During Christmas Day Evening I brought out the computer with intent to watch a DVD I had received some twelve hours earlier as a gift.
By the time my damn laptop booted up, movie watching was trumped by the impulse to rummage through 'My Documents'.
I read a couple pieces from the past, including one document titled, "skiing essay6". I wrote it four years ago when I was still living two hour plus hours from decent chairlift. It helped me remember that the mere fact of living in a ski town does not make someone a skier.
True skiers live everywhere – and sometimes the flat land MD rips harder than the lifties, and the Bay Area family man with skinny skis is more hardcore than the local guy with all the sick gear.
It matters not where one resides, what or where he rides – the love and the fellowship is what presides.
* * * * *
I grew up five hundred yards from the beach and never learned to surf. I played football in college, and it was not my favorite sport. My name is Jon Grant, and I am a Skier. I have been known to check weather reports five times a day. I will wake up cheery at 5:00am after four hours of inebriated sleep and drive two hours through fog and rain and snow, by myself, to go skiing.
I am not special, nor do I ask approval for my actions; I merely belong to an arcane brotherhood who transforms their lives simply to turn two shaped planks down heavenly-white joy. Indeed, it is the perfect combination of mountain and snow which is unique, and to this majesty we searchers blindly seek.
Where there is snow, we go. Where there is snow predicted, we plan, dig into emergency savings, and then go.
For this gift of powder snow, we are prepared to endure without comfort of home or loving embrace of family. We are peculiar souls – perhaps selfish, even crazy. But those who do not know, simply do not know.
And many seasons of our lives are lived exclusively through magazine and film; art forms that can be beautiful and captivating, but satisfy on a level perhaps only ill-fated Tantalus can truly understand.
Yet, a few days a year everything aligns and we reap the reward of our life’s submissive union to the powder day. In this perfection our fanatical devotion is affirmed, and the brethren find themselves in white effortlessness of boundless freedom. Amidst the fluff, we seek no more, and the pilgrims are at ease.
* * * * *
Mollify your pilgrim soul. Make a hajj to the mountains, and Go Ski! PlumpJack will take care of the details.
P.S. We most definitely had a white Christmas at the Squaw Valley Inn and are saying goodbye to 2010 with TONS MORE SNOW!!!!!!!!!!!!
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