“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.
One can never be bored by powder skiing because it . . . only comes in sufficient amounts in particular places, at certain times on this earth; it lasts only a limited amount of time before sun or wind changes it. People devote their lives to it “for the pleasure of being so purely played” by gravity and snow.
DELORES LACHAPELLE, Earth Wisdom, 1978
THR EE HOURS earlier I’d been asleep on a bunk in a Christchurch youth hostel. Now I stood atop a ridge overlooking the steep, snow-choked bowls of New Zealand’s Mt. Hutt, the once so-called “ski field in the sky.” Hovering 6,000 feet above the town of Methven and the green and brown patchwork of the Canterbury Plains, I watched as surf-raised punk Maoris bedecked in wetsuits and zinc warpaint zigzagged through swinging T-bars (drag lifts on which two riders are pulled uphill on an inverted “T”) on waves of Southern Alps snow. On the lodge decks, sheep farmers in generations-old gear tipped back quarts of Steinlager amid the screams of obnoxious keas, the eagle-like mountain parrots best described as green ravens with even more attitude and smarts. Visible from Mt. Hutt’s precipitous ridges were several small ski areas lodged in surrounding high-alpine cirques. These “club fields”—thrown up and populated by the most core of NZ’s hardcore ski families— were places you couldn’t even imagine placing a lift, though each was strung with a single T-bar, poma, rope, or, in some cases, cable that you wore a belt to hook into and that was locally referred to as a “nutcracker.” I blinked, filing away the exotic tableau, and dropped into two feet of the only kind of snow that really matters.
My final ski-bumming stint (discounting, many would argue, my current job) was another summer