more information becomes available. In the meantime, on this of all days, I am thankful for having gotten to know JD over the years and to have benefitted from his wonderful spirit. I, and many more of us who knew him better, will miss him. Rest in peace, John Donahue.

As for my family and loved ones, my friends, colleagues and clients, acquaintances, and mere passersby, I am thankful for the energy and enthusiasm you inspire in me to continue to pursue skiing, ski teaching, and ski coaching as a craft, as a passion, and as a profession. Now, having said that, let's all go skiing and riding!

On The Mend & Open for Business

Before departing Vermont for another winter at Treble Cone in Wanaka, New Zealand in June, I spent a fair amount of time thinking about the effects of the massive earthquakes that devastated Christchurch the prior February and in the months following. In a small country like New Zealand, the often cited ‘six degrees of separation’ shrinks considerably, and even those Kiwis and Kiwi residents with no immediate personal connection to Christchurch have been deeply impacted. It’s hard to overstate the extent and far reaching effects of the quake - the aftermath will be felt by generations of Kiwis to come. Each of my friends in Christchurch have their spirits up despite some incredible losses and, though they still suffer some difficulties in their every-day lives, most are rebuilding, literally and figuratively, spirits intact. In August, the shoe was put squarely on the other foot.

Watching the news of Hurricane Irene as it happened, as the floods tore apart so many homes, lives, communities, here in Vermont was particularly difficult given how far away I was at the time. So, just as I did in June on my way to NZ, I spent a significant amount of time contacting friends and colleagues and thinking about the after-effects of the horrific damage to my home state. Since arriving home to Vermont nearly three weeks ago, it’s been a remarkable experience to travel on our many windy valley-bottom roads to survey the damage. There were several notable and very tragic deaths in my immediate area, many homes completely lost and businesses ruined, and recovery from those aspects of the storm will, as in the case of Christchurch, take a very long time. Despite those aspects of the destruction, the damage to our roads was and remains perhaps the most visible devastation. Thankfully, if there can be a silver lining to such a tragedy, this is where we can find it.

After Hurricane Katrina utterly destroyed New Orleans in 2005, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (“FEMA”) became an icon of government inefficiency and political patronage, so they had some ground to make up with the people here. Thankfully, everyone in town seems to have some story to tell, some urban myth to spread about FEMA and the National Guard marshalling resources quickly, authoritatively, and getting to work. In addition to the feds and together with our state and local governments, countless private construction companies of all sizes did not wait to be asked, did not wait for some knight to ride into town on a white horse, and went right to work. The result has been a truly remarkable turnaround, and the speed with which the state’s many obliterated roads and bridges have been rebuilt defies any reasonable expectation.  My friends who were here are much better-versed in the quantitative perspective – metric tons of aggregate, thousands of dump trucks and earth movers, miles of asphalt, and millions upon millions of dollars. The sheer volume of work already completed in the merely seven weeks since the storm simply boggles the mind. Columbus Day Weekend in October at the height of the fall foliage season represents an enormous piece of Vermont’s tourist economy each year, and this year Vermont businesses had the busiest such weekend ever!  It’s absolutely incredible. The numerous comments from FEMA officials about the immediacy, enormity and effectiveness of Vermonters’ community spirit have made all of us exceptionally proud.

In the end, however, it’s not all strawberries and cream here. There remains a daunting amount of work yet to be completed, the bill for all of this will hang over us for decades, and for some families and communities rebuilding will continue to involve far more than heavy equipment and gravel as they put lives back together and move on. Scars will linger in the psyche of Irene’s victims more painfully than they will linger in our landscape.

As we head into another winter season here in Ludlow and at Okemo, we look forward to hosting our many guests, acting as ambassadors for Vermont and for Vermonters. I hope that despite the snowfall which we all await anxiously right now, our guests will be able to see and appreciate what is meant by the shiny new guardrails and bridges, the ribbons of fresh black pavement, and the enormous mounds of earth and gravel still in the work zones. I’m confident that our guests will be reminded when they come to vacation here that it’s not merely the skiing and riding that makes our state so special. It is the spirit of skiing in Vermont that makes it so special, so unique and so worthwhile for so many generations of Americans to bring their families here to ski and ride. This year more than ever that spirit flows from our people.

Now, speaking of snowfall …

The photos here are from a recent trip up the road to Woodstock and Quechee, Vermont. The Woodstock Middle Bridge survived intact but note the right side of the Quechee Covered Bridge in the photo – many more historic bridges were destroyed. I’ve posted these links before, but here are some local charitable organizations that are continuing to provide vital assistance to Vermonters: Black River Good Neighbor Services (www.brgn.org) is a local charity in Ludlow; The American Red Cross of Vermont & The New Hampshire Valley (http://www.redcrossvtnhuv.org) is very active in the area; and Independent Vermont Clothing is giving all proceeds from the sale of this cool t-shirt to Red Cross efforts in Vermont  (http://independentvermontclothing.bigcartel.com/).

