That evening, after I’d slept a few hours, my sister took us out bar-hopping in downtown Ketchum. Start with a few beers at the Pioneer, cross the street and check out the Alpine, drop in next door for a serious Wild Turkey session at the Yacht Club, then outside for a bracing breath of frozen air, going all the way across the street to Slavey’s. In Ketchum, bar-hopping is just that – you can get drunk four times over and never walk more than 100 yards.
On the way to Slavey’s, Dave looked over his shoulder toward the summit of Baldy, where the snow-cats and Thiokols were criss-crossing the slopes, their headlights careening wildly off the trees and across the moguls. An eerie sight, especially for one who’s been up all night, skied all day, then had six rounds of Wild Turkey.
“What’s that up there? Dave said.
“What?” my sister replied, looking somewhere in the direction of Hailey, down Main Street. At least she was looking out for cars as we stood there stupidly in the middle of the road, leaning on the snow pushed into piles along the center line.
“Up there, those lights!”
One of Leigh’s friends, farther gone than the rest of us, raced to the curb, lay down in the gutter, and tried to hide under his ten-gallon Stetson. “My God, it’s true! They’re landing – they’re landing!”
Someone said, “They’ve already landed, and they’re disguised as snow-cats!”
“Come one, what’s going on up there?” Dave pleaded.
“Well, I said, the Chinese need lights, you know.”
My sister eyed me askance. She was used to my cockeyed, but perfectly logical stories to explain almost anything.
“What?!” he said, eyes flaming as red as his hair.
“Sure, the Chinese. One hundred thousand of ’em. They go up there every night to polish the moguls.”
“Polish the moguls?”
“Yeah. See, Sun Valley is famous for its bumps. They like to keep them shined, so they look sharp in the sun. Polish ’em every night when it’s not snowing. The Chinese work cheap – they’re descendants of the guys who put the railroad up here.
“Do they really do that?” Dave asked Leigh. He’d only known me for four months, so he hadn’t quite figured me out yet.
“Well …” she started.
“They work mostly on Limelight,” I continued. “They get the undersides really smooth. It makes for easier skiing.”
“OK, you’re so smart,” my sister smirked at me, “We’ll go up there and ski Limelight under the lift tomorrow. Then you’ll really see Chinese moguls.”
Imagine if you will an Idaho January thaw, with the Chinook winds coming in and warming up the slopes, maybe even bringing in some rain to really make the bumps nice and wet. Then the freeze came, and the bumps turn into Chinese moguls, burnished hard and smooth on the underside, with frozen grapefruit-sized clumps of snow covering covering their uphill portion. You’ve skied them before, cursed them as you slid around them or rammed your skis into the irregular, unyielding upper surface. Well, now you know how they got that way. One hundred thousand Chinamen, out there at midnight, polishing up the bumps, just for your enjoyment.
My attempt at skiing them the next morning was, of course, a total physical and mental disaster. I had no idea how to maneuver my stiff 200 cm skis in the impossibly small chutes between the massive bumps, which looked like a bunch of white asteroids scattered randomly down the slope. My Raichle Red boots, like all boots of that era (known as the Year of the Jet Stick – remember?), were not high backed, and were incredibly unyielding in all directions of flex. It felt to me as if the mountain were trying to create a new set of ankles for me about five inches above the original ones. When I got home that night, I had a perfect ring of bruises, a purple donut (or maybe a bagel) around each leg where the boot tops had been torturing me.
I became convinced I knew nothing about skiing and couldn’t possibly learn, especially with the big boys all around me actually skiing straight down the face of Limelight, suffering no trauma other than what appeared to be repetitive shoulder dislocation as they planted their poles in the ice atop each bump with every turn.
Seeking to placate my feelings, my sister took me to the only place on the mountain without any bumps – the Bowls. Great: six day old powder with a two inch thick breakable crust on top. Perfect for my ego. I told myself I really must learn how to ski some day.
Despite such steadfast resolve to single-mindedly apply myself to mastering the seemingly simple intricacies of skiing, my hang-up with being a doctor kept getting in the way. No matter how hard I tried, I could not bring myself to become a medical school dropout. It is very difficult to fail in medical school. For one thing, there was the persistent loam of guilt, knowing that there were at least three other equally competent people who didn’t get accepted while I (somehow) did. And then, at least $40,000 [1971 dollars] a year was being spent in educating me. Most of the money went to the Xerox company, paying for the endless twenty-page “handout/outlines” which seemed to accompany each lecture. So the medical school has a great moral and financial investment in each student, and will do everything possible to maintain and justify that expense. Thus, merely not attending class for a few weeks, or failing several exams won’t suffice. One must practically be a convicted felon, or die of leukemia (both dodges were successfully employed by classmates of mine) before the school will consider giving up on a student.
As an undergraduate, I had come across the concept of the “happy bottom quarter”. Prestigious New England colleges and universities, knowing that all of their students of necessity must be academic over-achievers to gain admission, nonetheless consciously choose approximately 25% of each class who will feel comfortable at the bottom of a group of people of admittedly homogeneous intelligence. I attended such a school, but never worried too much about those in the bottom 25%; I was too busy making sure I stayed in the top 10% (that’s the only way to get into medical school, bub!). Then I got out to California for medical school (determined to be a psychiatrist, remember?), and decided I really didn’t need to know all of that stuff that was slung at us daily. So I meandered, happily, down to the bottom quarter of my class, for the first two years. Those first two years are exclusively lecture and book-learning, of which I had had quite enough by that point in my life. The last two years, however, consist of actual patient care in a hospital as a student doctor. My instincts had paid off; for the last two years of medical school in an environment more like being a doctor, rather than a monkish scholar (or, heaven forbid, a law student), I resided in the top quarter of my class. All of which, of course, bears absolutely relation to one’s final ability as a practicing physician. But at the time, all those little academic games managed to occupy my time enough to make my skiing progress come in spurts. I felt like a lumberjack in vinyl pants trying to climb a greased telephone pole.
[This seems like as good a place as any to stop; the remaining page is best left to the next chapter of “Learning to Ski”, which I may some day actually finish. But first, I’d rather write a bit about my trip to Loreto, Mexico, by way of Tibet and Cancun].
[Ed note, 2012: I never did write either “Learning to Ski” of about my trip to Loreto by way of Tibet and Cancun. But both seem fertile topics for 2013. NY Resolution Time?]