Читать книгу White Planet - Leslie Anthony - Страница 12
ОглавлениеWhat I really feel is that, if on a pair of skis . . . I forget everything except the joys of living . . . Well, why in God’s name not stay on skis? VISCOUNT ANTHONY KNEBWORTH in a letter to his father, Earl of Lytton, 1924
IN THE morning after a heavy rain, Santiago, Chile, was sort of like the basement of paradise. Its ubiquitous smog had been washed down gutters, the acrid smell of diesel exhaust replaced by musty garden scents and flowers. On downtown paseos, businesspeople rushed from coffee and morning papers toward whatever encuentro awaited. In surrounding neighborhoods, distant horns crowed over eager milkmen pushing ancient, squeaking carts and clanging bells to rouse customers. Towering above the city to the east loomed snow-capped heaven: when you could see them like this, the Andes formed a monolith of surreal scale.
It was usually magical anticipation that followed me out of the city on such a day, but that morning found me glancing over my shoulder at the sound of every footfall, certain I was being pursued. Shouldering my pack, I fought my way onto a bus and out to the police barrier that marked the start of most mountain roads in this country, seeking a ride up to Farrellones, the ski town I then called home. After my passport was approved by a couple of grim-looking carabineros, I joined a sightseeing Israeli couple in a collectivo taxi on the familiar heart-stopping ride up the canyon. Settling back in my seat, I shut my eyes and wondered how things could have got so crazy. What the hell was I doing there?
Part of the answer was easy: I was a ski bum in South America.
IN SOME WAYS, the previous few months had been a classic traveler’s saga; in others, the quintessential search for myself. Mostly, however, they’d served up a sensory overload.
Starting at the southern tip of the continent in late March, I’d hiked and skied alone through Patagonia’s Torres del Paine National Park, where I was followed by a puma for two days. I never saw or heard it but had only to retrace my steps a few hundred feet to see its eerily massive prints overlaying my own. Mid-May found me in the southern port of Punta Arenas on the Straits of Magellan, hunkered down in a bar. The soccer on television was interrupted by a report of massive snowfalls, road closures, catastrophic avalanches, and death in the Andes near Santiago. The bar patrons were universally horrified and glad they weren’t there—a disaster zone was the last place you’d want to be. But not me.
Ski bumming is a dedication to snow-sliding strong enough to make you ignore danger, shirk responsibility, eschew common comforts, and live near the bottom of the food chain, all in the name of making turns. I’d had my tastes of this time-honored rite of passage—skipping class in university whenever there was a big dump of snow, the overly freezing winter stint in Banff and subsequent tour of the Rockies with Merl in our van—but I’d always longed for something beyond the packed slopes and posh trappings of the home experience. The prospect of an adventure longer than the week I’d spent in Mexico had lured me to the Southern Hemisphere.
Upon completing my undergrad degree, I’d decided to reward myself with the delinquency of a summer of skiing. With only two reliable choices—South America or New Zealand—I’d flipped a coin that came up cabezas. So off I went, in the North American spring of 1982 (austral autumn), with more gear than the Austrian alpine team, alone, unilingual, and not just a bit naïve. After all, when you’re a twenty-five-year-old product of pampered Western culture, the world is still one big friendly place and you’re indestructible, the realities of life’s inherent fragility yet to sink in. A lesson that foreign ski bumming is unusually adept at teaching.
When the snow started falling in Chile, I headed north from Patagonia and eventually talked my way into a job at a ski area within a couple of hours’ drive of Santiago. Bunking in a large, wood-and-stone refugio high in the Andes with a happy-go-lucky crew of international instructors and patrollers seemed just what I was after. But all was not well in the area. Tension lingered from the 1973 American-backed coup that had ousted freely elected communist president Salvador Allende; military patrols of the infamous mass-murderer General Augusto Pinochet’s ruling junta ranged the slopes with unholstered guns (they were poor skiers and, so the locals said, even poorer shots). Whether or not they were simply maintaining a show of force or searching for subversives among a jet-set crowd dominated by wealthy Brazilians, diplomats, and Pan Am flight attendants was never clear, but they seemed oblivious to the gun-running, cocaine smuggling, and extortion around them.
