Mike and I were too battered to walk home, and we sheepishly used our last dime to call my mother. She cried when she saw us: we were broken, bruised, and bloodied, our pajamas shredded by rusty ski edges, the palms of our mitts torn out by the rough hemp of the rope tow. Consumed by guilt, she overlooked our shit-eating grins and did what any conflicted parent would: screamed at us for not calling her sooner.
“It’s OK, mom,” I smiled, unaware that I’d just experienced the closest a human can come to flying without leaving the Earth. “We had fun.”
“There’s nothing really can touch skiing, is there?” Nick said. “The way it feels when you first drop off on a long run.” “Huh,” said George. “It’s too swell to talk about.”–—ERNEST HEMINGWAY,
“Cross-Country Snow,” 1925
THIS STORY starts with a volcano. Or maybe it’s that one story ends there and another begins. Or maybe it’s just that a volcano, with an umbilical attachment to the core of the Earth, is the perfect metaphor for a gateway to another world. Either way, if there’s one thing you can usually count on with a volcano, it’s a hole on top.
This Mexican version, however, was proving maddeningly elusive. The lip of fractured ice wavering above us like salt crystals ringing a margarita glass had got no closer in the last hour. Was it that the slope was steepening? Or was it the moonwalk we were executing to make certain our crampons found firm footing on the glacier’s marble surface? Was it our zigzagging around the blue yawn of each small crevasse and resting, so it seemed, every thirty seconds? Or was it simply due to failing brain function at 18,000 feet, an altitude few accomplished skiers would ever contemplate and most North American mountaineers would never encounter and the fact that my friend Merl and I—hitching along with no clue, no rope, frozen feet, and hallucinogenic half-breaths—were neither?
Very likely. As in, all of the above.
Still, when there was enough oxygen to formulate the thought, I figured we should be making progress. And then suddenly, progress appeared. We were staring into the crater, the mix of ice and lava underfoot now more like the salt-and-peppered rim of a Bloody Mary, I thought, in the abstract way you entertain irrelevant ideas when you are high—or very high. And I could see why gaining this purchase had seemed too slow: the crater’s edge wasn’t level but sloped radically at some thirty degrees. Stumbling through the crevasse field, we’d actually been contouring the volcano in the direction of its rising rim. We’d breached it on a false summit about halfway around; far below to our left was the lower margin of the crater, its adjacent snowfield a mess of ashen streaks, volcanic dribble on a white bib, while above to our right was the summit. Which meant more climbing. Which probably wasn’t a good thing given the nausea, violent headaches, and dizziness we were experiencing— but really, how much farther could it be?
An hour later we were finished, literally and figuratively. Just shy of the rim’s highest point—a crenulated mannequin of brick-colored lava—we were too cold, hypoxic, and exhausted to go farther. Merl was talking but he sounded like Donald Duck, or someone sucking on helium. I couldn’t understand and laughed hysterically at him, which made my head hurt so badly I wanted to cradle it. He thought I understood perfectly and laughed back. Then he threw up. That’s what I remember, but maybe it didn’t happen; by that point I was already beginning to hallucinate. We look a picture—one of those photos climbers are famous for, with the camera held out at arm’s length and aimed toward our conjoined faces. I pulled an inscribed Frisbee from my pack and hucked it far into the crater to honor a friend who’d died in an oil-rig disaster off Newfoundland the year before. In the rarified air, the disc arced across the crater for an awfully long time before spiraling down into the toxic miasma rising from a vent encrusted in lurid yellow sulfur.
That seemed right: a petroleum-based product swallowed by the very earth that generated it; a fitting farewell for someone who’d been in service of that substance when he slipped quietly into hypothermic slumber, bobbing in the roiling North Atlantic, never to be found, returning to the sea from whence we all came.
These were the kinds of thoughts I had while skiing.
THE VARIOUS TRAILS I’d followed to the summit of Pico de Orizaba—Mexico’s highest mountain and North America’s loftiest volcano at 18,504 feet—had started in my parents’ living room as an adolescent. Years after my first time on skis, I’d come across a unique juxtaposition in a coffee-table book about Mexico: a full-page, black-and-white photo of an old Spanish church with a massive, snow-covered volcano— pulled preternaturally close by a telephoto lens, I now know—looming behind. Snow in Mexico? Wow. Could you ski on something like that? It planted a seed of secret desire.
In high school I’d taken up skiing in earnest with Merl and a few other friends. The lift-serviced partying that essentially defined the sport in the hard-packed conditions of Eastern Canada was for us both social activity and healthy conduit to dissipate teenage energy. We’d jumped in just as the ever-evolving sport’s context was shifting yet again.
In the late sixties and early seventies, North American youth challenged every aspect of the status quo. Nothing was sacred, even the supposedly footloose sport of skiing, longtime poster child of the hedonistic, jet-setting nouveau riche. An overzealous, corporate-minded ski industry was focused on lifts, groomed runs, and fancy condos at the expense of the gravity-driven, wind-and-snow-inthe-face sensations that attracted people in the first place, and young skiers railed against this packaged experience. They rejected the strictures associated with alpine racing and constipated European ski technique, innovating with mogul skiing, aerial maneuvers, and ski ballet (later re-branding it “acro-skiing” didn’t postpone its extinction), a troika collectively known as “freestyle.”
Freestyle skiing essentially put the boots to technique— damning convention and embracing invention—liberally fueled by the passing of weed and jugs of wine. This fit with the rebel-id of every teen, and our bedrooms were papered with requisite posters of freestyle antihero heroes like Wayne Wong, “Airborne Eddie” Ferguson, Suzy Chaffee, and Scott Brooksbank sporting short, colorful skis, science-experiment bindings of questionable security, and sloppy, equally questionable rear-entry boots (back-buckling boots that made it easier to slip your foot in but that destabilized the overall boot structure). We also dressed and acted the part by skiing gang style in logo-adorned lab coats, bright-green gaiters, and the occasional top hat, executing ridiculous tricks like Tipstands and Wongbangers (a front flip between your poles) in lift lines where they were sure to effect maximum annoyance. We rode our skis in the backseat (i.e., on their tails), eschewing style in favor of simply wiggling our asses to turn, built illegal jumps in full view, got upside down off them when we could, and, for our considerable trouble, were thrown off every mountain we visited. If freestylers were skiing’s punks, we’d aimed to be the Sex Pistols.
Ardent rock climbers and canoeists, Merl and I also shared a more conventional outdoor interest that had been piqued by school ski trips to the American West’s larger mountains. There we’d gazed longingly at the bowls and faces staring back from beyond the ski-area boundaries. We weren’t alone: skiers were ducking ropes, climbing peaks, and taking helicopters and snowcats into the great white beyond to rediscover the joys of fresh, untracked snow that had begotten the sport. We thus found ourselves with eyes widening simultaneously toward the open rebellion of freestyle and the quieter freedoms of open back-country. Like Alice through the looking glass, I