Talking About Cars, From New England to The World

Town hall in Grafton, Vermont in March

In the nineteenth century, Yankee clipper ships were instrumental in the growth of the United States as an industrial power. The sailors from ports from Connecticut to Maine raced around the world’s oceans bringing American raw materials and industrial products to Europe and Asia, making friends, opening markets, spreading the gospel of democracy and capitalism and, occasionally, empire building. No, this is not a post about the state of America’s relationship with the world, our economy, or our current political situation. It’s about radio. One radio show in particular.

I giggle a bit when I imagine the reaction some of the Yankee sailors would have encountered when they arrived on the far side of the world and the locals first heard their accents. [N.b. For folks here in America, a “Yankee” is someone from New England, meaning the states of Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine with the notable exception of baseball players. Yes, it’s ironic that the baseball Yankees are from New York and are reviled in New England, but that’s another story altogether.] Consider, if you will, the iconic ‘paaahk yaw caaaah in Haaavaahd Yaaad’ (read: park your car in Harvard Yard) accented Bostonian arriving in nineteenth century Japan (for reference, think of the accents in the film Good Will Hunting). Granted, this year the same person would be able to have a very interesting conversation with any Japanese baseball fan about the pros and cons of Bobby Valentine as a baseball manager, but I digress. Along with the accent, these intrepid Yankees brought with them a freshness, unencumbered by hierarchical class society and its stultifying self-consciousness. Easy in their openness, quick to laugh out loud at anything remotely funny, and genuinely curious, the world’s first wide exposure to Americans must have been entertaining at a minimum. Ok, ok, I do like where I live and I’m biased, but it does crack me up to think about some jamoke from Southie roaming around the globe in a sailing ship. But again, this is about a radio show.

For the past twenty-five years, a couple of brothers from Cambridge (“aaah feh city”) have been hosting a radio show on National Public Radio once a week (and for 35 years over all). It’s called Car Talk (“Caaah Taaahhk”). The show's hosts, Tom and Ray Magliozzi (a/k/a Click and Clack the Tappet Brothers), are graduates of MIT, are owners of a repair shop Cambridge, Massachusetts, and are bearers of accents that make Kennedys sound like Roosevelts. The premise of the show is that the guys field phone calls from listeners about their car troubles. Sounds simple enough. The subjects frequently proceed into the real issues at hand – relationships, travel tips, dispute resolution, buyers advice and remorse, dealing with dim-witted brothers, lazy mechanics, and so forth. I’m not particularly a car guy and, though I have learned a fair bit from listening to Tom and Ray over the years, any information I get about cars has been secondary to why I’ve been listening. The guys are simply funny in a totally unpretentious, incredibly inclusive and endlessly entertaining way. Mostly, the guys crack themselves up and they manage to crack me up as well. This past week, much to the chagrin of their many fans, Tom and Ray announced that they will be retiring from live radio. As one of them noted: if my brother retired, how would we know? I like to think of Click and Clack as refurbished, updated ambassadors of our particular sensibility and character here in New England, carried on the airwaves instead of by clipper ships. And yes, I do realize that’s a stretch but work with me here.

In my years as a ski race coach, I hit the road with the team every Friday night for our weekend of collegiate races and would time our departure so we could all listen to Tom and Ray on the radio. In the few years when I was out of the ski business and in the dark world of the weekend warrior, Tom and Ray again accompanied on my every-weekend drives to the mountains. Now that I’ve been at it full-time in the ski business for well over a decade, Tom and Ray accompany me in a different way. I download their podcasts to my iPod and listen to them while I ride the spin bike at the gym I use in New Zealand in the summer/winter/whatever. I miss my bicycle while I’m away and I hate spin classes, so I close myself in the spin room of the gym when there’s nobody else in there and I listen to the boys. By mid-season in Wanaka, there’s enough sunlight still outside when I get to the gym that I’ll set up shop in the spin room with the lights off. The problem is that I get lost in listening to Car Talk and occasionally can be found alone in a dark spin room, sweating profusely, and laughing out loud all by myself. It’s given quite a fright to a few people over the years, but it makes me happy. What can I say?! There I am, as far from the ports of New England as one can get, finding some entertainment in the sounds of the people from home, the personalities from home, in a way that has unified my various experiences in the ski business. They’ve traveled with me all these years, and I’m grateful for them.

