Category: Skiing

Categories
mental health Skiing

More Bumps, More Beauty

As an anxious adventurer, I have to play tricks with my nervous system, use shortcuts to get down mogul runs free of halting fright.

Recently, riding up the Beavers lift at Arapahoe Basin, I confessed to my unflappable ski buddy Carl just how nervous I had been, how downright shaky, on a run we had just finished. He was surprised when I reminded him how anxious I felt on the slopes. You don’t seem scared. Just very determined. A typically kind response.

When I ski down to Carl and exclaim, Beautiful! I am not just catching my breath. I say beautiful because acknowledging beauty burns off my crackle of anxiety and turns down my self-criticism.  

When I say beautiful, I mean that I’m scared out of my mind, but I can calm myself by looking at the trees, at the sky. I say it knowing that if I face my torso downhill and plant my left pole firmly, my legs will have to swing my skis around into a turn.

I say beautiful, feeling the semi-wilderness around me and the eternal blue above, knowing that the mountain and I are connected.

Beauty is why I ski, why I ride my bike in the mountains, why I want to be in this messed up world. Hearts break every day. Wars rage. The human family appears beyond dysfunctional, downright broken.

And as part of this world, far too often, I forget beauty, forget generosity and grace. I fret about the busted pipe in our cabin. Sheltered and warm, I worry about the weather. I look at the news, and look away again. Then, out of nowhere, magic happens.

Last night, for the first time in a quarter century of looking out at these woods, the husband said, Bobcat! I have heard him say deer, elk, moose. One memorable morning, he even said bear. But never, until last night, bobcat.

She was graceful and still, square face lined in elegant geometrics, black ear tips twitching. We watched her in the early spring dusk as she sat stock still, perfectly camouflaged in her white and brown coat. After listening intently, she made a quick pounce for a mouse tunneling underneath the snow—a near miss. With the confident serenity of a predator, she watched us for a few minutes, as we watched her. She made a few strides toward us, took a showy turn or two, then stepped gracefully over the hard packed snow into the silent woods. Beautiful.

Categories
humor mental health Skiing

Subzero

Photo by Darius Krause on Pexels.com

This is the kind of cold that kills people. Astronaut wear:  Gore-Tex layered over down, over wool. Neck gaiters under helmet. And still a shiver. Eight thousand feet above the far-away sea, searing wind has pushed snow into wave-like patterns. The chair lift rises through a bleak gust. Taos ski valley. Birthday number next.

Breathing in, she puts her mittened hand over the small gap where wind blows through her goggles. The wind sucks warmth away from her thrice layered neck. Relentless. No one should be out in this weather.

A snowmobile bores its way uphill, small siren wailing, lights flashing into the white-out. Tugging a rescue sled. Please god, she murmurs, not today, not me. A group hikes skyward, skis shouldered, to launch down a couloir. They are crazy. This is crazy. This is killing cold. Raising a layer to cover her face, feeling only ice on the crusted fabric. Wind bites like fire at her nose-tip. Too cold to breath in, too scared to breath out.

At the top, in front of the ski patrol hut, and look! Everyone! Down she goes, left hip bouncing off hard scrape. Embarrassment bolts her vertical again, sliding onto the lip of a run called Honeysuckle.

Chair seven to Bob’s run to Walkyries Glade. Do not explore black trails alone. Do not enter the narrow track, or pass the sign with a pretty name for treed moguls. Do not be lulled by this hush of trees weighted with snow, by this spotlight of calm. Time falls away. Look down, turn once, turn again into perfect cushions of soft white between oval humps. Just a person, skiing.

Too fast! Trees narrow on the steep. Traverse! Angle against the hill. Knowing she will die this time. Launching into the air.

And both skis land firm. Heart pounding, looking back. Six inches off the ground, at most.

Adrenalin surges, recedes. Up to go down again. Down to go up. From death by wind chill. To a tea stop in a crowded lodge.

Legs ache for days. The slow-motion tumble? Too much thinking, too much pulsing fright? Or doing, as happens, a bit too much. Afternoons huddled on the blue couch, soothe reading Austen under hand-crocheted blankets. Pushing away, and into, this next middle year.

Categories
Skiing Writing

Refuge

Inciting Email

After being cooped up too long with a cold, looking out at a brown Denver January, I drank coffee and quickly skimmed my email. The day was set aside for writing, to get one revision closer to finishing a stalled essay I’d started two years earlier. My brown backpack leaned heavily against the back door as I scanned my messages. Joy! A powder alert from Arapahoe Basin ski area! My favorite playground had gotten six inches of snow overnight, and ten inches in the prior twenty-four hours. I threw my skis into the car and tucked a small notebook into my pocked. It would be a different kind of writing day than I had planned.

I drove west on 1-70 and an hour later crested Loveland Pass, where blue sky outlined the majestic ridges of the Continental Divide. In the hundreds of times I’ve seen that 360-degree panorama, it never looks the same. With every fresh look, it stalls my anxious thoughts, deepening my breath from chest to belly.

Two hours after leaving the house, I was on the two-seat Pallavacini lift. Below me, expertly curled powder tracks on steep rocky terrain; above me, shafts of sunlight on sparkling evergreen boughs. I skimmed along the aptly named Cornice run with its views of the Ten Mile Range, then made my way to the Loafer trail. Powder flowed over the top of my ski boots as I glided through the widely spaced tree trunks along its flank. I stopped and angled my skis against the slope to look uphill, where a dark band of boulders offered a bounty of snow back up to the open sky.

Heavy with a story I yearned to tell well, I soon ascended the Beavers lift and made my way to a tiny restaurant named Il Refugio, a sanctuary at 12,000 feet above sea level. Resting my tired legs, I drank tea slowly, and started to write—again–about that time in my life when I hovered between the wisdom of innocence and the scarring messages of a shame-based culture.

As I wrote, Frank Sinatra crooned out of a hidden speaker, You make me feel so young! You make me feel there are songs to be sung. I looked out at the view and smiled at the sleight of hand that is time, the healing refuge that is beauty.