In the first installment of Here Is Our Happy Place, a small-town Wyoming native searches for the wild of New Haven. For skiers, bikers, birders, fishers, trail runners, backpackers; for the people who like the look of a sunset over mountains or a sky through tree branches, or a river in winter.
New Haven Ski Club members introduced themselves to me with just the necessities: their name, years with the club, and years skiing.
“We just celebrated our 50th anniversary at this club,” said Georgiana Meyers. At last week’s Thursday meeting, she sat at the corner table with her husband, Frank, bundled up in her deep purple ski jacket and nursing a glass of red wine. It’s the same table they’ve sat at for every weekly club meeting for half a century. Georgiana hasn’t skied for two years now.
“I just feel it’s too risky. I can’t keep up with my grandchildren anymore. He still skis,” she said, pointing at Frank. Frank’s also bundled up in a ski jacket, bright turquoise. He’s soft-spoken and all smiles; Georgiana does most of the talking.
Founded by Kriste Hille and the inventor of the snow machine, Walter R. Schoenknecht, the Ski Club has hosted weekly meetings in the Harugari German-American Club in West Haven since 1941. The meeting room is all wood panels and wood tables and rosy cheeks; a bar stretches along the back wall, and beer is dished out pint after foamy pint; in the middle, a pool table sits, covered in papers and club stickers. Despite the warmth, many like Georgiana stay dressed in their ski jackets. Throughout the night, members ebb in and mingle: everyone circles by Georgiana and Frank’s corner table—the club is a family, and the Meyers are its grandparents.
40-year member Jim McDonald was the first to arrive at last week’s meeting. He wore a blue New Haven Fire and EMS jacket and held a briefcase bulging with binders. As if I were a new member, he shook my hand and sat me down at a greasy wood table at the back of the room. He spread the Club pamphlets before me in a papery fan.
Holding up a pamphlet, he explained, “When you have a membership card, you get discounts, so if you have a day off school you can go to Mohawk and ski for $30.”
And, pointing at another: “We have racing, we happen to be the first place Ski Club for the last three years, and so far this year, we’re ahead, and you don’t have to be a racer. I’m not a racer, but I’m going this Monday night. I’m 84.”
Handing me a booklet: “If you want to try out the club and go to the lodge in Killington, Vermont, you can. We have that lodge in Killington for new members. I love the lodge in Killington.”
This was all I learned about McDonald. He wasn’t interested in telling me where he was from, what he does, or why exactly he skis—on Thursday nights in the Harugari Club those things don’t matter.
“You leave your title outside,” said 26-year member Paul Weiss, another New Haven local. We met two hours into the meeting, sitting down in the middle of the room with a crowd of other members. He wore a Lake Louis fleece from a club trip five years ago. “You have blue-collar workers, you have people who worked for Chase Morgan-Stanley. But you leave your title outside, and here you’re just a regular person. It doesn’t even matter what level you ski at.”
“I mean, look at our president. He won the snowboarding world cup,” Weiss said, pulling a tall man with worried eyes and dressed in a green quarter zip to our table.
Connecticut is far from the playgrounds of World Cup skiers and snowboarders. New Haven is even farther. Jackson, Wyoming, where I grew up, is one of these playgrounds. I know skiing as it is in the Rockies, where snow falls 500 inches a year and the mountains reach 14,000 feet. My parents got bit by some ski bug in their twenties, which brought them to Jackson and made them professional ski instructors. Such is the story for most of the town: neither students nor teachers go to school on good snow days; sweet falls and sweeter summers are just warm periods of waiting for the next ski season. Everyone—the doctors, yoga teachers, baristas, neighbors, therapists—ask not how you’re doing, but whether you’ve been skiing.
Ski Club President Kevin Blagys spent a winter bumming it in Jackson two decades ago. There he worked as a snowboard instructor and won first place at the local Dicks Ditch race in 2001. Blagys doesn’t much like talking about his previous life: “Sure, raced a little in the World Cup, yeah,” he said when pressed.
“I got to grow up with the sport,” he said. Blagys began snowboarding in high school, in Connecticut, in the days when the sport still seemed like some snowy surfer fad, headed by bandana-clad Californian Tom Sims and mustachioed “Godfather of Freeriding” Craig Kelly. But for Blagys, the sport was all-consuming.
“There were some early races up in Stratton, Vermont, and I became part of that group, in that era. It was an era,” Blagys said.
After high school, he first went north to college in Vermont and then West, racing and competing, floating through ski towns like Jackson, securing podiums at international races in the Andes and Alps. While he never won the World Cup, as Wiess says, he narrowly missed qualifying for the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics—the second-ever Winter Games to feature snowboarding.
It’s a passion-filled and exhausting and lonely way to live; it’s a life built on the violent rhythms of snowfall, on the risks of broken backs and broken hearts. My parents left family, friends, and livelihoods behind for snow. My friends left high school, skipped out of college, and lived out of cars. And when it’s bad, it’s bad: my mom always told me the story of the two little girls she saw in the waiting room in the Jackson emergency room, who watched on silently as a doctor explained to them that their mom and dad had died in a skiing accident.
“After living out West, I moved back east, to be with my family, and I started a boat cleaning business,” Blagys said. “It made me appreciate Connecticut more, after living out in the middle of the country.”
Blagys doesn’t elaborate. I understand him; the land is smoother, easier out here by the sea. The skiing, and the people who love to ski, are too.
“People appreciate going to the mountains here. We appreciate our little mountains, our Monday night racing,” Blagys said. “Nobody is alone here. The club makes sure nobody skis alone.”
This is why Kate came to the ski club. 12 years ago, she was newly divorced and newly sober. That’s when a club member approached her. As she recounts the story: “He goes ‘so I hear you ski’ he goes ‘So, you should join the ski club.’ And I said ‘I don’t want to join. I’m not dating this and that. I’m a single woman. I don’t want to go anywhere.’ And he goes ‘Just come. We ski. That’s what we do.’” That Thursday, she showed up. She was given a seat next to another sober club member. The pair would become best friends: all these years later, they host Galentine’s brunches and scuba dive in Aruba.
“She goes, ‘You’re gonna need a lot more Christmas cards this year. About 300 of them.’ She goes, ‘Cause we have one big family here,’” said Kate, laughing. She wore an American flag infinity scarf, she had red hair and red boots, and she laughed with her whole body. She’s found her people, she’s at ease here. So are all the members, it seems: the night is all banter and shining eyes.
I wonder what the magic is. I wonder if it has to do with skiers, with a life lived in worship of snow, mountains, and gravity, a life of constant humility. Or, it might be something simpler, a peace found among people who love the same thing. For now, what I can say for certain is that the Harugari Club, on cold Thursday nights, is a happy place.