Car Talk will continue on the radio in a ‘best of’ format for years to come and I have a library of back episodes of the show that I have yet to hear. I’ll be able to listen to them for some time. Still, it’s a little bittersweet, the end of an era. So, going forward, it’ll take just a little longer to explain to people why every cab and limo driver in the world is referred to as Pikup Andropov, customer service people as Heywood Jabuzoff, and law firm partners as H. Louie Dewey. They’ll be missed, but I’ll still be laughing, by myself, in the dark, on the bike. Thanks guys!

For more on Car Talk and Tom and Ray's decision to retire, go to:
http://www.cartalk.com/content/time-get-even-lazier

Newport, New Hampshire in June

Tanned Feet

A typical securities industry disclaimer says something to the effect that ‘past performance is not an indication of future performance’, and it’s just like snow storms in autumn. Pre-season snow may excite us, but it is not an indication of a snowy winter to come. Still, all of us, myself included, reserve the right to become giddy when it does snow in autumn. At a minimum, it reminds us how much we love skiing and riding and it brings some of the details to the front of our minds as we make plans for the approaching winter. Even the simple motions of getting ready for winter – changing to snow tires, pulling our winter clothing out of basements and back closets, and trying to locate boot heater batteries – are elevated and become worthy of excitement and giddy anticipation.

This is equally true for Southern Hemisphere winters, though with some funny wrinkles for me. Instead of slowly evolving my wardrobe into warmer clothing, with flip-flops and shorts slowly finding their way to the back of closets and the bottoms of drawers as I do here in October, I sit and contemplate all of those funny winter details while enjoying the benefits of warm weather and sunshine. There’s nothing quite like sitting outside on my favorite beach chair reading in the warm sunshine while contemplating which down coat and how many pairs and which weight of long underwear bottoms to have with me in Wanaka, New Zealand for the winter. I consider packing shoes and socks necessary for life in a small town where I walk everywhere and don’t have use of a car, where I look for housing close enough to town to pack groceries into a backpack on my way home from work and can make it to my weekly pub quiz on time without rushing.

A newly-hatched dragonfly and friend.

The forests here in Vermont have now fully evolved into that rich, yellowy-green of pre-summer foliage and the hardwoods are covered in newly full-sized leaves. Memorial Day weekend was gorgeous – sunny, warm, unhurried for me, and a wonderful reminder of summer. Meanwhile, on the other side of the planet, there is snow on the peaks of the Southern Alps and several New Zealand ski fields have announced early openings. It’s downright exciting, and the bigger the contrast between the season here and the season there, the happier I’ll be. Ultimately, one fun sign of the perfect transition from Northern to Southern Hemisphere for me is to be sitting in a ski school locker room in the Southern Alps and taking a fond look at flip-flop tanned feet before shoving them into my Nordicas for the day. If I get to walk through LAX in shorts and sandals while carrying my ski bag over my shoulder, all the better! It’s these contrasts that make my choice of on-and-off season so odd for people trying to grasp what I really do for a living, and I definitely revel a bit watching them grapple with it.

Pre-season snow may not be an accurate indicator of a snowy winter, but it definitely helps me get excited and focused. I leave for New Zealand next week, and I’m looking forward to the confused looks of the folks in LA. More importantly, I’m very much looking forward to putting my suntanned feet into ski boots and going skiing!

Lake Winnipesaukee, surrounded by New Hampshire's White Mountains

Baking Bread

I was very lucky recently to spend several days in France, my first time there in quite a while. I was in the very un-touristy part of Brittany called Finistère (translating to “Lands End”), a region filled with rolling green countryside and tiny little villages separated by vast swaths of farmers’ fields. It’s gorgeous, and the mix of coastal climate, Breton culture and language (and tough-to-understand accents), and the absence of tourists made for a wonderful if not brief immersion. My fond memories of France and the French were more than reinvigorated. And then there was the food.

