As I sit down to write, three-and-a-half hours remain in the first day of autumn. The season of anticipation has officially begun. We’re planning a trip up to Jay this very weekend, the first of fall 2009, in hopes of inhaling some crisp, cold air and breathing our first hints of coming winter. I could easily write this post about ramping up the ole mindset for ski season—it’s a-coming, after all. I’m already planning on skipping Thanksgiving in hopes that we’ll catch a dump of early powder. But I feel like such a story would feel “familiar,” as one of my professors used to say as a gentle synonym for “clichéd.” Instead, I’m thinking about conditioning. Not merely the physical, but mental as well. And while it may seem like a sacrilige to write on a ski resort’s blog, I’m admitting that there’s more to my family’s life than skiing at Jay Peak. We’re not year-round skiers, nor do I believe we ever will be. Skiing Jay is easily our favorite family activity, but it would be criminal to spend our entire—lengthy—preseason simply waiting for the snow. And I realized this summer that, partly by design and partly through serendipity, most of our cross-training leads to the same destination as skiing.

It’s fall, and it seems appropriate that I’m teaching Hamlet to my seniors here at the boarding school. Ghosts come out this time of year, right? And because I have to constantly point out deeper meaning and help translate figurative language for my students, I start thinking about everything on a metaphorical level. Today in class, I even asked myself if skiing itself is a big fat metaphor, especially as it relates to my seven-year-old son, Luke. As I blah-blah-blahed about Shakespeare and ellicited cogent responses from my students, I wondered if it was an insult or a compliment to the sport to suggest that, at least on some levels, it’s not at all that it seems. Skiing certainly is not just about how you start your turns or read lines in the trees. It’s not just about speed or thrills. Those parts are fun and challenging, but I think we’re all into the sport for more profound reasons. When I look at Luke—this growing sponge deadset on mainlining the hallucinogenic drug that is the entire world—I see that skiing is independence and self-sufficiency and freedom and exploration and expansion—all concepts or ideals that we’ve been working on this summer. Taken on this level, I can even expand the comparison and say, “karate is skiing” or “soccer is skiing.” Really, for Luke, almost any meaningful experience in which he has the opportunity to learn something about himself or advance to a new level of skill or gain confidence is skiing.

Back in June, Luke expressed his frustration that I “worry about everything,” and that I am “Mr. Bossy.” He told me that he was “capable” of doing all sorts of things, but that I didn’t give him the chance. “You’re like the parents in Little Pig Is Capable,” he said. When I asked for clarification, he explained that his first grade teacher had read to his class this story about a little pig whose parents fussed and fretted and embarassed him and wouldn’t let him just do things by himself until he went hiking in the mountains—where else, right?—and saved his “snout scout” troop from a vicious, disguised wolf. It sounded like a great story to me, so I agreed to help give him the distance that he needs to feel independent. We set up a system where I reward him with poker chips every time he accomplishes a task on his own, and believe me, I’m happy to see him get things done without my help. But still he thinks I “worry” too much, and he’s probably right. That’s why, I tell him, we’re always encouraging him to pursue activities like skiing at Jay. Because, ultimately, isn’t that what every parent wants—for his or her children to become capable?

Tonight I walked back home from a faculty meeting where we talked, among other things, about “encouraging personal responsibility” with our high school student charges. This struck me as just a fancy way of saying that we want them to be capable: of waking up on time, of going to every chapel talk, and of achieving their potential athletically and academically. One of the chief ways we do this is by providing “consequences” to kids who display irresponsibility: we assign them to study halls, we give them C-minuses, we send them to 6:00 a.m. work details. We tell them that if they are incapable of doing the right thing, they will be punished until they figure it out. Parents like this system, we like this system, and the kids understand its parameters even if they’re not wild about the penalties they incur. Philosophically, I don’t see much problem with this model, but I wish we, not just here at school but in society at large, could do a better job of teaching this big concept in a more rewarding way. Poker chips work pretty well a lot of the time for my seven-year-old, but there has to be something more.

I was still faintly thinking about this stuff when I walked into our apartment and hugged my wife, Yupin. Luke was already upstairs, sleeping, but she told me to look on the table, under the green iPod. “There’s something he wants you to see.” When I picked up the gadget, I exposed a small sheet of parchment-like paper with the emblem from karate class printed in the middle. It couldn’t be mere coincidence that the official-looking form invited Luke to test for his orange belt next Friday. My first reaction was I wanted to give him a hug—he’s been working to advance since he earned his yellow belt back in June—but he was asleep so I could only share the proud moment with Yupin, and that’s not quite the same thing. This is the fruit of his hard work and discipline. His determination and perseverance. And my only part in the experience is that I pay the bills and praise his efforts. I wanted to see his eyes. I want to hear the pride in his voice.

