Ski Bum Dad: Ken Wright’s “The Monkey Wrench Dad”

By Jenny Shank, 9-01-08

The Monkey Wrench Dad: Dispatches from the Backyard Frontline
By Ken Wright
Raven’s Eye Press, 230 pages, $18.95

What happens to ski bums when they grow up?  In his essay collection The Monkey Wrench Dad, Durango’s Ken Wright provides his answer to this question.  Wright moved from Boston to Colorado in 1983 for a season of ski bumming and never left.  He managed to carry on with the usual adulthood rituals (he married a fellow ski bum and has two now-teenage kids) while maintaining the lifestyle that he moved West for. 

Even as a middle-aged dad, Wright encourages his kids to skip school on fresh powder mornings and relishes summers spent on river trips.  He says he lives in “(mostly) voluntary poverty,” juggling several jobs that can accommodate his adventures, including a current gig running Raven’s Eye Press, which published this book.  Many of the essays previously appeared in such venues as Durango Magazine, High Country News, Inside Outside Southwest, and New West.

He has clearly avoided living the unexamined life that Socrates cautioned against, and Wright’s insights about his choices are sharp and witty.  Wright writes that he first came West “as a sort of back-road detour from the trip-tic route in life I’d been navigating—academic to professional to homeowner to family to beer gut to loss of body pigment to mid-life muscular attrition to pension retirement to hip-replacement surgery and then, if not sooner, unto death.”

In his essay “Following in Their Parents’ Fall Lines,” Wright creates a poignant portrait of one of the rituals of parenthood among those who have chosen to extend indefinitely their ski bumming days: the crack-of-dawn trip up the mountain every Sunday to drop their kids off early for “Snowburners, Purgatory’s weekly ski school for local kids.” In a passage that succinctly summarizes the rewards and costs of the decisions he and other town parents have made, he observes:

“These Sunday mornings are a tincture of mountain-town culture (or at least the skiing subculture, just one of the many intriguing tribes found in a mountain town).  It’s a culture that, in the vein of our species tribal roots, has coalesced around a place that matters to them, and lives a lifestyle that maximizes getting out in that place as much as possible.  The places offering this lifestyle, though, are by nature and definition not always easy places to make a living, so these Sunday morning ski-area gatherings are healthy reminders of what making as much money as possible was sacrificed for.  They are medicine.”

“License to Shill” is a funny essay about how he and his wife, despite their repeated, careful examination of their life choices and financial considerations, were rooked into signing up for a time-share condo in Sedona, Arizona.  His description of the mesmerizing salesman who jacked them up on coffee and would not let them leave the room until they signed a contract will put readers in mind of similar characters they’ve encountered everywhere from the jewelry store to the health club business office to the car lot.  Wright writes of his experience that he “understood how old folks get swindled out of their retirement savings.”

For all its charms, The Monkey Wrench Dad suffers a few problems that are common to many collections of occasional pieces.  There is a lot of repetition, as Wright establishes certain details of biography or proclivity repeatedly in several essays (such as the fact that he and his son love to camp outside).  The essays skip around freely, and as a result the book lacks the pleasures that a sustained narrative can offer, and there are gaps in Wright’s tale. 

For example, most of the essays are set during the period when Wright’s children are already go-getting outdoors-people, in their double-digits, always up for a ski or rafting trip.  I would have liked to learn how Wright managed his entry into wilderness parenting—when the kids were tiny, did he have to scale back his adventures?  And how and when did he start teaching them to ski?  Did he consider what would he have done if his kids didn’t take to his enthusiasms?  Even though his own kids are wilderness fiends, does he know of any other ski bum parents whose daughters turned out to be more interested in princesses than powder? 

He seems so confident in having made the right decisions: did he ever question if maintaining this lifestyle was feasible?  Did he ever question whether he should try to take a more stable job to provide for his children’s future education as his own parents did for him?  I don’t mean to suggest that Wright isn’t doing a great job as a “monkey wrench dad"—it definitely appears that he is—but it would have been more interesting to learn about whether he at least struggled with any of these issues that face all nature-loving parents than to read another account of a river trip or ski day.

I suspect I can guess what Wright’s answers to some of these questions would be—probably that all kids take naturally to nature if they are introduced early, often, and consistently enough, which has been my observation.  He writes, “What kids really need is unstructured time in big open spaces.  That’s pretty much it.  Then they’ll become whoever they are,” but he could have further interrogated the specific choices a parent must make to provide this.

Because of its repetition, The Monkey Wrench Dad is probably best dipped into rather than read all at once, but its many fine essays offer plenty of insights for everyone who seeks to combine parenting with wilderness adventure.