How many states were in the Union?

Revere Bell in Woodstock

Reentry

I’m home. Well, sort of home. I’m in Arizona, storing up some hot weather and sunshine after yet another awesome winter season at Treble Cone in Wanaka, New Zealand. Late October in Ludlow, Vermont isn’t exactly the spot for soaking up sunshine in an effort to forestall seasonal affective disorder, so the desert southwest is just the ticket. My ski season at Okemo will start soon enough as it is.

While I’m overseas, I often take on a funny role with my Kiwi and Aussie friends. In many ways I become sort of the Alastair Cook of the moment, the ‘great explainer’ of all things American to them. Foreign policy, cuisine, language, the size of our cars, ‘reality television’ as an oxymoron, Donald Trump’s hair style, or how it’s possible that someone like Michelle Bachman can be taken seriously as a Presidential candidate. You name it, if it’s American and it’s different, I’m asked about it and nothing is off limits.

The concept that always seems to creep into these conversations is how different we are from place to place in America. No, I am not familiar enough with Texas state politics to explain Rick Perry’s qualifications. Yes, I do live very close to New Hampshire and I’m grateful that in Vermont our concept of the role of government is different enough that we have better pavement than NH despite higher taxes. No, I’m not from Vermont despite having lived there for a decade and having spent much time there in my youth. I’m from New York, as in Upstate New York, and that doesn’t mean that it’s odd for me to have a different accent than the boys from Bensonhurst. We’ve had two Winter Olympic Games in Upstate New York, for Heaven’s sake! My friends from New Zealand and Australia all know that the United States of America is a very big place with a lot of people in it, but often they haven’t had the opportunity to consider all of the wider implications of what that means. Apparently it’s my role to tell them. My favorite little nugget to use as an explainer is the use of the plural to describe the US before the Civil War and the singular after it; as in “the United States of America are the largest economy …” versus “the USA is the largest economy …”

Still, despite stopping over in a place that joined the union in 1912, is 2500 miles from where I live in Vermont and is quite a bit different in most respects, Arizona definitely is on the way home, both literally and metaphorically.  Just as when I return to NZ and re-adjust to the details of everyday life, there are things here that I note upon arrival and which I otherwise would take for granted. I have not had to search high and low for brewed coffee instead of espresso; I may have been flying during the Rugby World Cup semifinals but I did get to watch part of the NY Giants win on Sunday; I have not had to order my food at the counter before sitting down in a restaurant and I have had to tip; I get to read the NYTimes print edition every morning; I can order a bagel without fear of being branded an oddity; and I don’t have to repeat my NZ driving mantra whenever I turn a corner – ‘left, left, left’. Parking lots and ketchup are referred to by their ‘proper’ names, and nobody, not a single solitary soul, discusses cricket for any reason.

It’s great to be home, even if it’s still so far away. Oh, and one more thing: Go you All Blacks!

Clouds Lift, Cue The Sun!

Sunday, October 2nd was the last day of the 2011 season at Treble Cone, and the early morning circumstances didn’t bode well. At 5:00AM on Sunday, the rain poured down so hard here in Wanaka and up at TC that I thought we should convert our normal pond-skim, DJ and costume festivities into an ark-building and sub-pump fixing party. Driving around town at 7:00AM on the staff shuttle loop, the skies above us were clearing but looking north towards Mount Aspiring and TC, things still looked pretty gloomy. Up at TC, by 8:00 there were increasing patches of blue poking through the clouds and by 9:00 the wind had died and the sun was shining – the problem was that nobody was there. For a little bit, it seemed that our ever-faithful, incredibly devoted Cone Heads had all decided to go to the movies instead of braving the elements. At 9:30, the last big cloud literally moved through the base area (see my video below taken from the lesson meeting area) and behind it was only an absolutely glorious spring day. As though on cue, as that last cloud moved up and out the people began to arrive in fine form, all dressed up in their finest retro gear and funny costumes and in terrific spirits. Great spring conditions, warm sunshine, drinks and tunes on the sun deck, and the usual wonderful camaraderie that accompanies any great day with TC and the locals who provide so much of our resort's energy.

I’m not sure whether I can explain how a season feels when it began with so little snow that we delayed our opening for two weeks, then so much snow that we delayed our opening for another six days opening with the best conditions ever seen, only one other significant storm in mid-season, an astonishing number of sun-filled days, and enough business that our snow sports school was at maximum capacity for six weeks straight? I’m still too close to it to have any significant thoughts on the subject. Somewhere in between strolling slowly through town in flip-flops, hiking in the mountains around Wanaka, the occasional road trips and rounds of golf, and enjoying the remainder of the rugby world cup, perhaps I’ll have something to consider on the whole thing. For now, I’m content to breathe in the fragrant spring air, catch up with friends, get some rest, and remember how much I love spending time here in Wanaka and New Zealand. After all, my next winter is just six weeks away!