My second reaction was more intellectual—the recognition of synchronity. Because I’ve been working on this story in my mind for nearly a month now. The first flash hit me when we were sailing on the Cape in late August. In our Day Sailor, I shadowed Luke, who sailed by himself in an eight-foot Optimist Dinghy. It was probably his tenth solo sail, and I was thinking of how comfortable he looked at the tiller. What an amazing gift, I thought, to give a child such an opportunity for independence, and it’s a big deal for a seven-year-old kid to take out a sailboat. Because it was his boat, and he knew how to sail, he didn’t need to hear my fatherly/teacherly chirping. He would happily listen when I taught him new lessons, but he just wasn’t going to put up with my telling him—again—that he was luffing or that he needed to pull in the sail. To him, this repetitive coaching was just more of my “worrying.” He had it under control and was determined to prove his point. He was his own man, at ease, and proud of himself. Yet at the same time, he was, as he had earlier told me, “following in my footsteps.” At one point he started singing to himself, and that’s when the realization hit me—that sailing is skiing. Take away the water, the wind, the snow, and the equipment, and you have the same essential concepts; in the end, both sports reduce to the same common elements. That flash was the beginning of this article.

Today, I knew I would sit down and write, and I knew where I would start, but I had no way of knowing that Luke would receive his invitation to test for the orange belt this evening while I was at a meeting about teaching personal responsibility. It all seemed pretty FAR OUT to me, man. I’m thinking about how we learn, and how we try to pass knowledge to our kids, or to the younger generation, and what’s really important. I’m not knocking school or anything—I am a teacher, right?—but when I look at the homework Luke brings home from second grade, I can’t really draw the comparison to the big ideas. I can’t write a simile that goes “homework is like skiing” because that would be a lie. Reading, maybe, or art, for sure, but not “circle the correct word and write it in the blank.” This is why we sign Luke up for swimming lessons, why we teach him to sail, encourage him to continue with karate, send him off to soccer, and why we drive at least five hours every chance we get to ski at Jay Peak. These are the true classrooms, the lecture halls where we learn, to steal from President Obama, that “Yes, we can.” This is why, as the days wane and cool to a chill, that I’m looking forward to another season at Jay. Not so much for myself, for the fun I’ll have playing in the snow. Not even for the heavier, cheesier, deeper reasons that I love to ski, the beauty and spiritual connections and such forth. No, what I look forward to most is seeing Luke’s eyes, beaming up at me through his goggles, on fire with the ecstasy and pride that comes from long draughts of freedom, from proving to himself on the slopes that he is more than capable.

So I’ve never net Mitch Joel.  (Until we started engaging across social channels in a more meaningful way 6-8 mos ago, I had never heard of him), I’ve never spoken with Mitch Joel and, were he to queue up in one of our lift lines, I couldn’t point a finger at him (even if he was helmetless).  And yet, we’re about to give away several thousand dollars worth of lift tickets to help support the sale of his book, ‘6 Pixels of Separation.’

Why are we doing this?  Well, because I think we should.

We read it, got lots from it and are in the process of applying what we’ve learned at both conscious and, I think, unconscious levels.  Beyond that, we think we got a hell of a lot more out of it than the dough we put on the table (and summarily expensed) to buy it, so we’re going to try and help give a bit back.  Here goes.
Show us a receipt from a recent purchase and we’ll give you a lift ticket.  Easy.  A lift ticket here at Jay Peak goes for $67 this season.  6 Pixels of Separation, which you can easily add to your quiver by jumping off here to buy http://www.amazon.com/Six-Pixels-Separation-Connected-Everyone/dp/0446548235/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1252604984&sr=8-1  goes for about $20.  That seems like a pretty good deal, non?
Plus, the guy is from Montreal.  And Montreal kicks ass.
Limited to the first 20.  Send your proof to me at swright@jaypeakresort.com

