Lifers and addicts
by Doug Schnitzspahn (buzz@boulderweekly.com)

There is really no reason to ski now. Sure, there have been blasts of unseasonable snow weighing down the branches of trees covered with yellow leaves. But this is a season for face-painted cheerleaders, backbreaking home runs, and kids dressed like goth sluts walking the streets for candy. It's fall.

My seasons have mixed metaphors. I feel reborn this time of year in Colorado. It's not the rains and flowers of April that make me think reincarnation. I prefer the hush, the slowdown and the gusty chills of winter approaching; the long billowing clouds that hide the peaks; the early nightfall. This is a season when I can think, rediscover, reemerge. Ski. I pull my boards out of the garage and run my fingers over the war scars—the edges covered in slight rust and burred from springtime rocks. I didn't mean to neglect them; it's just the last time I put them away, I didn't think it was going to be the last time.

Loveland and A-Basin opened days ago, but I stayed away because opening day is too often like playing in traffic. There's really not much to recommend about resort skiing this early. The open runs are the type of blast-down-to-get-to-the-bottom stuff I usually ignore. There are crowds. It's freaking October. But there's an inescapable need to be back to that place-away-from-places I go every winter, even for a brief moment, that brings me back. Once the thought of claiming my first day on the hill gets in my head, I can't shake it. So I run a file over my skis' ragged edges and drive up to Loveland on a weekday. There is a decent-sized crowd waiting for the one open lift, but these are people much like me—lifers and addicts out to remember who they are.

The snow can actually be decent this time of year. Sunny days soften it up without the slush of spring. There is a smeared-yet-crystalline quality to it. I adapt to the two runs that are open. (There's not even an impetus to poach the stuff that's closed; it's still so rock and raw.) My focus narrows. Those two runs become my universe, and everything falls back into place, as if I had never been away. Left to these simple intermediate groomers, I focus solely on form, on those subtle transfers of weight and edge and foot that let you fly. (No one writes about the technical internal beauty of the sport. We want the cliffs, the fear, the pure balls-out badness. But that's only a part of it. Any dangerous sport is based in this subtle, internal concentration on form.) And on this first day back, I waste three hours doing nothing but feeling further into my skis, taking runs for the sheer pleasure of skiing. Keeping sane.

Skiing is nothing but an escape. Meaningless, right? A narcissistic pursuit for the privileged that I spent the best years of my youth pursing when I could have been working for Nelson Mandela, or uncovering the truth about Iraq or rebuilding homes on the Mississippi Delta. But this is what I do, and I have never found anything else that fills me with such a sense of being (and just for the record I have taken tear gas to the face protesting against corporate global rule and tried, in vain, to champion the rights of songbirds over cows). Who's to say what wrongs can be righted? What choices matter? When the mountains start to fill with snow again, all I want to do is be back here and, for now, everything in the world is right.

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