It's a powder day!

Absence (From Work) Makes The Heart Grow Younger

By Ken Wright, 3-28-06

I really had planned on growing up some day.

Instead, here I am, in the middlest of my midlife, standing in a mostly empty parking lot at our local ski area on a weekday morning, pulling on my ski boots. I’m supposed to be working. But it’s a powder day.

I had asked my kids if they wanted to skip school and join me today. They both said no, that they had important things to do at school. They’re growing up, it seems. I’ve really got to work on that.

Work on their not growing up, I mean. Grow – yes! Please! Abandon! Savor! Explore! Embrace! But don’t grow up! And as a parent, I know that it’s most effective to show, not tell; that the style is the message. So here I am. Because like any devoted parent, I want to be a role model for my kids.

Next to me in the parking lot is a college-age kid, probably also MIA from classes, lacing his snowboard boots on the tailgate of his Jeep. I’m blaring hip hop; he’s cranking Ozzy’s “Crazy Train” -- like we’re exploring each other’s generation. We nod at each other, grinning, our heads bobbing to our respective beats.

I won’t be growing up today.

Soon, I am heading up. I have the seat all to myself on the big six-person chairlift rising from the base lodge. When I left town, it was under assault by a wet, driving sleet, splattering into a thick accumulation of slush. The air was dense, damp and chilling. Trees were frosted, the hills and mountains behind town swallowed in the cloudbank. On the highway headed north out of town, the “chains required on passes” sign flashed.

Here on the mountain, the aspen ridges reach into the clouds, heavy, wet snow droops the spruces, and coats me. The air smells like happiness.
Off the lift, I skate the flat past the mountain-top patrol hut to the top of the Paradise run. From here there is a usually dazzling view of the distant, enormous, looming fangs of the Needle Range. Today, though, that wall of rock is swallowed by the mass of moisture. But … it’s there. I can feel it.
I push off and sink into deep telemark turns, and the mountain and I enter a gravity-dance down the pure uncut fall line. Swing and dip and swing and dip … My knees carve the snow like the bow of a boat, unreeling behind me a river of turns meandering down the mountain.

I pass copses of snow-heavy trees and dive down steep pitches marking the limestone ridges that band the mountain. I cut left and under a dormant chairlift and stop at the crest of a steep pitch. I peer over to see a steep field of snowcovered Volkswagen Beetles. Or so it seems.

Two snowboarders skid to a stop next to me, kicking up an explosion of snow.

“Yeah! That was bitchin', Bob!” one yells.

Hey, some of my best friends are snowboarders. But, aside from the fact it lets people of very little experience or skill go very, very fast, I personally have no interest in strapping one on for one aesthetic reason: It seems going so fast makes the runs down the mountain go by much too quickly.

But even if I don’t get it, these young bucks riding their boards are still part of the Powder Day Tribe.

Tribal code: I was there first, so I have right of first descent. I jump into the first turn, and immediately lurch, then lunge, then launch forward, downward, displaying very little of my prodigious skill and experience, finally auguring in face-first into a large mogul. I glide to stop when I plowed and adequate snow to counteract the the mass of my body multiplied by the square of my velocity. It takes about 30 yards.

Looking back up at my snowplowing skidmark, relishing the chill of snow blown through weak points in my my apparel, I notice Bob and his buddy are gone – their nearly-straight tracks head past me and away over the next rise.

I lie in the snow savoring the glow of the flow of blood in my downward-pointing head, and ponder the Zen powder-day lesson in this: Egolessness, Grasshopper.

The rest of the day is equally filled with fun runs and lovely lift rides. One time, I ski up to an empty lift line and find three snowboarders lying on the snow. Just lying there, spent. At the top of a lift, I see two old people merrily poling away, one is wearing one those pile jester hats and the other is in a hat like lizard. On a particularly ridiculously delicious run down Deadspike, I am passed by a guy carving wide, fast, swooshing turns, cheerily singing a Christmas carol: Sleigh bells ring, are you listenin’…

I haven't seen a single grown up today, I guess.

By mid-day, it’s time to head home – I have to pick up my kids from school, anyway. When I get back to the parking lot, I’m wet, tired, sore, and behind on my work. But I’m not grown up enough yet to fret.

And I’m not alone. Walking back through the parking lot, I pass a mother scolding her toddler: “Emma, come get your skis,” she demands. But Emma is walking in her pink snowsuit and little ski boots with her hands outstretched like a zombie, toward a huge snowbank left over from the morning’s plowing.

I give her a nod and smile as I stroll by. Welcome to the tribe.

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