Distilled to its essence, my life is centered on the holy trinity of family, service, and skiing. While others consider the holidays a gauntlet to be conquered, they are a time when my clan further cements its bonds. This season was no exception – we had a blissful series of days together doing very little other than eating and exchanging gifts and indulging in the warmth of our easy companionship. As always, our community, whether strangers or clients or friends, needed help and we were there with a smile and a hand and a shoulder on which to lean. It is the third leg of this tripod, usually equally steadfast, that has led to an existential crisis, not solely individual, but as a collective Valley.
To live and work in this place is to engage in a calculated tradeoff – addressing the often-draconian whims of entitled visitors and second/third/fourth homeowners in exchange for the opportunity to immerse oneself in the surrounding outdoor bounty. It is significantly easier to cater to a demanding bar customer when one has spent the earlier parts of the day getting faceshots. This year, as we are all acutely aware, the calculus has shifted. Now, to the extent that one has been on the mountain, it has been in close proximity to the very populace that one must serve later in the evening. There is no separation from the ire, from the rude behavior, from the cluelessness that would be endearing if it wasn’t emanating from a distinctly unsympathetic person.
As each week has passed with no portent of meaningful snow, the downward spiral has increased its centripetal force. The despair is seemingly the only topic of conversation, affecting even those, like me, who traffic in unreasonably optimistic prognostications. While tourists lament the untold sums they have spent to arrive here, they are missing the larger picture. Skiing is not a hobby, not a pastime, not a chance to brag on social media. To those who have made their home here, it is life itself, an obsession, a central organizing principle, a worthy sacrifice. Thus, when there is no real skiing to be had, doubts begin to seep into the subconscious. Maybe we should have taken those big city jobs with the big pay or gone to medical school or joined the family business, as our kin had long urged – well, not my parents, because they are awesome and get “it,” but most parents at least.
In the forty-plus years that I have been skiing, I have never been so discouraged – not even on those East Coast days when it was somehow simultaneously precipitating water droplets and freezing freaking cold. Consequently, my mood has been mercurial at best. I usually laugh off the dipsticks in the roundabouts, the tyrants with their shopping carts, the cavalier swinging of skis that threatens decapitation. This year, I have not been able to capture that spirit of forgiveness and that has troubled me – I don’t want to be a curmudgeon. So, this past weekend, I went to Denver instead of to the slopes and I was all the happier for it. It was quite freeing, to take a step back from it all and therefore attain a bit of gratitude. I am intellectually aware that there is more to life than skiing. But, also, I believe that, in a world where nothing matters except love and health, the mountain life, being steeped in these twin core values, is more meaningful than any other endeavor.
I have not looked at a forecast recently so that I can protect my fragile mental health, but I know, to the extent that I know anything, that it will snow again, perhaps quite a lot. Until that happens, I’m going to hold my people close and the jerks at a distance. If we all adopt that ethos, we will survive.