This I knew from having an unwelcome ear to the ground. In addition to working on the mountain, I ended up running the boutique/bar in the ski shop. It was the social hub of the resort, the place to gather after a frenzied day on the slopes, and it was there that I finally learned Spanish (I’d been passed—barely—in a high school course only after promising the instructor never to take Spanish again).
The sunny days above treeline on the resort’s wide-open slopes were long and heady, the patio perpetually full of fashion-conscious types power-drinking white wine and shucking fresh mussels hauled from a coast that could be seen from the mountain on rare, smog-free days. Everything was larger than life there, including the people.
Characters were everywhere, starting with the chanchos de cadenas (chain pigs), a bedraggled, barefoot lot that stumbled like zombies along the shoulders of the approach road during snowstorms, and that for the equivalent of two cents affixed chains to your vehicle’s tires with broken tools. There was the platoon of American instructors in the ski school, a French-Canadian who lived in a snow cave above the first chairlift, a handful of down-and-out pro racers from Europe. The ambience was both international (the ghost of racer Spider Sabich ruled the slopes; the celebrated and once-frequent visitor had been shot dead in Aspen, Colorado, by actress Claudine Longet) and, like all foreign ski destinations, uniquely local (drunk on pisco, the mountain manager rolled the new $150,000 German grooming machine on its first day of operation).
There was history. I learned that Norwegian and British engineers introduced skis here during the construction of the trans-Andean railway in 1910. Public consciousness of the sport caught up in 1913, when a Chilean diplomat who’d lived in Norway organized a ski tour to the popular Maipo volcano; then Germans and Austrians in conjunction with well-to-do Chileans, started the Ski Club of Chile, and used mining roads to build cabins at Farellones and shape the first resorts, like Portillo. A gaggle of French skiers had more or less built this place by hand during Chile’s sweltering summers.
The weather? Apparently no North American knew what El Niño meant the year I was in Chile, but I had a front-row seat: as I’d seen on television, the first storm of the year had sparked unprecedented flooding in Santiago, destroying barrios and upscale neighborhoods alike, carrying people away in the process. At Portillo, the storm dropped nearly ten feet of snow onto otherwise dry slopes; it all slid, killed some police in a patrol shack, destroyed a lift, and submerged the road under twenty-five feet of icy cement. It took weeks to clear. This pattern was repeated all winter, with ski areas closed for days at a time. At mine, life rose and fell around the single máquina available to clear all roads and parking areas. Snow blew in so hard during one hellacious three-day tormenta that the bull wheel of the main chairlift was actually buried; the lift cable and suspended chairs emerged from the snow as if from underwater. A man trying to uncover his car ended up so deep that by the time he reached the vehicle’s roof he had to be rescued from the snow pit he’d dug.
Frequent earthquakes tended to shake snow loose from all but the most tenacious slopes, heightening avalanche conditions. When the glasses hanging over my bar started rattling, someone would yell terremoto! and we’d all run outside to safety. Just as often, we would exit only to discover that the shaking was a military helicopter coming to evacuate another victim of a peculiar local trend: people regularly skied into lift lines out of control at outrageous speeds, and injuries abounded. My on-mountain activities were dominated by shoveling off flat roofs, placing bamboo poles where someone was likely to hit them, and removing the doors from various structures to use as backboards to strap down the latest lift-line victims. Out of bounds? There was no such thing. We could go where we wanted, and people did, followed by a squadron of hopeful Andean condors.
And yet, so much was great. The endless sunshine between storms, the endless western view in the mornings, and the endless nights—which seemed bottled, ready to be uncorked at will. You had but to say the word fiesta and a party would happen. The people were warm, friendly, sincere, and only occasionally dangerous, especially the smiling, tanned, oh-so-intense women—married ones in particular.
The skiing was beyond my wildest expectations, and the frequent closures meant we often had the mountain to ourselves. Bottomless powder could be found days after a storm on the right slope. There was the 1,000-vertical-foot couloir above the area, a pilgrimage we made on full-moon nights so that you could drop into the slot just as la luna pulled directly overhead. On such occasions, things often had an electric-blue halo around them, an artifact of ingesting magic mushrooms shipped north from Chile’s austral rain forests. It was full-tilt crazy but also endearing: a culture struggling to preserve itself on one hand and trying to emulate the materialistic trappings of norte americanos on the other. For a rube ski fanatic with little to compare it to, it delivered the experience of a lifetime.