steve

In last week’s post, my wife, Yupin, described her experience of immigrating from tropical Thailand to falling in love with skiing at Jay Peak, a journey both geographical and spiritual in nature. Along the way, I have been her guide, convincing her that sub-zero temperatures are insignificant—“We just need to buy the right clothes”—and that skiing is well worth the 5-7 hour drive as often as possible. We both agreed that it would make a lot more sense for her to actually learn  skiing from professional instructors. At first my line of “I don’t want to teach you any of my bad habits” sometimes seemed like an excuse to sneak off into the glades by myself for the morning, but as I thought more about it, I realized that I really don’t know how to teach skiing. Now we don’t even think about lessons—they’ve become an automatic part of our ski routine. Yupin goes off with her small group and instructor for the mornings, then we meet for lunch, and in the afternoons she shows me everything that she has learned. It was during one of these lessons, with an instructor named Danny, that all the trouble began for me, or at least for my surprisingly fragile skier’s ego.
 
On the first day of our March vacation, we dropped Luke off at ski school with Phil, then I left Yupin at the instructor pit near the magic carpet with an instructor named Danny, a friendly guy of about my father’s age who has this aura of experience, like he’s been teaching folks to ski for years. It’s not quite a 1,000-yard-stare, but you know it when you see it. Confident that they would have a great morning together, I shoved off for the Flyer.

There wasn’t a ton of snow that day; we had missed a recent dump and then it had rained. The woods looked crunchy and uninviting. I decided to head over to Stateside and rip the black cruisers. Maybe the sun would come out and soften the bumps on UN or Kitz. If I got really lucky, the woods might even be up to my standards of safety (???) by my last pre-lunch run. But after a few runs, I came to accept that the moguls were still as hard as the Rav-4’s in the parking lot; I headed to the red Bonny chair for a little Can Am “Supertrail” action. I found some softer bumps down at the bottom and played for awhile before I realized that I better make my way back to the Tram base to meet up with Yupin. On my way down, taking Goat Run to Exhibition, I saw her with Danny. He was explaining something. I was surprised to see her up so high—all of her previous lessons had been on the lower lifts. I skied over, beaming with pride and excitement that she had graduated to the upper mountain. We would no longer have to confine our afternoons to Interstate or Raccoon Run. We’ll be skiing black diamonds together before I know it. The plan was all coming together to perfection.

I coasted up to Yupin and her instructor expecting a bit of pleasant banter, but after a quick hello, Danny said, “We have to work on your turns.” He wasn’t talking to my wife. I was like, “Say what? My turns?” but I said nothing. He went on about something “round” and how Yupin looks up to me as a “role model.” Then he turned back to his job of teaching her. I just stood there, dumbfounded. How could he possibly have judged my skiing just from my approach? Maybe I had hit a patch of ice and that had made my form look bad. That had to be it. After all, I’m an expert skier, or at least advanced, right? I mean, I’ve been downhill skiing for what, 25 years already. I grew up in the Northeast Kingdom and went to school at Boulder for crying out loud. There’s nothing wrong with my turns. I can’t remember ever, in my whole life, feeling insecure about my skiing ability.

The excuses and rationalizations kept shouting in my head with the hostility of talk radio, and by the time I reached the bottom of Exhibition and slid into line at the Flyer for one last run to silence all this nonsense—and screw it if I’m a couple minutes late for lunch—I had wound myself up into a lather. I mean, I worked for Jay Peak for a winter back in 1997-98 and skied like every freakin day in every condition on every part of the mountain. But then a tiny little voice piped up: “What if Danny’s right? Isn’t this why you send Yupin and Luke to lessons in the first place? Because you don’t know how to teach and you don’t want to pass on any bad habits you might have?” By the time I reached the cold part of the lift, where you pass over the Everglade, a full-fledged war was raging in my brain. And my furious breakneck descent did nothing to bring about a truce.

It wasn’t until later that night, after Luke had gone to sleep, that I finally talked to Yupin about my crisis. “We saw you from the red chair,” she explained. “Danny said you were scraping your turns.”

“It was icy,” I said after a pause. “Everyone scrapes and slides on ice.”

She shrugged her eyebrows. “Yeah. Everyone else was scraping, too.”

Then she fell easily to sleep. For hours, I tossed, listening to the wind whistling across the lake and around the eaves. “All right,” I finally decided. “I’ll take a damned lesson.” Now, I think I’ve taken two or three lessons since I first began skiing, back in the winter of 1983/84, when I had Police and Def Leppard stickers plastered all over my Trapper Keeper, and my school, Craftsbury Academy, sent a group of us up to Burke. Then, when I was in college, at Boulder, my friend’s father bought me a lesson at Vail. Maybe I took one at Stowe, too, my junior year in high school, but I’m not sure. Point is, I’m a self-taught skier for the most part. I’ve picked up techniques over the years by skiing with people who are better than I am, and my most extreme friend, Marta, taught me jump turns at Snowmass. But I don’t recall a single thing an instructor ever told me.

