Discovering Ski Season

Joe Chellman

New Hampshire has four seasons: mud, humid, foliage, and ski. My favorite was always foliage (what others may call “autumn” or the boring “fall”), with perfect weather and beautiful scenery. However, most of my classmates, from the time we were very small through high school, preferred ski season. Every winter would see people putting on their multi-colored jackets and hitting the slopes. Almost everyone owned skis, and almost all of them went skiing nearly every weekend, sometimes skipping school to go during the week.

I was not among the skiing elite. Although my mother is a pretty proficient skiier, it was not something I started at age three. I may have been pretty talkative at that age, but a budding skier I was not.

When the ski program at my elementary school was made available to us in the fourth grade, it was a completely new thing for me. I learned to flounder on the edgeless skis, trying to glide gracefully through the backyards of the school's neighbors, trying desperately not to cry when I fell. Fridays eventually became something I looked forward to. Skiing almost every Friday through much of the winter was good exercise for us, and taught us a valuable New Hampshire survival skill. Over the next two years, I learned more or less how to ski.

Until sixth grade rolled around. For the first time, downhill skiing was made available. It was more expensive, but it was also, all my classmates said, much more fun. You went faster down steeper hills, there were chair lifts to ride up the hill that carried you twenty or thirty feet off the ground, it was a real life-and-limb-risking good time!

Needless to say, I was a bit terrified. I had never do such things before, I was deathly afraid of heights (just looking at a ladder made me woozy), and I was a real crybaby. To subject myself to the possibility of embarrassment in front of my classmates in the interest of “fun” was not appealing to me. Just the same, I thought that it might be fun — after all, everyone else was doing it — so I thought I would ask my loving parents for advice. My mother was a skier, wasn’t she? Surely she could tell me all the fun reasons I’d love to ski. My father wasn’t a skier, but surely he too would be able to tell me that there was no reason to be afraid.

My mother proceeded to tell me about friends she knew who had gone too fast, wiped out and broken limbs. The chair lifts could be quite high, and you know how you feel about heights, Joseph. You have to take many lessons before you’ll be able to do much of anything anyway, it really takes a lot of work, and really don’t you think that cross-country skiing is good enough I know all your friends are going to be doing downhill and you’ll be all by yourself but I think that might be a good thing it will give you time to reflect and think clear thoughts and besides I don’t want MY BABY TO DIE OUT ON THOSE AWFUL HILLS OH PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD DON’T GO SKIING!

My father was more succinct. He told me about the one and only time he went skiing, where he nearly killed himself because he went down a regular hill without taking a lesson, didn't know how to snowplow (the essential posture all learning skiers must know — we learned it in cross-country skiing), and went screaming down the hill at 90 miles an hour, falling in a heap at the bottom after expending all of his considerable kinetic energy, taking off his skis, and spending the rest of the day in the lodge, trying to unclench his teeth. He never skied again.

Needless to say, I was extremely terrified. I ended up being one of two people in entire class of twenty-five who elected for cross-country instead of downhill. We tried to enjoy ourselves skiing peacefully over the countryside, but my thoughts always turned to my more adventurous classmates. After a week or two had passed, and I had talked to my chums about the fun they were having on the slopes, I began to think I had been duped. My friends were telling me all the fun I was missing. If there’s anything a kid can’t stand, it’s missing out on something fun. I asked to be allowed to go downhill skiing next week.

I never actually killed myself, broke any bones, even bruised myself downhill skiing. Yes, the chair lifts at some ski areas are terrifying, and I always ask to have the safety bar down even now (the real skiers, of course, need no such protection). Yes, I've had some “yard sale” falls (where your skis, poles, bindings, googles, pants, shoelaces, everything goes flying in all directions, littering the ground like a messy yard sale), but falling, if done right, is almost as much fun. I never regretted my decision to start downhill skiing.

Except once. But that’s a story for a another time.