The very reason for ski bumming.
AS EVEN NONSKIERS know, skiing can be a consuming passion. Just what, then, is the shape of this fixation? Start here: instructors and coaches obsessed with technique; gearheads beset over the minutiae of equipment and design; other skiers simply and singly preoccupied with the various attributes of terrain (piste, moguls, steeps, chutes, glades) or jargon-laden meteorology (orographic precipitation, upslope storms, pineapple expresses, katabatic winds). Some ski writers are consumed with the physics of snow itself, penning columns on crystal formation and configuration and the temperatures at which it happens; water content and related phenomena like rime, graupel, and sleet—even the angle at which the Earth leans away from the sun in order to cause winter (known as axial tilt, it’s 23.5 degrees). There are abundant places in which to explore these notions, including some twenty national and international ski and snowboard titles that clutter magazines racks in North America alone—more publications than those devoted to surfing, skateboarding, hiking, and climbing.
Evidence of this peculiar mania lies in a glut of “I’ve been there” me-bris: ski gear and roofboxes adorned with resort-logo stickers; hats constellated with ski-area pins; jackets hung with clattering collections of weather-worn lift tickets. Likewise, there’s no end to the bizarre collateral that says “I’m a Skier.” Bumper stickers announce, “I 1 Big Dumps” and “If Hell Freezes Over I’ll Ski That, Too.” Auto knick-knacks like license-plate brackets and seatbelt covers scream “Ski Utah” or “Ski Tahoe,” turning vehicles into rolling chambers of commerce for the mountain ranges of their drivers’ fancy.
What is it about this particular badge—one rarely encountered in other individual sports like surfing or climbing—that so appeals to skiers? Here’s a clue: since you don’t see stickers claiming “I’ve been to Rogers Pass” or other favored lift-free snow stashes, perhaps it has to do with skiing’s conspicuous infrastructure and the fact that ski resorts are—or once were—built to attract like-minded individuals. While in some cases skiing was merely grafted onto pre-existing mountain locations, in others whole towns have sprouted solely because of the sport.
Society makes it hard to live simply and in the moment, so ski aficionados of all stripes are usually making some kind of sacrifice to get their fix. Which is why ski bums take perverse pleasure in the identity of a couch-surfing, dumpster-diving existence; the greater the sacrifice, the richer the reward. Some hang onto the ideal their entire lives, proudly wearing it on their sleeves, while others cover it up with the onion skins of career, family, and other facets of existence. But like a jungle tribe suddenly forced to relocate to a city and wear suits, true ski bums never lose a sensitivity to the perceived threats to their simple traditions. The kind of threats that progress and development ultimately deliver.
Mike Berard, a writer, photo contributor, and one-time editor of Canada’s skier magazine, still has a self-confessed obsession with the ski-bum life that almost always finds its way into his columns and features.
“This rootsy, cool, vibrant part of my life really stands out now that everything’s more complicated,” he says, alluding to ski-bumming’s Peter Pan qualities. “When all you had to do was ski, or wake up to a shitty job you were only doing so you could ski, life was carefree and simple.
“I met a construction worker in Fernie, [British Columbia] who exemplifies the ski-bum dichotomy,” Berard continues. “He snowboards all winter, and in the off-season wants a job that lets him bank enough money to keep doing it. New construction projects give him that but . . . he doesn’t want to see too much new business bringing more tourists to town to steal his fresh tracks. Only it’s too late—the change is already there and he’s participating in it. Fernie has expanded a ton, and more citizens and tourists are what keep the mountain operating for guys like him.”
This unsettling trade-off is the new reality for most mountain towns, and it drives the most obsessed skiers into the unfettered realm of the backcountry, or to remoter towns where the tide of change hasn’t risen too high. “Itinerant” is part of the credo: ski bum and ski gypsy were always one and the same.
These notions are mined endlessly in ski media, and though much of skiing has become the aegis of the wealthy, even these folks can relate. Connecting with the ski-bum ethos is maintaining contact with the grass roots; celebrating the core and its dedication to gravity. Above all there is this: ski-bumming’s essence—the compelling human arc of struggle and survival to achieve a certain idealistic end— never grows old as a storyline.
