Requiem For A Skier

I love being a skier, and by skier, I mean any form of snow-covered-downhill-means-of-conveyance-that-requires-you–to-stand-while-in-motion sport.  I snowboard, too, went today, in fact, so no discrimination.  I’ve always felt that skiing helps keep us young in body, mind and, most certainly, in spirit.  Sometimes, maybe I confuse feeling young with being immortal.  The true rush of skiing is how absolutely alive it makes you feel, making the opposite impossible to imagine.  We are a community, we snow riders, and the name of the community we share is Life.  It’s simple, to ski is to live and those of us who find ourselves addicted to the challenge and confident in our ability to overcome those challenges live very large.  Sadly, nothing, not even the perfect experience of an absolute all-hands-on-deck powder day can deter the Reaper forever.  I am now of an age group where, as the song lyric contends, I am past the point of dying young.  It’s a startling realization.  More so when it’s driven home by the untimely death of friends. 

A good friend of mine passed away recently, not when skiing, because he no longer could, not by cataclysmic accident or the rapid on-set of disease, but by chronic protracted illness aided by obesity and poor lifestyle choices.  Some of those choices may have been made while we ran amuck in high school, and perhaps my friend sped through crossroads with reckless abandon while most of us heeded warnings to slow and turn down gentler, less destructive paths.  Maybe he was always moving too fast to turn.   My friend did everything at full speed.  We all know these people, the true type As.  They often fail at business because they’re too damn restless to be driven.  They often fail at relationships because, like a champion rodeo bull, they’re too uncontrollable to ever be ridden.  And God knows you can’t assail them with reproach and reason.  They’re just too stubborn to listen.

Brian was a balls-to-the-wall skier, no better way to describe his technique.  He was profoundly good, one of the very best skiers at Killington, a certified instructor as a teenager; a hot dog, rocket fueled, top gun at the biggest, baddest hill in the East.  I was always in awe of his talents on snow.  Huge, even at 16, his easy blend of power and grace separated him from everyone else.  He was gifted; skiing was as effortless for him as drawing breath was for the rest of us.  I remember once skiing with him and being so embarrassed by our skill discrepancy that I spent the afternoon in the lodge reading a book.  Too bad because I could have learned a lot if I could have kept him in sight.  Even the Beast, however, ultimately wasn’t big enough to corral him.  A lifestyle powered by party can implode any career. 

The way I remember him, the way I choose to remember, are not his withered legs, no longer strong enough to carry him across a floor, or his struggles just to breathe through damaged lungs under the constriction of acute obesity, the way he was at the end.  I choose the beginning of the story where a kid with a wicked grin too large to be contained, rips a zipper line through the never-ending spring bump fields of Bear Mountain, or dips into the steep tight trees along side Devil’s Fiddle decades before it became a free-ski rite of passage.  In my heart of hearts, beyond intellectual certainty, I would have sworn to you then that he, my friend and the best skier I knew, would live forever.  And so would I.

We’re a big noisy community, we snow riders, as diverse as human kind.  What brings us together is the feeling that we’re at our best, our most alive, when we ski.  I know it doesn’t make us immortal, but I think, as long as we keep searching for another perfect run, we stay forever young.  Just like Brian.