Ski racing, especially downhill, is a dangerous activity and there are many accidents. It would be really too bad to lose everything because of a crash.
-- Hermann Maier,
Austrian Alpine Skiing Olympic Gold Medalist, 1998
I wasn't a ski racer, let alone an Olympic downhill level racer. I skied the pace I skied, relatively fast for an amateur skier who only got the opportunity to ski three or four times a year. The people I skied with could keep up with me, but rarely did. My Uncle Jack and I skied at about the same level which is why I always treasured his company -- the fact that he was a fun guy to be around helped, too.
Snow skiing was the family sport. Not just my parents' and siblings' sport but that of my aunt and uncle and cousin along with my mother's multitudinous aunts, uncles and cousins. It was like a tribal meeting whenever we'd make the big ski trips to Mammoth Mountain, California. And I was arguably the best skier out of everyone. I was about 8 when we began skiing in Big Bear, California. We all took lessons, we all liked the experience, except for my sister who really never took to it like everyone else and who soon was pregnant with her first child -- I'm 8 years younger than my sister and she married at 19. Even my little nephew and niece were skiing from the time they could walk, on little "ski skates" hanging between someone's poles that we held horizontally so the kid could be between our skis. Even some of the family friends joined in. Skiing was just something we did, something we enjoyed.
In 1973, when I was 14, I was attending a small private school in Ojai, California. One spring, the entire school planned a trip to Mammoth for a week. I happened to be home visiting and the family and I were going to meet the school up there, take advantage of the timing and go on a trip. When I say "spring", I mean April-ish. The snow was usually okay to ski on until May or June back then -- you know, when we had predictable weather? I'm fuzzy about all of the particulars as both time and injury have clouded my memory. But this is what I recall.
As I've already written in my poem, "The Fall" (which is contained in the last few blog posts), it was a beautiful day the day my father, my brother-in-law (Wally) and I decided to take on the biggest challenge any of us had faced on that mountain: the very top of Mammoth, "The Cornice". This was a very steep run with a concave -- rather than a convex -- curve to it. In fact, you had to take a narrow trail down to get on to the run, almost having to jump a little from the narrow approach to the run itself.
Dad went down first and had just turned around to tell Wally and me not to follow him, that the run was too icy, when I -- standing on the narrow approach, ready to get to the run any second -- felt the snow just crumble beneath my down-hill, right, ski. And the world disappeared in a jumble of beautiful blue sky and hard, icy, slushy white. It was, I imagine, like tumbling in a clothes dryer. Round and round and round I went. My body hit the snow and bounced, hit the snow and slid, hit the snow and tumbled, hit the snow and cracked. The ski poles I had in each hand -- safety straps around my wrists -- poked me in the face, the eyes, my ribs. My skies, secured in those days by a safety strap around the ankle, hit me in the head, the back, the legs.
Through all this, my brain was rejecting what was happening. In fact, I have an odd memory of seeing my body falling from a higher vantage point, like I was standing on the top of the next run over looking down. Then, like a door closing, everything stopped. Even sounds seemed to have ceased. Then I heard voices telling me not to move, to lie still. People brought pieces of me down: my sunglasses that had fallen off, the shirt I'd had tied around my waist and other little paraphernalia I'd had with me. So, there I lay, head downhill, on my stomach, arms and legs splayed, skies hanging off my boots and poles still hanging from my wrists.
Then Dad was there, frantic of course, and he told me, again, to lie still. But by then I'd done a quick check to see what hurt and nothing really did. I think I was pretty cold and numb and, most likely, in shock. So, after a while, I sat up. Dad unhooked my skies and poles and sat there with me for a while. Then, deciding I really was okay, I slowly got to my feet... and nearly collapsed. My stomach felt like a cannon ball had hit me in the gut. My head felt like it had been run over by elephants. My legs felt like they were everything but broken, as did my arms.
Dad had me sit down again and took my skies and stood them in the snow uphill from me, crossed in the universal sign of distress so that the ski patrol would know we needed help.
Unknown to us at the time, Wally -- who'd remained at the top of the run and had watched me fall -- had already sent the ski patrol but they'd gone by while I was standing up before Dad had put my skies up in the snow. So when a second ski patrol team came down the run, they stopped to help. I think they had to call for a sled and, while we waited, they asked me all kinds of questions, checked me over for broken bones, etc. And then packed me into the sled when it arrived. They wrapped me up and strapped me in, head downhill, and one of them took the front of the sled and another took the back of it and down we went.
Again, my memory is hazy but I remember snow in my face and my head hurting more and more, feeling like blood was rushing to it, which it probably was doing as the ski patrolmen had to negotiate some very steep runs to get me to the bottom. And it seemed to take a very long time, longer than it normally would take to get from the top of the mountain to the bottom. Twenty minutes? Thirty? I had no idea what kind of time passed.
My next memory is being in the ski patrol infirmary.
And that's about it for this time. It's important to know the beginning of the tale so that the rest of it will make more sense. It's a 40+ year story and I appreciate you sticking with me as it unveils itself here!
No comments:
Post a Comment