Make a Wedge

"Make a wedge with the tips of your skies, stand up nice and tall, and push your shins against the tongues of your boots." This is what I spend the majority of my day saying to young kids at Mt. Bachelor resort here in Bend, Oregon. Instructing ski lessons is a long day, somtimes rewarding, sometimes very frustrating. Even at ages four and five the difference in athletic ability between these kids is staggering. Some will grasp it immediately and will be ripping around on steep slopes before their lesson ends. Others will spend the entire six hour lesson trying to stay on their feet and make it down an incline the pitch of a roof on a one-story house. It's also not a cheap sport so it is rare to get the appreciative child who is grateful to be there and listening intently. More often I am fighting with kids--who could literally be my own--about whether or not their parent's ski instruction supercedes my own.

I've discovered that although I've skied several seasons as an adult in several different states I had no idea what I was doing until I came to ski school training two weeks ago. My strategy was always to turn my skies downhill, swerve when I started getting out of control, and stop on a dime when about to run into something. This always sufficed in the past. Now I will never make a turn again without analyzing whether or not I could have done it better. "Was I leaning too far forward? Was I sitting back on the pot? Did my skies stay parallel through the turn?" So much to think about. Self-improvement can be annoying as an adult. Sometimes you just want to do something without knowing so much about it. It's part of the fun. Once you know what you're doing, you have to work at it. Bummer. The same used to be true for walking in the woods. I used to like to go out on hikes just to get away from the city and unwind, then I tried to make this leisure my job and had to learn the names of all the plants and trees and animals and the natural cycles that we are all involved in. Next thing I knew I couldn't go for a walk in the woods without analyzing every detail of my surroundings. "Is this grove too overgrown? Should they do a controlled burn here? Why don't they do some trail work on this eroded site, it looks like shit." Even nature has become something for my mind to pick apart and organize. It's exhausting.

I'll stop that thought right there though, because who can honestly complain about working as a ski instructor? It's not an office. There's not a whole lot of responsibility (except not losing your kids somewhere in a snowstorm). It's a fun way to spend the winter and live in a beautiful part of the country. However, life doesn't just stop when one decides to do something like this. There are still bills to pay and food to be purchased and all the same wants and needs as before. So it takes a little sacrifice--like sleeping on a giant blow-up mattress to avoid the cost of yet another bed you won't be able to take with you when you move. Needless to say useless things like cable TV don't make the budget and amazingly if there is money that shows up in the bank account it seems to go effortlessly toward the outdoor gear we get at absurdly low prices. So the culture becomes one of homeless vagabonds with backpacks, skies, and mountain bikes that cost more than some people's cars. It takes a certain kind of crazy to live this way and one I'm finding myself growing out of. Don't get me wrong. I'm having a ball, but at some point the costs start to out-weigh the benefits. You get to the point where you're talking to the parents of these children--who carelessly throw away two-hundred bucks to have their kids get ski lessons from a group of homeless psychotic athletes--and you're thinking, I could do this person's job. I could be on the other end of this transaction...and the dream wanders off to better things.

I have so much more to say about this adventure and so little time to sit down and write about it. I'll try to keep this updated as the winter goes on. Hope everyone had a happy holiday and a happy new year! Welcome 2007.