Of the many great quotes by Henry David Thoreau, this one is my favorite:
“To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts”.
Skiing, at its core, is deliberate. There is no other way to do it. Gravity is constant, the slope unyielding. To descend well, you don’t fight the mountain, but you don’t surrender to it either. Control lives in that narrow space between. It is not resistance, but it is not not resistance. To hold a carving ski while descending a steep slope requires the balancing of forces. The pull of gravity, the energy of bending and arcing skis and the projection of the body down the hill.
Almost high noon and Ripcord is a smooth, soft, sunlit tableau. I used an inclinometer and measured the steepest section, just uphill of the Spillsville intersection. I reckon it is shy of 30 degrees, maybe 27.5. I found wide open spaces and stretched some turns to the full width of the trail. This is a deliberate slowing down in comparison to tucking the trail. This is where a skier can feel the turn radius that is engineered into the ski. A skier can shoot the skis, across the fall line straight at the woods that separate Ripcord from Spillsville. Straight at those woods, and once the skis are flying in that direction, roll them onto the new edge, high and using that “shooting energy” to bend the skis uphill.
Uphill? Bend the skis, uphill? Yeah, ideally you begin the arc before you enter the fall line. If you wait until you are in the fall line, you are late…and straight. Your opportunity for deliberate skiing is in the back seat. The hill has the wheel.
Centering doesn’t just happen. I have been working and fighting my way into that center for decades. A beginner starts out in the back seat. The ground drops away, which is scary, so you resist. You hang back; you sit on your heels and steer from the rear. A steep trail teaches you that the back seat is not where the steering wheel can be found.
With practice and instruction, you learn to carve. You learn to incline and you learn to build edge angle. Sometimes you have to battle your way into the center. When it works, you ride in that magical place where the balls of the feet ride the falling line, and the skis just swing from one edge to the other.
I was skiing solo, so I rode chairlifts with strangers. One was a mathematics major. I expressed my challenges with math as I found it too abstract and disconnected from anything real. In skiing we have acceleration, elevation, vertical drop, and edge angles. The ski design dictates turn size and speed multiplies everything. Math is not abstract, it adds up…hill!
Another skier called himself a philosopher, but of the scientific bent, and not of what he called “pure philosophy” which is the philosophy of the present moment, of a priori knowledge, of instinct, of intuition, the philosophy that applies to skiing.
I saw many skiers at the No Kings protest in Waitsfield. The blare of car horns is sub-optimal in the quiet town of Waitsfield, but this is the sound of the alarms going off. These signs we carry as protestors are not warning signs. It is too late for that. It’s here. It’s 2026 and we are talking about Project 2025.
It takes a number of people to effect change. How many, you may ask. It takes one more. That is all it takes, and Kitty Werner was there. She told me fascinating stories about the Kennedys. Another woman wore a black funeral style hat with a black veil. Appropriate, I thought, given the impending death of our democracy. It also protects from facial recognition.
The U.S. Army raised the maximum enlistment age up to 42 from 35 and eliminated the exemption for a positive marijuana result. Cue Arlo Guthrie, although Thanksgiving is a summer and fall away. I can still hear Arlo screaming “Kill, Kill, Kill” with the draft Sargent. You can rely upon folk singers. They sing the truth. Trust your folks and your folk singers.
Freedom, like muscles, needs to be exercised if you want to keep it. Richard Jones and his lovely wife were enjoying the good company in town. They told me stories from Vietnam. Of course, they met while skiing. Richard is celebrating his 90th birthday soon, so leave him some space on your lift to celebrate with him.
When the world is in crisis-- and it has been in crisis during numerous ski seasons over my fleeting time on this planet, I go skiing and that affects the quality of the day.
