The First Client
He’s in his 50s. Maybe 60s. About the size of a truck, chest armored with a Teton Pines Golf Course stitching, and beard soaked with foam from the pitcher of beer he’s nursing. He’s white. Blue eyes—the whole nine yards, an ex-lacrosse player at Harvard and heir to his dad’s billion-dollar weapons manufacturing company.
A self-made man. The mountainous, adventurous type. Goes to Austria to ski race with ex-Olympic gold medalists when he’s bored, except he gets so drunk by midafternoon that he ends up catapulting off a cliff and fracturing a femur. A man of the people. Skis in a Stio shell and 110 underfoot Black Crows. He knows the scene, asks me to tell him “where the good shit is,” asks me “where all the locals eat.” Claims to be a true Wyoming cowboy because he once paid $100,000 to go horse packing, despite being promptly thrown off his horse and into the Snake River where he sat, wailing, until two 17-year-old boys rescued him and nursed him with hot cocoa and peppermint schnapps. Sends his sons to wilderness camp so he doesn’t have to see them in the summers.
I don’t think he said a word to me over lunch. Hell, I don’t think he even spoke to his kid. He talked to a nondescript point on the wall above my head, as if I were the wallpaper, the floral-printed-slightly-peeling backdrop to his life of glory and glamor. He was obsessed with peeling me down, putting me in some box so he could take me out with the recycling. “Did your parents go to Yale?” “Where in town do you live?” What’s the size of your house and your income bracket? How could you possibly have access to the same education, the same mountains, the same ski hill that I do?
The Place
This is a landscape that eats people whole. It’s a hateful landscape; an angry, relentless, bloodsoaked valley, violated by highways and golf courses and chairlifts. It’s fantastic. Snow falls by the bucketful, settles over the landscape, buries houses, and softens the mountains. A home to romantics, like my parents, whose visions of America were not a gilded city but a snow-coated ski hill somewhere in the Wyoming Rockies. Romantics who will do anything for a lift ticket, wake up before the plows clear the village road to catch first tracks, drip hot wax over skis until their hands burn, dip into impossible tree lines until their muscles tear.
Those who choose to ski instruct—like my parents and I—do so to ask for permission. It’s for those who can’t afford lift tickets, who aren’t local enough, for the too old and too young. It is a means of asking the mountain if they too are allowed on it. A means of bypassing the iron gates that wrap themselves around the sport of skiing with 50% gear discounts, free lift tickets, ski training, and decent pay.
Going home to instruct over break, I spend a lot of time thinking about how I feel about this sport. I spent most of my work days teaching private ski lessons, glimpsing into the world of the top 1%; I also spent a rare few days in the mountains with my closest high school friends, racing through powder fields and over pillowy cliff drops—finding ourselves morphed by some snowy god back to the magical, translucent things that once made us children. I have this piece of writing that repeatedly threw itself around my head on those days:
May I introduce you to the dance? Rise up along the skeletal backs of the Rockies at dawn—rise with the sun, with hot breath and sweaty palms, rise human and heavy. At the tops of these mountains, change. Slim yourself. Slow your breath, so that it may become part of the howling wind. Cool. Freeze. Make it so that snow does not melt when it touches you, but instead grows on your back, so you may metamorphose into part of the landscape. Finally—the fall. The utter collapse into gravity, into the valley below you, held by faint, thin lines struck into snow. Transcend. You are not part of—you are less than, you are departing, you are escaping, you are a mere streak across the mid-morning mountainside, so that the trees may forget you by noon.
Closely followed by:
I feel like a part of me is torn off by this place.
The Bus Ride
They’re chemical reflections of me. Young, duck-taped, and tired, eyes glazed over with visions of twin mountain peaks. We sit, we lean into each other, releasing our confusing swirl of resentment and joy, gulping hot coffee until the bus windows turn white with steam. We hold in our bodies proof of this place: desperate, romanticization of the sheer joy of skiing, of living in a valley nestled between national parks and pristine rivers and breathtaking forests—and the anger we’ve inherited. I find home on these bus rides. Find the permission to belong, amid the rejects that have collected in the riverbeds of this valley and find flight in the oxygen-thin morning air.
