Five Falls, One Diamond
I began my skiing career this year with two farfetched goals: to ski a black diamond and fall five times a day. These were comforting and complementary; failure in one suggested success in the other.
New hobbies are hard to start as an adult; we are so often challenged and embarrassed in the course of days that it seems strange to do so recreationally. Nonetheless, I slid under the lessons arch at Northstar in January on a pair of scuffed 168 cm Faction Prodigies, bought at steep discount at a Sports Basement. My first instructor is a leathery lawyer from New York who fondly recalls long-dead lifts in the New Hampshire hills. He immediately cross-examines over my skis: "Are you sure those are yours?"
I am sure of very little besides the freedom of my falling goal, which I fulfill immediately. Confidence, it turns out, is eviscerated when you are passed on anything called “The Big Easy” by a backwards-skiing parent in paroxysms of pride at their graceful toddler, and I am usually thirty feet downhill from where the instructor means us to be. “You just slid down more hill than we had to learn on,” he comments.
But I feast on pizza and fries for a few hours, and the lawyer says I am "most improved" among the group and recommends I consider advancing. He has also just won a court case over the phone and is feeling magnanimous, but upwards I go.
My afternoon instructor considers my “most improved” an invitation to remove the pizza-fry crutch and go straight to parallel skiing. He is a phenomenal exaggeratory teacher, overselling the subtle movements he is trying to impart to me and another most-improved from SoCal who has declared the Main Street run to be "suicidal.” Still, after a few hours of working us over, the instructor says we are both ready for the family zone further up the zippy Comstock Express. There, children rove like predatory wasps. My fellow student protests.
But I do not care. A madness is setting in. Maybe it is the candlelight of the sunset, setting the pines atop of Mt. Pluto ablaze with a warm, auric glow. Like a hug on the tenth date, the easily anticipated movements of the Big Easy no longer satisfy.
I am soon falling down the sheer cliff face of the family zone. "What did you do wrong?" the instructor asks for the fifth time.
"I leaned back. I should lean forward," I say from the ground.
"No, no!" he says. "You must lean down." He zips off, leaning like a homesick compass needle downhill even as his skis carve into the snow, changing north to west to north to east to...
And then it clicks.
—
I am leaning down at the top of Northstar's East Ridge, cheeks stung by a blizzard. It is three months later and there are maybe two hundred souls upon all of North Star, each of us here by dumb luck during a storm which rescued the hills from spring.
Spring? I have never heard of it. The storm pulls a vast gray curtain around the mountain, obscuring even the sapphire of Tahoe, as if all the world has dropped off into the void and there is nothing but the snow-cloaked trees and this ballet of winter upon the piney stage. I think of what Canadian literary critic Hugh Kenner said of sailing, that "beyond illusion it is possible to be for hours and days on end perfectly and inexpressibly happy.”
The Prodigy skis are still too short, but full of a zippy delirium of which I’ve grown fond. I look down at them and their cryptic French palindrome beneath the flying snow, Engage le jeu que je le gagne, “Start the game so I can win.” Behind me, an oldtimer enjoys a morning beer in the snowed-in Tost champagne hut. With a slight lean to the left, I slide off the ridge and into the top of Tonini's run. It is a modest black diamond, but it is my first.
Here you go. Resort to switchbacks if you have to slow down. Lift the left foot. pivot the right, recover.
No, no switchbacks. Don’t deny the hill. Turn into it, rely on the skis, two blades on which you can shave the snow with all your weight. There is delight in working hand-in-hand with the slope, ceding control to gain it. Recite with your feet the liturgy of movement: left and lean then right and lean.
I am unsure what really compelled me to try skiing in the first place. Perhaps a vague sense that it was worthwhile, and this sustained me until it was worthwhile. From the very beginning there was something quite familiar about it, as if I knew how to talk to the hill once and am remembering. And when this memory fills your limbs, like the second après beer, and you do not think about skiing, but simply movement…
I suddenly cannot imagine life without the possibility of skiing. This movement, so oddly localized to certain places at certain times, seems now as ordinary as talking, or at least as fundamental. What a shame it would be, to have never spoken with a mountain in its own tongue, in the accent of winter.
I rotate the Prodigies into a snappy right angle and carve to a stop, the powder blossoming into a flare of snow quickly snatched by the wind. A spontaneous laugh escapes me, echoing off the taut white corduroy canvas of the open Powder Bowl meadow at Tonini's base. It is getting harder to fall.
