You can only score if you’re here. Photo: Palisades Tahoe.
I don’t think I ever consciously decided to be a ski bum. I’d just been thrashed by a breakup with my college girlfriend, and I worked at a beach parking lot, collecting cash sticky with suntan lotion, gazing longingly at the waves across the street. A few months later I awoke stuffed into a car with camping gear, snowboards, skateboards, and two other dudes. Nine-eleven had just occurred, and there was a strange heaviness in the air as we left New England and drove west.
Newspaper headlines shouted at us from truck stops and planes and helicopters whirred overhead. We were alternately confused and scared, sad and elated. With no help from cell towers we charted a crooked path across wrinkled maps, and late at night we dropped change into national park coffers and ate sardines over campfires. We abided by the clichés: reading the Beats, rolling cigarettes and skating sketchy spots while sweating through tired clothes. The roads behind us echoed with car horns and some sort of blurry innocence. In the hazy distance, the mountains waited.
Someone had a friend with a girlfriend of a friend with a house in Tahoe City. The first night a bear cub climbed into the foyer and sniffed at the bong on the table. In the morning the air smelled of pine and sunshine. We found a house to rent and told all our friends who skied and hadn’t folded to The Man just yet: hey, get the hell out here.
We got jobs in and around the mountain. Afternoons, I ran in woods crowded with spindly white firs and cinnamon-red cedars as coyotes skittered from my Nikes like ghosts. Soon, friends descended on the house in droves, and the type of eager debauchery typical of 20-somethings who suddenly have no responsibilities began. Our house was a playground, people climbed the walls and billeted off the ceiling beams. One visitor rolled us joints in exchange for a couch to sleep on, another pitched a tent on the balcony. Anarchy and chaos ruled, and it was beautiful and sometimes disgusting, like when two roommates got into a late-night fight using only buckets of ash from the fireplace, coating the entire house in smoke and dust.
The locals issued forecasts in hushed tones, and together we waited for the whisper of snow to fold over everything and change us. When the first storm blew in, the mountains closed and cars, streets and small children disappeared. Mornings were spent shoveling and diving off the roof, nights were for Hamm’s and feasts of Hamburger Helper. There were 13 of us now, and each day we woke to find our footprints filled in. We built snow bars, masterful structures with fridges and kegs, and were surprised when people from all over town showed up for happy hour. They knew our house, they said: it was the one with broken skateboards in the windows.
Late at night we pulled each other through the streets behind old trucks, surfing the snow drifts that lined our hilly neighborhood. I once got lost in the thick forest around our house in waist deep snow, snowboard in hand, chased by a crazy neighbor who was haunted by a terrible past. I thought I was done for. Months later a bear would follow me home from town on foot and I’d again say my silent goodbyes to my family back east. It’s been a good run, I’d whisper into gloves. I love you.
The crushing weight of relentless snow blotted everything out. We became nameless ski bums, surrendering our identities to 50 cent coffees at dawn and dollar beers when the lifts stopped running. We were lifties, chefs, waiters, barbacks. I was a landscaper, a junk collector, a sandwich maker. None of it mattered because the result was the lightning thrill of lonely runs across headwalls and through chutes we swore we’d named, because this place was ours and no one else’s. Our singular goal was virgin snow at sunrise, fresh tracks we would very nearly kill for. No alliances, no politics, no money. No order, no rules, yet a pervasive belief among our privileged pack of wolves that our lives had yet to fully begin.
Those times won’t last forever. Photo: Andri Klopfenstein
Over 35 feet of snow fell that winter, and it didn’t melt until July. I’m told that pictures of snow-drenched highways from that season still hang in the bars. Now that group of friends is spread wide and only a fraction of us stay in touch. But sometimes I dream of the thrill of dropping off a cornice into the snow’s silent emptiness, or of following the ski patrol up the lift at sunrise and gazing out over the untouched valley, the ice-blue lake. Some nights I snap awake, haunted by the time I flipped into the powder and went down a tree well’s rabbit hole, sucking snow into my lungs, just barely digging out with shaky hands.
Of course, there were injuries, breakups, even scraps among our crew — typically over a girl. The freedom of spinning through the blue sky gave way to the time when I crookedly somersaulted through the air and walloped my back on the frozen ground. A good friend carried me to his car, and someone who was surely not a doctor gave me painkillers to numb the injury that still haunts my misshapen bones.
We knew, for those quick years, that we weren’t getting any younger. What we didn’t know was how quickly seasons would soon be reduced to photos kept in boxes in closets. We didn’t know that friendships fall apart, and people forget, and our current adult lives would become so rooted and solid that we couldn’t imagine being anywhere else. I sometimes wonder; were we obsessed with the wrong things or the right things? I’d say the former. There was a beautiful singularity in the rollercoaster descent from top to bottom, the never-ending cycle that ultimately left you drained of adrenaline and ready to hitchhike home. Ah, the stoned joy of sticking a thumb in the air after reaching the bottom of some side-country adventure – and a road. Tires sloshing by, sky slinging snow, always a ride to be found.
Surfing, now, is when I get to live in the moment, to pause time. Is there any profound importance to being a ski bum? Conversely, is there any meaning in being a surfer? The value may be found in our fleeting memories of flying across the face of a wave or of swooping off the high ridge in the blurry dusk. In the transient joy of deep carves on bluebird days and screaming drunken nights – and friends who’d pull you out of the six feet of snow.
There’s no going back to those disconnected days when we drew lines on maps to mark where we wanted to go. When, if you stuck a new trick or blazed a new chute, the memory lived on only in your bluster at the bar, and not a spinning video or broken reel. Yet there’s still magic in the world, even when we can’t remember the paths through the pines or the names of everyone who lived in that house. Time isn’t elastic anymore, but the lift still runs. The mountains still call to us with their high, dizzy freedom, and we answer.