The National Film Board of Canada’s 2002 Ski Bums, shot in and around Whistler, British Columbia, follows an eclectic cast of oddly nicknamed characters from their resort life to the high-alpine world beyond the ropes to investigate the attitudes and emotions of those for whom snow-riding isn’t just a way of life, but life itself. Although much is gleaned from the subjects’ candid comments, including how and why they regularly walk a tightrope between life and death in the mountains, the movie’s true charm lies in its depiction of cliché: an indigent ski bum living in a van or squat, eating peoples’ unfinished food in the lodge cafeteria; making soup from the free hot water, ketchup, and crackers available; and poaching the bathing facilities of high-class hotels.
Almost predictably, the filmmakers are ski bums themselves. Portraying this lifestyle is nothing new. Dick Barrymore’s 1969 movie, Last of the Ski Bums, followed a tradition begun by ski-film icon Warren Miller, who built a multimillion-dollar empire on the movies he churned out each year in Sun Valley, Idaho (where David and Jake Moe were also stationed when they started the ski bum’s bible, powder). Miller and his ski-bum buddies lived in tents and trailers, hunted (with guns) for food, and made pocket money where and when they could by instructing, shilling books of self-penned ski cartoons, and, eventually, touring Miller’s celebrated annual movies through ski towns. Though Warren is no longer personally involved, the fall classics bearing his name now play to thousands in every major city on the continent.
Ski bumming’s storied history reaches well back into the sport’s literary tradition and possibly as far as its modern roots. As author Peter Shelton has noted, “ski bum”—a decidedly postwar phrase first mentioned in Ski magazine in 1948 (“Inside Report: Ski Bums Wait Table, Ogle Heiresses”) and immortalized in a 1950 Life magazine pictorial set in Sun Valley (“Life Visits Some Ski Bums”)—quickly acquired succinct definition: anyone who wanted to ski so badly they were willing to give up anything to do so.2“The word bum came out of the Depression, but the meaning took a turn after World War II,” Miller is quoted as saying. “A lot of people hit the road then, and it was almost a badge of honor not to be locked into the 9-to-5 . . . The words freedom and ski bum are inextricably intertwined.”
In 1962, when skiing was still considered a fringe activity, Sports Illustrated published “The Oldest Ski Bum in the World” about New York–based Leon Vart, a Russian artist whose path began when he found a discarded ski in Moscow at age thirteen. He may or may not have been the oldest person, but his was a story emblematic of an esoteric subculture barely on the public radar as skiing and resort development entered their Golden Age:
‘Because I am poor, I must live among the rich.’ At 73, [Vart] can afford such candor. It’s about all he can afford, since ski bumming is a hand-to-mouth life . . . He relies on ingenuity (the next best thing to money) to get around and stay comfortably lodged. His lean, tall figure moves with ease and grace, though his blue eyes are faded from the glare of snow and sky. . . he has bartered his services as a painter, translator, correspondent, waiter, baby-and-dog-sitter, and ski instructor for the privilege of skiing in Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, New Zealand and across the United States and Canada.3
Readers at the time likely saw Vart as a Beat Generation holdover, but today’s skier—rich or poor—would have little trouble recognizing a kindred spirit.
Arnold Lunn, an early doyen of British mountaineering who first skied in 1896 in Chamonix, France, made much of the superior sensations afforded by sliding down a mountain, an act he believed could turn even the tamest terrain into acceptable challenge if not sheer, heart-thumping terror. Although the terminology never arises in his abundant and erudite writings, a ski-bum mindset was at the heart of it for Lunn and the cadre of well-to-do, sport-mad Brits who became the unlikely promulgators of skiing’s recreational birth in the Alps. Unbelievably, in the preface to the 1949 second edition of The Mountains of Youth, Lunn is already mining the raw-to-this-day lament of ski-bumming’s purist soul as an innocence lost to the march of progress, infrastructure, and organization (which, ironically, he contributed significantly to), offering up his own prose as a glue to hold the tribe together:
Skiing, as I have tried to show . . . illustrates the Spenglerian distinction between culture and civilization. Every great cultural cycle begins when a nomad tribe settles down . . . It is the economy of the farm, the village and the small city which gives birth to great Art . . . It is from Nature, from Homer’s ‘life-giving’ earth that Art draws its inspiration, the inspiration which vanishes in the giant cities of a dying civilization. Ski-ing has passed through the Spenglerian cycle. It began as a culture in contact with Nature. In the Gothic phase of our sport we skied on snow moulded only by the natural agencies of sun and wind, frost and thaw. . . In those days, we skiers were as scattered as the primitive communities in which culture is born. Today we struggle in télépheriques and funiculars as crowded as the slums of our megalopolitan civilization, and the surface on which we ski is nearly as hard and quite as artificial as the city pavements which mask the kindly earth . . .