I stayed in a modest house in the middle of a village similar in size to Ludlow, Vermont but more compact. The main square abutted the medieval church and the old commercial buildings housed an unremarkable collection of businesses – bank branches, a super market, a couple of bars, and an amazing number of hair salons.  Then, around the corner from where I stayed, on the main street, just down the block from the church square, is one absolutely incredible boulangerie and patisserie. The thing that makes this haven of excellent food in this slightly out-of-the-way place so incredible was how normal it is for everyone there. The boulangerie is clean, inviting and the people are very friendly, but nothing about it is designed for tourists, it is not intended to draw in a wider clientele and it is in no way gentrified. The place simply serves the needs of the local people, that being the making and serving of exceptionally delicious food (exceptional only if you're not French, I guess). And by delicious, I mean mouth-wateringly, roll-your-eyes and hold-your-belly, spend-time-before-going-fantasizing-about-the-food good. Breakfast each day consisted of pain au chocolat, naturally, and each day included one or two baguettes depending on the lunch plan.

The baguettes from this place make the breads sold here at home under the same name seem somehow to be improperly identified. Color: golden brown. Tap the outside and they sound hollow. Want to break off a piece? Just bend it slightly and the crust gives way to the lightest and most flavorful inside. So often when we eat fresh bread here at home, even if from a great bakery, the inside is just gummy enough that we have to muscle off a piece and the crust scrapes at our mouths as we chew. It’s depressing. The baguettes in my new favorite food joint on the planet massage the mouth as you chew, the sounds of the easily cracked crust serving as the perfect opening act to the joys within.

Sorry, I digress. I do have a point to make here about skiing and teaching skiers (to say nothing of cooks, bakers and consumers). A lot of people spend a lot of time analyzing what makes greatness great. The physics of a baseball pitcher’s wind-up, the ability of a great striker to see and to create ways of scoring in soccer, the movements of a great golf swing, all fall under the analyst’s microscope. In my now favorite boulangerie,what makes the bread so great? Is it the water? The ancient brick oven? The wheat and the way it is milled? The quality of the air? The incantations of the bakers? Maybe they hum long forgotten Breton folk songs to the dough as they knead it. Who knows. Who cares. And that’s the point. Whatever it is, the key thing is to appreciate just how good it is, to view the bread in the context of the experience of tasting it in the environment in which one can find it, and to keep the memory of that experience wedded to my time there in Finistère.

As instructors, doing technical analysis of skiers, and understanding and then training the specific details of technique is a major component of our jobs. It’s an essential skill set that take years of practice, and it provides an important service to our guests, the staff that we train, and to our industry and our sport. Still, sometimes, we need to be able to sit back a bit, look at the totality of what we see in someone’s skiing (even in our own skiing) and say “wow, that’s awesome”, without breaking it down into bits. More importantly and at times more difficult, once we’ve done the work with our students of breaking down the details so as to improve their skiing (and their understanding of skiing), it’s essential to bring back that most simple level of appreciation. The ultimate result of someone moving their inside ankle a certain way during the initiation phase of the turn shouldn’t be that they feel their inside ankle (although that helps). The ultimate result should be that it brings their skiing to the next level and it feels really cool! It’s our job to keep that perspective close at hand even while we focus on the details, and that is an art form found in only the best bakers and the best instructors. Hmm, suddenly I’m hungry for more.

All of The Ingredients

In spring, metaphors bloom in the minds of would-be writers like early-season daffodils. Something about warm sunshine and greening pastures following on the heels of a long, cold winter encourages otherwise pedestrian thinkers to wax philosophical. The problem is that it happens to me as well. It really is an amazing phenomenon and, truthfully, I don’t mind even if it does crack me up a bit. This year, however, the timing has been a bit off.

The past few weeks here in Vermont have been wonderful spring skiing weather. Temperatures never really strayed above the mid-40’s Fahrenheit, we had a good, consistent wind across the summit of Okemo as we do in winter, and we had a decent amount of sunshine. We even had a bit of snow. Perfect, except that we had no skiing. If we’d had a normal snowpack this past winter we’d have been fine, but the exceptionally hot end of March simply devastated Okemo’s (and everyone else’s) snow and we shut the doors early. To be perfectly frank, I ski a ton of days each year and, other than the resulting financial pinch, I don’t normally mind when the season winds down. The problem this year is that what would have been great April skiing weather was lousy weather for just about anything else. I do love cycling and am very devoted to it, but when I have to dress warmer to be on the bike than I did on the last day I skied, cycling can devolve into mere exercise. I do put in the hard miles as a down payment for those warm days when I can really find peace of mind in the saddle, but it’s just not the same. Until today, that is.