When I announced at breakfast that I would be taking a lesson, Yupin laughed, not really at me, but at the whole situation. Luke was simply delighted. “We’re all taking lessons today, Daddy!” Yes, I conceded, we were. And for most of the drive up the mountain, I tried to keep an open mind. The other parts of the ride, I just tried to blank it all out. Because when you believe a certain self-truth for so long only to find that maybe you’ve been mistaken, you feel a bit exposed. Naked.

After dropping Luke off in ski school and listening to him chirp, “Have fun in your lesson, Daddy!” I slunk my way upstairs to the lessons desk. I scanned the room to make sure no one I knew was watching. I mumbled and whispered my way through the transaction, “Advanced…Type 3…Maybe learn to ski the parks?” Then I trudged to the instruction pit outside, with Yupin—not to drop her off, but to meet my very own instructor. When I saw Danny, I smiled sheepishly and announced that I had taken his advice and signed up. It was a classic moment of: “Fine, Dad, have it your damned way,” but I tried to cover it by asking, as contritely as possible, “What was that you were saying about my turns being too round?”

“No,” he said pleasantly. “I’d like to see your turns be rounder. You’re scraping them.”

Ahh, I thought. So round is good. Now at least I had a frame of reference. Just about then, my instructor walked up and introduced himself as Spoon. John Witherspoon. He was about my age, laid back, with an easy confidence. I was starting to relax, to stop worrying that someone might see me taking a lesson. Spoon said, “So you want to do a little park skiing? Well, we’ll see who else is in the group. In the meantime, we can go right over here to this box.” As he led me over to the magic carpet and explained how to balance on the box, I admitted why I had really signed up: to fix my turns so I could set a better example for my wife and son. “No problem,” he said. “We’ll work some on technique, maybe play around in the trees, and then hit a park if we still have time.”

We never did hit a park. And that was fine. Because I discovered on the little box by the magic carpet that I’m not sure I’m really ready for that. I might just leave the half-pipes and rails and all to my son, if he so desires. But what I really learned was that I’m not, by any means, an expert skier. Advanced, sure. I’m confident that I can make it down most anything at Jay Peak, which I think says a lot; John Witherspoon, on the other hand, raced professionally for years and just might be the best skier I’ve ever met. As I found out later, on a Google search, he finished 5th in the U.S. Freeskiing Nationals at Snowbird in 2007, and this was just one of his many achievements. I wanted to hire him for the entire day, to teach me everything he knew, but it didn’t take him long to revolutionize my approach to skiing. He taught me that a ski turn has two parts, and that I had always just done the second half—hence, my flat, slamming turns. Suddenly, for the first time in 25 years, I was starting to ski the right way. For most people, including Yupin, who learn to ski from professional instructors, it’s no revelation that a turn begins with a slight shift of the upper ski and develops into an S-shape—nice and, in Danny’s word, “round.”

After a just one run with Spoon, my entire outlook on skiing had changed. It didn’t take long to retrain my brain and make the necessary adjustments, but I spent all the rest of our vacation practicing the new technique. I realized that while sometimes I had turned properly by accident, it’s a much smoother ride when you intentionally carve pretty S-turns. And it does feel easier on the knees when you’re not smashing V’s down the mountain. Now I could recognize when I was scraping; I could then make corrections. I developed a theory that the reason I had always turned incorrectly had to do with starting off as a cross country skier, where I hadn’t had edges. Since alpine skiing had come so easily to me back in eighth grade, I had never seen the need to develop proper form. It took bringing my family into the sport for me to finally see my error. And though I had fumed initially, this tasty piece of humble pie has given me the opportunity to both improve my own skiing and to help my wife and son advance as skiers. Spoon had assured me that my mistake of slamming my turns was common, which made me feel less foolish, but by that point all the resistance that my ego had thrown up—“How dare Danny criticize my form!”—had softened like the sun-warmed snow in the glades. He taught me there’s no shame in taking a lesson; I think I’ll sign up for two this season. I’ll be glad I did when it comes time for me to keep up with my family.