Reading: Dava Sobel, Galileo's Daughter

Not yet given up on: John Milton, Paradise Lost

On deck: Invisible Man; Don Quijote

Moving: skied three hours, hard

29 March 2002: I skied

Yes. And angels wept. We rented me other boots and different skis, so I didn't (weep, that is) as much.

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Tromping from parking lot to base, I overhead an older man remark to a younger passerby, "You must be from Florida to be wearing shorts up here!" The woman responded, "No, from Boulder," and I could tell, or I liked to think, that the Florida crack irked her. The man must not actually have known anyone from Florida. It was gorgeous that day, already in the high 40s at the base, hence the shorts. But people who live in Florida don't wear shorts when it's 40 degrees out or there's snow on the ground or both. Floridians don't even swim when it's 60 and the water is 70. Our wedding day was overcast (which was less pretty but mercifully cooler than a sunny day might have been) but perfectly comfortable; RDC's Florida family left soon after sunset because they were cold. Freaks, I say. Anyway, that remark cracked me up; and DMB snickered (at herself and her state-mates) too when I told her.

We were very careful to read the Skier's Safety Code. Elsewhere on the mountain, the signs indicated that they contained a partial list, but I still want to know what a particle list is.

The skiing was okay. The rented boots were shorter in the leg--less able to throttle my calf--and had more micro-adjustments. I knew how the first few runs would go--in lift lines, I hung over my poles, panting, too weary even to sip from a Camelbak. After the third run, we stopped to pee, and afterward I sat in the snow, in the sun, outside the lodge, slowly nibbling a Balance bar and sucking down pints of water. When we got up and snapped ourselves to our skis again, I told RDC that this would my best run of the day.

And it was. I had rehydrated myself, my feet had accepted their fate, and so I did much better. RDC was still giving me pointers, and okay, I haven't skied since February 2000 but even on my 170 straight skis I could do what he was suggesting (I think). When I'm tired or scared I drop my butt and lean back; when I'm less tired I don't get as scared; when I have enough water I don't get as tired. Also I was on shaped skis, only 153s. I was certainly tangling the shorter skis' tips less.

I'm working on completing my turns. Apparently I start to turn left before I've finished turning right. I don't really know what that means, since actual skiers don't turn but just twitch their butts while pointing straight down the fall line. But anyway, I followed tracks RDC laid for me, and then I wanted him to watch that I could do it so he stayed up the hill a bit and told me when to turn, and frankly it didn't feel much different to me than any other decent day I've had but he said it was my best day ever and I am almost intermediate.

After nine years I should hope so.

I maybe shouldn't count 1993, when my first and only day--at Okemo with a sucky, condescending morning lesson and two companions who didn't ensure I had been taught to turn when after noon they brought me up what I remember as an impossibly steep green run--convinced me that skiing was just as stupid and pointless as I had contended for my first quarter century.

When I was a child, skiing was beyond my family's means, and by high school my defense mechanism was that skiing was stupid and needlessly expensive and nothing but a status symbol and anyone who partook of it was a spendthrift. In Old Lyme, the number of lift tickets you had bristling off the zippers of your ski jacket really meant something. Later in high school, my mother, imitating my father, who had taken up skiing some time before, offered to take me with her to Powder Ridge, a wee little slope in Middletown, Connecticut. If there's anything more pathetic than keeping up with your exspouse or trying to keep up with the Joneses, it's trying and failing, by going to Powder Ridge instead of Vermont at the least (as he did) or to the Rocky Mountains or Europe, as many of my classmates did. I stuck with my defense mechanism.

I still think skiing is ostentatious and a waste of resources. But I don't flaunt my lift ticket--now a plastic card with a picture and a bar-code on a lanyard, renewable instead of accumulatable--and I'm a great rationalizer. I do love the speed--what speed I can gather, still wearing my bindings loose--and the views and the snow and the warmth and the sun.

But what I think about skiing is best illustrated by what happened on the mountain the day I got my photography, bar-codey ski pass: It was an office in the burgeoning Keystone resort, and there was a line. A woman in her early 20s was taking photographs and doing all the pass paperwork in addition to dealing with other resort business. A boy of around 10 years arrived and began to hassle her about what I remember not. I remember how she kept her temper with him and how she could not reprimand him, despite his being an unsupervised child in her place of business, because of the socioeconomic distinctions. Mostly I remember the way he taunted her, about how he bet his father made more in a day than she did all year. Maybe the man did possess such an outrageous income, but how much did it profit him when the result of his parenting was so toadlike?

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Anyway. We staggered back to the car. When I tried on the boots, RDC asked me such ridiculous questions as "Are they comfortable? Do your toes hurt?" I don't get it. Of course they're not comfortable; of course my toes and metatarsals and shins hurt: they're ski boots! However much less injurious they seemed than my own pair, they were savage enough that my toes were numb and the tops of my feet bruised when I finally wrestled them from my legs. My calves might be fatter, but that doesn't affect the angle my ankle can bend relative to the angle the boot allows. For anyone who's seem "Dogma" but hasn't skied, I have to tell you Azrael was wrong. It's not central air but removing ski boots that is the deepest carnal pleasure.

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I've only been in Breckenridge a couple of times, so I don't know how old the crêpe stand we found is. Any age of crêpe stand is preferable to the Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. restaurant, where we went once before when all we wanted was deck seating (and that was all we got, too). We each had a seafood and mushroom crêpe, really yummy. We ate at a sidewalk table so we could admire the dogs of passersby, and having eaten my savoury course I returned for a sweets course--blueberry and Nütella. Yowza.