Today is April 14th, and in many ways it’s the official kick-off of my off-season. My definition of a perfect off-season day includes some of the following: when not wearing shoes for cycling, hiking, or other outdoor activity I wear only flip-flops; when not engaged in some outdoor activity I mostly sit and read a good book in the sunshine; my trusty old beach chair becomes a more integral a piece of furniture than anything else in my house; fresh air circulates around my house like a transfusion; my neighborhood here along the flanks of Okemo is so devoid of human activity that a big gust of wind is the loudest noise interfering with my enjoyment of the sounds of the woodpeckers hammering away in the trees; and my car sits idle. The air smells sweeter, the sky seems bluer, food tastes fresher and is, and my blood pressure drops precipitously below its mid-winter high. I am not tired, my knees and back do not ache, and I have some well-earned soreness in my legs from my morning ride. Fantastic.

There is still a fair bit of skiing going on in resorts around the United States this week, but none of it is here in the East. Would I be happy if we’d had a normal winter and those of us here in Vermont were still enjoying all that spring skiing has to offer? Absolutely. Until today, I was wishing that we were, but with the warm sunshine and light breeze in our quiet town, I’m perfectly happy to have started my off-season in earnest. People often ask how I endure two winters each year, and in response I explain that I get to experience spring twice. I’m not being disingenuous when I say that a great spring can make it all worthwhile, especially when at the tail end of a lot of great powder days. Today, even without those great powder days, it’s still working out just fine.

My book is sitting on my beach chair on the porch, so pardon me while I go back outside. I strongly recommend that you do the same.

123 Days

A field in Grafton, Vermont three weeks ago.

As I write, it is the last week of March, the mid-day temperatures are hovering around the freezing mark outside my front door, and it’s been flurrying lightly on-and-off all day. With those details, and only those details in mind, it’s a pretty normal day in Vermont for this time of year. Unfortunately, those are not the pertinent details. Last week, for the entirety of the week beginning on March 18th, the temperatures were hot. Africa hot. Ridiculously, astonishingly hot.

On Sunday, the 18th, I saw several firsts. I saw snow melting so fast on our bump runs that water – clear, blue water – was pooling in the troughs of our zipper-line bumps and cascading from one trough to the next. Trails that in the morning were skiing well were virtually impassable by the end of the day. Water was literally pouring out of the forest floor, choking the culverts and seasonal stream beds. The creeks that run underneath some of our lifts had so much runoff in them that what began in the morning as a slow, murky normal-looking flow evolved into clear fast-moving water by the day’s end. Water was moving everywhere, filling every ditch, divot and dent, beneath sunny blue skies on an otherwise glorious day. The most amazing feature of that day, however, was the morning fog. As the lifts began turning at Okemo, the base areas and all of Ludlow’s low-lying river valleys were filled with an incredibly dense fog that was also incredibly cold. I began my first lift ride of the day concerned that I had underdressed. Immediately upon rising above the fog on the lift, I was hit from the side with a genuinely hot wind, such that with five feet of elevation rise the temperature increased fifteen degrees Fahrenheit (and that’s conservative)! Absolutely bizarre, and it stayed that way until the fog lifted by late morning, bringing the heat all the way down to the base of the resort.

On Thursday and Friday of last week, I attended a PSIA event at Mount Snow, a bit more than an hour south of here, and drove down there in flip flops and shorts. Comfortably and, I might add, happily. I’d never seen anything like it – the highs on Thursday were in the mid-70’s Fahrenheit and on Friday it hit 80 (that’s almost 27 degrees Celsius)! I can’t believe that none of the many instructors attending events there suffered from heat stroke. I still can’t believe it. By the end of the day on Thursday, each route open to skiing from the top of Mount Snow to the base of the resort required at least some walking across mud that separated the snow fields. The very idea of a trail being divided into “snow fields” at a resort that recently invested in a couple of hundred fan guns (the latest technology in snowmaking) is difficult to contemplate.