For the ski-runner the snow is no inert mantle on the hills . . . It is alive with a multiple personality. He learns to love the snow as a friend and to wrestle with it as an enemy. . . The genuine initiate of the mountain brotherhood has always been in the minority, and I doubt if the multiplication of Ski-hoists and Chair-lifts has either increased or decreased his numbers. Those for whom this book was written will always escape from the pistes. Mountaineering is not a substitute for religion but it has some of the characteristics of a devout cult. The true initiates recognize each other not only when they meet in the flesh, but also when they meet through the medium of the printed word. 4
Where Lunn beat around the bush with lofty prose, however, others simply lit it on fire. As the literary world’s best-known ski bum, Ernest Hemingway was the patron saint of the genre. In the mid-twenties, Hemingway spent two winters in Schruns, Austria, inculcating a serious ski addiction and subsequently popularizing the mindset in stories like “Cross-Country Snow”: “When have you got to go back to school?” Nick asked.
“Tonight,” George said. “I’ve got to get the ten-forty from Montreux.”
“I wish you could stick over and we could do the Dent du Lys tomorrow.”
“I got to get educated,” George said. “Gee, Mike, don’t you wish we could just bum together? Take our skis and go on the train to where there was good running and then go on and put up at pubs and go right across the Oberland and up the Valais and all through the Engadine and just take repair kit and extra sweaters and pyjamas in our rucksacks and not give a damn about school or anything.”
“Yes, and go through the Schwarzwald that way. Gee, the swell places.”5
The swell places indeed. Oh, and is it coincidence that Papa Hemingway eventually moved to Sun Valley to finish out his days? (Not that most ski bums end up blowing their brains out; mountain living is generally mind-blowing enough.) Still, Hemingway had it right: ski bumming was at its best and most raw when you were on the move in a foreign land; this was adventure by its very nature.
IN CHILE I’d landed in an outlaw life where everybody looked out for themselves and took nothing for granted. Things there were generally weird enough to debase anyone, but life took a decidedly stranger turn when I came to work one day to find that the shop owner had been replaced by his ex-partner, whom I’d been told was dead. In reality he’d been doing time in the Caribbean—having taken the fall for a larger group in some drug-smuggling scam and losing a wife and young child in the process—and now he was back to claim his share of the business that had been stolen from him. He was a warm, charming man whom I instantly liked more than his predecessor, and with good reason: the latter eventually sent a gang of coked-up, gun-toting fruitcakes and a five-ton truck to reclaim the boutique by cleaning it out in broad daylight.
“What can we do?” I’d asked the head gunman, hoping that if I helped him he’d leave the staff alone.
“Have a drink,” he’d laughed, handing me a bottle of whiskey and turning back to supervising his thugs.
Just then the new boss came in and was knocked unconsciousness with a metal pipe. This was so surreal that it was like watching a movie instead of a real act of almost murderous violence. There was a lot of blood and we were more than scared. It was then that my last ounce of innocence soaked into my polypropylene longjohns, along with the contents of my bladder.
So the taxi ride up the mountain with the Israelis was the denouement to this ski-bumming chapter of my life. I’d gone down to Santiago to see the boss in the hospital. He lay there with stitches in his head and a lost-looking grin on his face. He’d probably be OK, they said, but I knew I would never be the same.
