If you spend time in the mountains with your old man, you’ve probably got plenty of stories.
As in, enough stories to be told, retold, and mis-told (by him, of course), for decades to come.
For me, at least, the memories multiply like ideas in a room of screenwriters. One story becomes four, and so on. With my old man hitting the three-quarter-century mark this year, I count myself fortunate to still be sharing in his mostly good health, adventure enthusiasm, and special brand of septuagenarian boyishness.
25 Years of Skiing
My first memory of skiing with my dad goes something like this. I’m pizza-ing my way down a green run (this would be after my bunny-slope graduation) at Montana’s Lost Trail Ski Area when I hit a long flat spot before the chairlift. Four years old and pole-less, I come to a somewhat sorry stop. Schools of skiers blast past. Anxious, anticipating the impact, I chance a glance over my shoulder.
Whoosh.
Before I even see him coming, Dad swoops me up between his legs. Buzzing with excitement, we glide toward the chairlift with me half-sliding, half-dangling, a pint-sized ski marionette.
Fast forward a couple years and we’re arguing. It’s 3:50-something, and he wants to cram in another run down the fresh snow near Chair 2 rather than head back to the lodge. Not only that, but he wants to ski the harrowing steeps of upper Southern Comfort, a top-to-bottom blue run. I had just started feeling confident on the lower part of the run but hated when he made me ski the upper portion.
“Noooo, Dad, I just wanna ski the bottom,” I whine.
“Matthew, you’ll be fine!”
Off we go. I’m pissed.
After a few nice (him) and tentative (me) arcs in about 10 inches of pow, Dad tumbles. Loses a ski. Head downhill, snow everywhere. I watch him wiggle around trying to get his legs below him and find his ski. A few hundred vertical feet below, the lift line is empty. Lifties are taking down ropes.
I yell something about how the lift is going to close and we’re going to be stuck here forever with no way out. Hurry up!
Per usual, he puts himself together and we somehow descend to the lift without incident at what must have been 3:59 and 59 seconds.
Growing Pains
In the montage of ski memories, another four years pass. We’ve moved to New York, and we’re skiing in the Catskills at Belleayre Mountain. I’m a punk. As in, all talk and no walk. Bark bigger than bite. I’m skiing chiseled moguls, blowing off my dad’s recommendation to slow down and work harder on skiing with my sticks parallel. I can get down the mountain without falling, so what’s the problem?
I don’t admit how annoying it is to watch him drop the same run with perfect control like he’s done it a million times.
The mantra he coins during our time skiing the Catskills is “go when it snows.” As an angsty teenager, I cringe when he seemingly repeats it to every person we talk to. How many times do I have to hear this? Isn’t it obvious?
All the same—that mantra does, in fact, mean that if it snows on a weekday, school usually takes a backseat to skiing. And he writes me the absent notes to prove it.
One day, we go when it doesn’t snow. Dad catches an edge on a chunk of man-made ice and slams his shoulder into one of those sculpted moguls. The run is Yahoo, a double black, and as he slowly descends, he says he’s nauseous and may puke. I’m speechless and useless. It’s the first chink I’ve ever seen in his ski armor. A rough sequence of more rotator cuff and knee injuries follow. No one told me he was human.
When I’m 16, I start landing 360s. He films them. When I’m 17, I land on my head trying a 720. He answers the call from my buddy before the helicopter lands at Belleayre. Then he rallies family and friends to the hospital. Once I’m conscious, he informs me that the subarachnoid hemorrhaging in my brain is fatal 50 percent of the time, so kudos to me for being on the right side of that one. Mom is unamused, to say the least.
Always Mountains
College, naturally, brings some changes in our ski relationship. One, we share fewer ski days, although I ski more than ever and plan my schedule around midweek mountain trips. He’s getting ripped off at Belleayre as they keep raising the age qualification for “free skiing for seniors.”
Two, we share whisky on chairlifts. It’s a pastime that will never get old.
And three, I start planning a future in which I continue to prioritize skiing. That means a versatile and transferrable skill set. One that can be applied to many jobs in many (mountainous) places. The answer is an English Writing Arts major. I hear no objections from Dad, only general enthusiasm and encouragement. He reserves his negativity for the bad snow years in the Catskills and the knee surgeries keeping him off the ski hill.
Shortly after I start getting paid to write about skiing for Mountain Magazine and he finishes rehabbing a PCL/meniscus, we find ourselves back at Belleayre on a powder day. We ski hard and sip Bushmills. He looks smooth as ever, linking those parallel “dad” turns like surgery never happened. He only realizes he forgot his knee brace before our last run. We can’t help but laugh. “Your mother doesn’t need to know.”
Three years later, he becomes the oldest guy to heli-ski at Colorado’s Silverton Mountain. That happens two days after my brother and I drag him up to nearly 13,000 feet during a guided ski tour on Red Mountain Pass. He loves reminding anyone who will listen that he had only arrived at altitude a day prior. “My sons abuse me!”
Just doing what you taught us, man.
Go When It Snows
Time tries to blur vibrant individual memories together into barely remembered silhouettes. Luckily for me, whenever it snows and I hop on the phone with the old man, his mostly subconscious commitment to storytelling helps us zero in on each individual puzzle piece. Where would the memories go if he didn’t bark those old refrains?
“My sons, those punks, they’re such good skiers.”
“Out here, the rain just washes away all my snow!”
“Those blankety-blank ice moguls on Yahoo…”
“Back when they first opened Pallavicini at A-Basin, I fell on one of those freshly cut stumps.”
“Those new Black Crows skis you guys got me…man, are they smooth!”
“Southern Comfort at Lost Trail!”
“I remember when we were griping because lift tickets hit five dollars.”
And of course—that mantra. Twenty years later I find myself typing it, in various forms, for a living. Surrounding myself with people who understand. Recounting all-time days only made possible because we got the message.
(Turns out it’s not all that obvious to everyone).
“You’ve got to go when it snows!”