Needless to say, despite heroic efforts by our mountain operations team all season long, Okemo shut for the season this past Sunday, March 25. Whether it’s a result of Mother Nature working against us or simply never showing up this year is something that will be the subject of much conversation over beers in Ludlow this summer, but winter never really showed up. I’m not sure what our total snowfall was for the 2011-12 season, but it was small. Very small. Add to it unusually warm weather throughout and the dearth of natural snow left us totally and completely reliant on snowmaking – thank Heavens we’re so good at it here. Amazingly, I actually managed to have a reasonably good season on the hill, thanks in no small part to a wide range of responsibilities here and elsewhere and some very keen, very enthusiastic, very devoted and very tough guests with whom I ski. In a normal season it is the guests that keep me focused and enjoying my work here in the mountains, and this year my gratitude to them and to our terrific staff is immense and hard to quantify. Thanks to everyone for keeping my spirits afloat – literally, I suppose.

Our season here at Okemo began three weeks late and ended about three weeks early, and left us with 123 days of skiing and riding. That’s it. Honestly, in a winter like this one, Okemo is an especially great place to work, with all the stresses and frustrations that accompany a career devoted to snow that never really arrived. I am certain that the effects on our business will be ongoing for a few years to come. I am equally certain that the prognosis for our resort is good, from a financial perspective and for our spirits. Next winter will be snowier. It has to be. And I’m willing to bet the ranch on it.

Sage Wisdom

There’s a lot of ski advice out there. Too much. It’s amazing to me, as someone who has devoted my career to teaching and coaching skiing that so much of the advice out there is so bad. Seriously, a lot of the things people consider to be good advice is incredibly outdated, amazingly misunderstood, or simply just plain awful. I’m not quite sure what it is about reading back issues of ski magazines, having skied in Jackson Hole, or having a child who is a ski racer that makes people think they are qualified to give ski advice but, alas, it’s the world I inhabit.

Beyond the ski advice and concepts discussed at suburban cocktail parties (which can be downright scary), instructors themselves often fall into the vortex of hyper-complication, a close cousin of bad ski advice. This can and often does lead to the dreaded condition known as ‘paralysis by analysis’ in our guests. Obsessing about what angle our inside ankle is at the top of a turn or some minute difference between a skier’s right and left turns may be interesting to discuss among ourselves, but burdening our guests with them without proper perspective can be incredibly counterproductive. To say nothing of being completely un-fun (there’s that pesky fun thing again).

The qualification about keeping details in proper perspective is critical – when we teach in a way that enhances our students understanding in the big picture, the details of technique fall into place in a coherent way that makes it easy to teach technically without muddying the waters. Not everyone we teach is a gifted athlete, but if we communicate well, if we explain concepts in a way that our guests understand, the ‘technique’ we are teaching never devolves into “because I said so”. Throwing the book at people, hammering them with the ‘proper’ technique, and drilling them without apparent purpose or sufficient understanding in laymen’s terms is a great recipe for impressing them with our knowledge and our skill, and it also ensures that skiing and taking ski lessons becomes a chore. If we’re out to impress our guests, to prove to them how not good they are in an effort to get them to work hard at their skiing, perfect. If we want to be their guides to a lifetime of better, stronger, more exuberant skiing full of discovery and joy, perhaps the lock-step hierarchical teaching of the past is not the way forward.

None of this is news to anyone who is familiar with modern teaching of any subject, and that’s certainly true for those of us well versed in the American Teaching System of the Professional Ski Instructors of America. Still, I think it bears reminding ourselves of where our priorities lie.

With that in mind, one of our instructors here at Okemo related to me recently the best advice about skiing and ski teaching he’d ever heard. This instructor has been a fully-certified instructor since the 1950’s, he’s been everywhere, skied with some of the true greats of the sport, and is the last person to get into a detailed conversation in the locker room about technique. He’s also a bit of an alter cocker (to throw a little Yiddish at you – think Stadler and Waldorf from The Muppet Show and you’ll understand). What was the advice? It came from a trainer he had a million years ago named Bruno Juli, and it was this: never move any equipment or body part that you don’t have to, and never move anything unless you know precisely why you’re moving it. Maybe my friend is simply old enough and has seen enough change to keep things solidly in the big picture. Maybe, but it’s far more likely that the old sonofabitch is simply right.

