Although Dr. Levy showed us this essay almost a year ago, it seems apt to print it now, on the eve of an Annual Meeting high in the Rocky Mountain region. The article is reprinted with permission from the March, 1985 issue of SKIING Magazine, copyright 1985 by Ziff-Davis Publishing Co., all rights reserved.
May 2, 1984
Salt Lake City
International Airport
In a few hours, I will join my fellow psychoanalysts in San Diego for several days of erudite scholarly debate about matters intrapsychic at our annual meeting. Being an Atlantan, a trip west offered the possibility of a Utah stopover for Spring skiing too inviting to pass up. Thus I found myself, after a late Saturday night arrival, on the Snowbird Tram early Sunday morning. I must confess to being somewhat unnerved that all around me were the best dressed, best equipped downhill skiers I had ever seen.
What a riot of Goretex powdershirts, racing pants, and long, longer and longest skis made of unblemished unimaginable space age materials. I held my beaten-up mid lengths tightly and tried desperately to recapture the high of my last run months earlier in Colorado. I now couldn't rid myself of the thought that the slopes I skied last were somewhat patronizingly referred to in something I read as groomed and forgiving. I suspected I was not about to be forgiven again.
We arrived up top and exited into a cloud I would become ever more familiar with during the next four days. Since it was my first run in months and my idea of fitness training is wine and cheese, I elected to let those overdressed dilettantes ski first. I was further disquieted when, leaning on my poles as nonchalantly as possible, I watched all fifty or sixty of them descend down the fall line in perfect synchrony like precision fliers.
Something had to be wrong. On my best day, on my best run, even with considerable self-deception, I never skied like that. What had I gotten myself into? I had heard Snowbird was primarily an expert's mountain, that it tended to attract good skiers. But did I have to ski like that to leave unharmed? I fought my way to the bottom through waist high powder, some of which I learned, much against my will, tasted just like snow in other places I had visited. I looked up. This was an awesomely beautiful mountain. And I was clearly the worst skier on it.
Later that morning, I met my friend Frank, with whom I skied the rest of the day. We have been friends for ten years yet had never skied together. He had only one day to ski and we made the most of it. Frank is Italian, born in the Dolomites, schooled in the Austrian Alps. After hours of happily chasing him around the mountain, we stopped at the crest of one last chute. Frank looked at me with that wonderful grin of his. “You have to be a little crazy to do this.” “Thank heaven we both are,” I replied, not knowing exactly what he or I meant but certain it captured our momentary essence. When I'm with Frank, I'm a little Italian too, and this undoubtedly explained our mutual understanding.
When I returned to the lodge after bidding Frank a liquorous farewell, I noted to the desk clerk, trying to sound off-handed, “Damn fine skiers up here.” I learned that the resort was deserted save for all the PSIA (Professional Ski Instructors of America) instructors there for skiing workshops and a handful of guests like myself. I ought to have been relieved. I was briefly amused. Mostly, I was intimidated at the prospect of three more days surrounded by skiers totally out of my league. What league?
Knees aching, I climbed into the hot tub. There were ten of “them” in there. Suddenly my frail frame and slightly, only slightly, gelatinous midsection seemed to preoccupy my thoughts. They were talking ski talk. Equipment, snow, edging, Jens, Alf, Stein, Horst. Suddenly I felt like Woody Allen at the
Ritz. They started to talk about hoping to make the D Team. I was crushed. What sort of supermen make the A Team? (I later learned the D Team was the PSIA Demonstration Team, the pinnacle of achievement for a ski instructor. But by then, it was too late.)
The next day, demoralized, I resolved to take a lesson. My powder skills were deficient. In fact, they were nil. I couldn't ski at all in the fourteen inches that had accumulated overnight on top of the two or three thousand feet of snow already there waiting to swallow me up. My skiing education consisted of two beginner lessons in Colorado and a four-hour private lesson with Jeanine in Chamonix. Having make what seemed to me to be very adequate “American” progress, I decided France was the place to cement my intermediate skills. My American instructor had been great. He wanted me to have fun during my lessons. He hadn't pushed me. Here I was on Mont Blanc. The Alps. I was ready. I went to the ski school. I asked for an aggressive teacher. Someone who would push me. Speaking little French, I was assigned Jeanine, one of the bilingual teachers. Bernard, who made the assignment, told me she had been on the French national team in the fifties, “a nice girl. You will like her.”
I met Jeanine off the gondola on L'Index at LaFlegere. Jeanine spoke six English words. “Up” (pronounced oop), “non”, “exactement”, “we ski eh.” Eh is here given word status due to the high percentage of Jeanine's English vocabulary it represented. For four hours, I skied eighteen inches from the tails of Jeanine's skis, mirrored her every move (very roughly approximated is more accurate), and learned to make “grande Christiana” turns, arms held high, edges skidding across the hardpack, knees, ankles, and skis held tightly together.
Jeanine is the most elegant skier I can ever remember seeing. She literally swooped down the mountain. She drove me back to my hotel, a French custom. At the time, I thought this was due to the fact that after a four-hour lesson such as the one I had just completed (perhaps I should say survived) no human could possibly manage his own transportation. From then on, I honed my “French technique” on groomed Colorado slopes. It worked well there. “We ski, eh,” I would sometimes say to my wife as we headed down groomed forgiveness. Another of my affectations she seems to tolerate without apparent effort.
My Utah instructor informed me I would surely kill myself skiing like that in the heavy powder that kept falling on and off during my four-day stay. Even weight distribution, body over the skis, follow the tips down the fall line, bounce up and down, feel the snow. Being an analyst, I analyzed the situation. I couldn't see two feet in front of me. I was skiing blind in the snow and white light. I could feel the soft snow, but longed for the hard pack I could skim across in wide, swooping turns like Jeanine. Frightened of the fall line on snow with no bottom on terrain I couldn't see surrounded by supermen skiers I couldn't match, I instinctively turned wide and was flung into the deep time and again. No swooping here.
Next morning, standing on the resort Plaza, I spied a familiar face. We tentatively greeted each other, it being difficult to be certain who a person was under the hats, goggles, face masks and all. Perhaps that's part of the appeal of skiing. In any event, after a time we recognized each other as analyst colleagues. Chuck couldn't pass up a chance to ski on the way to our meeting either. We skied together and joked about two hundred ski instructors and two analysts on the same mountain. The altitude undoubtedly contributed to whatever irony or humor we saw in the situation. The snow stopped and visibility improved briefly. We had a good run—for psychoanalysts. Seizing the moment, I said “You have to be a little crazy to do this.” Not being Italian, he said he thought skiing allowed us, for a time, to identify in a healthy way with ubiquitous narcissistic fantacies. “Flying dreams actualized,” I joked, myself no longer Italian.
Skiing is a fantasy. Four humbling days of intimidation, fear, breathtaking falls, no swooping. Like all fantasy, I reasoned analytically, it must remain untouched by reality to retain its magic. I longed to do it again. To be a little crazy, a little Italian, to swoop like Jeanine, to fly in a dream, to ski like a psychoanalyst. After all, we were the best two on the hill.
Flight #633 now boarding.