My reflection was interrupted when we rounded a hairpin too closely and swerved to avoid an oncoming truck. With the driver braking hard, the vehicle slid through the dirt toward the unprotected embankment, hundreds of feet above the river below. With a loud thunk, we stopped with our front wheels overhanging the edge like some Looney Tunes Coyote–Road Runner cartoon. The Israelis clutched each other and mumbled prayers as the driver and I clambered into the backseat with them to stabilize the car. We all exited safely through the rear doors. The driver, to his credit extremely apologetic, not-so-much to his credit pledged that he would charge us only the half fare. Anyone else would have kicked him in the junk, but I paid without hesitation, perhaps in an unconscious effort to buy my way back to normalcy. I left them all standing on the road and walked the four steep hours back to the ski area. Mortality of every description was closing in.
Later, I sat on my bed wondering what to do, a mountain of gear and clothing adding to the mental claustrophobia. With the present snowpack, there was at least two months of good skiing left, and I’d come a long, lonesome way for it. Did I really need to leave? Was my drive to ski strong enough to conquer my paranoia? Ski-bumming of the Warren Miller car-camping style was one thing, but this was something apart. I looked out the window at golden canyons colored by the uneasy partnership of descending sun and rising smog. I picked up a pair of socks and tossed them into an open bag. Two days later I left the country.
Like a summer romance, Chile has never left me, and I recall the craziness with a fondness borne of an experience that can never be adequately described. Though much of the wildness of those days is long gone, some memories will never be dislodged: the vastness of the Andes, their wide-open slopes, legendary snowfalls, and cobalt skies; and, always, circling high overhead, the condors, reminding one that life in the mountains is a fragile proposition. And a strangely welcome struggle.
ONE OF THE hallmarks of snowhounds is how shared passion and communal endeavor can, under the right conditions, so easily be bent to the will of the id. Flash-forward twenty-eight years. These days I live in Whistler, where I make my living writing. A certain number of hours per day will deliver the required number of words by a specific deadline. I usually write from 6:30 to 10:00 a.m. in a local coffee shop. But inevitably, from mid-November through the end of April, if it has snowed any measurable amount the previous night and the 6 a.m. snow report looks promising, I will be in the Creekside Gondola line-up by 7:30 a.m. for an 8:15 opening. Rarely am I the first. A similar affliction apparently interferes with many other lives: however employed (or not), whatever façade of respectability is being maintained (or not), we are, one and all, ski bums in heart, soul, and mind.
Many in the morning line-up work nights specifically so they have mornings free in case it snows. There’s helmet-cam George and pro-snowboarder Dave and his brother. There’s perennial racer boy with his weird goggles and absurdly side-cut shape skis, and also seventy-year-old curmudgeon guy with the Austrian accent, who always gets in a shouting match about the fairness of the singles line. Anonymous tall dude rolls up alone with a beaten pair of fat skis and peers conspiratorially over the rim of a coffee that he hopes to stretch until the lift opens. Finally, a skein of painfully sleepy, dreadlocked dirt-bags drift in from parking-lot vans and hippie hovels after a long night of drumming and incense.
This crowd, as stickers announce from the surface of several snowboards, is the Creekside Crew, a frontline phalanx of powder mavens that guards the gates to the kingdom when there’s even a whiff of potential face-shots (in ski-bum parlance, snow deep enough to fly up your nose when you turn in it). Some have assembled here for over twenty years; to them, those of us who’ve joined the fray in the last few anni are mere tourists. But we’ve nevertheless formed a bond, sharing the anticipation as a family—a family that meets only very early on certain mornings and likely will not see each other after the ride up. Like other family gatherings and the ski world in general, it’s hard to discern where the various airs of obligation, ritual, and tradition begin, end, or overlap.
Obligation. We all know that the eight inches of new snow being reported is, due to wind-loading, likely double that on the upper mountain, three times that in the favored stashes we’ll each head to.
Ritual. Predictably, no one shares the exact location of those stashes.
Tradition. In the communal, hedonistic world of the ski bum, where few things are sacred, one aphorism rings loud enough to merit cliché: there are no friends on a powder day.
This last is the loudest of skiing’s many paeans to obsession—and contradiction. There’s nothing quite as fun as navigating the preternatural world of powder with friends, but when push comes to shove—literally, in lift lines or along some traverses—it means that getting to your line, your turns, your face-shots will take precedence over anything. And if you have to barge ahead, losing your friends in a cloud of cold smoke only to find them at the bar at the end of the day to celebrate your respective triumphs, well then, that’s the way it’s got to be.