A Bird's Eye View



SIA Stratton on-snow demo

Every job, every profession, every past-time has its own subculture, its own idiosyncrasies and oddities, and the snowsports industry is no exception. Far from it. Go deeper, take a look at the working life of ski and snowboard instructors, and things become peculiar very fast. Maybe I’m just a bit self-conscious about it, or maybe we just get a little weird. Entire conversations go on ad nauseam in The Loft about the way we articulate our ankles in our ski boots. I know ski instructors that actually comfortably use the word ‘fore-agonal’ in sentences, and in front of guests for crying out loud! Just because my particular micro-culture may have the cache value of a healthy, lifestyle-driven outdoor sport doesn’t mean that it doesn’t get a bit ridiculous at times.

One of the problems of working so hard to make a living in such a comparatively small and nuanced profession is that we often have trouble picking our heads up above the water, so to speak. I’m pretty lucky in this regard – I have a wide range of responsibilities in the industry, here at Okemo and elsewhere, so I tend to get frequent glimpses of the big picture by necessity. Among the more gratifying ways in which I’ve been exposed to another side of the business over the past eight years or so has been my relationship with Nordica, the venerable Italian ski equipment manufacturer. My role with Nordica is pretty simple – I ski on their equipment, promote the brand with guests and pros alike, liaise with our retailers and generally lend a hand when my friends at the company need it. It’s a lot of fun, the insight into the direction equipment is going and why, and how the equipment side of the business works in general is always interesting and really helps me provide a better and more complete sense of the world of skiing to my guests and to the instructors I train. This season has been particularly valuable in this regard as I’ve been working a bit with my friends at The Boot Pro, a successful specialty boot and ski retailer here in Ludlow that is a big Nordica dealer. I’ve learned a ton from them and, combined with my work with Nordica, I’ve now seen how the manufacturers look at sales, how the retailers look at sales, and how the consumers approach the whole process. As I said, at the end of the day the most important piece of all of this is that it helps me become a better and more complete ski teacher and really assists me in providing the highest level of service I can to my guests to enhance their skiing experiences. And it’s genuinely fun and a welcome change.

Speaking of fun, I recently had a day that drew together numerous aspects of my place in the ski industry all at the same time. For the first time, I attended the Ski Industry Association on snow demo at Stratton Mountain Resort here in Vermont. It’s an event that is essential for the manufacturers and for the retailers as they button up their sales for the following season. It’s a huge show, with every major ski and snowboard equipment manufacturer bringing their lineup for next year and every retailer in the Eastern US testing as many pieces of equipment as they can for three days. The schwag flies, everyone talks the talk, and it’s a non-stop equipment and schmoozing hootenanny. Totally cool and a lot of fun. I was at Stratton wearing three different hats: as a Nordica Elite Team member I needed to familiarize myself with next year’s lineup; as a Boot Pro employee I needed to ski on some of the equipment we’re looking at for our shop next year; and then in the afternoon I conducted a training clinic for Stratton’s instructors. Talk about being deep in the material. Honestly, the whole experience was a bit overwhelming and when I finally got on the hill with my clinic group in the afternoon it was almost a relief to simply get back into my comfort zone and work on skiing with ski instructors.

As a teacher, I often explain to my guests that their understanding of the big picture is essential and that we’ll dip down into the details that are important for their improvement as needed and incrementally over time. I like to make sure they are comfortable from a vantage point where they can see the curvature of the earth so that the details make sense in that big picture. For my own place in the industry, the varied exposure does just that – it helps me keep the details of my students’ skiing in perspective, helps me better understand their consumption options and decisions, and helps me guide them to a better, happier life as successful skiers. And it helps me get out of those annoying conversations in The Loft, especially when I run out of patience with people who insist on making up words like ‘fore-agonal’.

Sara and Alex from Boot Pro talking shop with Erica
from Nordica - all in the family at Stratton SIA!