Après ski
When I cooked up this green chile turkey chili I thought I was saying: “Hey, you guys all seem pretty cool and our kids get along and thanks for inviting us to your gracious mountain chalet and I hope you find this tasty after a day of skiing.” With maybe an addendum of: “I was not raised by wolves and I know how to be a good house guest.” And, perhaps, just in case I am as much like my father as I’m starting to suspect: “Oh, and I’m sorry about leading the kids down that black diamond run at the end of the day. My bad!”
What I ended up needing this chili to communicate was: “Oh my god. I want to die. I cannot believe I am so lame. I don’t know what I was thinking. I am so sorry I got my snow chains tangled onto my tires as I tried to take them off. I don’t know what I was thinking. I wasn’t. Obviously. It would be bad enough if this just delayed getting everyone home after a long day of skiing, but the fact that you needed to lie down on the slushy mud-filled parking lot to get them off for me because I was paralyzed by fear that I would be stuck there all day waiting for AAA and couldn’t think clearly…. Words can never express my embarrassment, much less my gratitude. Please, please, please, for the love of all that is great and good on this green earth, may the taste of this chili erase any memory of the incident from your mind.”
Along with trying to infuse the chili with amnesiac powers, I’m also hoping that skiing worked its mojo. I’m hoping that my hosts are like me: that at the end of a day of skiing, they are always glad to have gone.
Crazy-ass storm off the Pacific closes I-80 in the middle of the day and turns it into a parking lot well past midnight, extending a 2 hour 52 minute drive into a 6-plus hour extravaganza during which I literally slapped myself to stay awake driving on dark, icy mountain roads at 3 a.m.? Happy to have done it as soon as I click into the skis.
Even the day I messed up my knee a few years ago (all better now, thanks!). That run before the fall… that was some good snow. I am not sorry to have gone out that day. Sorry to have taken the run-out at that speed, perhaps, but not sorry to have skied.
Skiing involves a certain level of hassle. There is equipment to manage and layering decisions to make. You can take wrong paths and end up in places you didn’t expect to be and don’t think you can get out of. It can be free and easy, with turn effortlessly flowing after turn until all of the sudden you lose your rhythm and the next turn takes more effort than you think you can muster.
As I find myself telling my son when he thinks a slope is too steep or too bumpy: I know it’s hard, but you can do it.
And I suppose I could now say that these are life lessons the slopes make clear to me. I suppose I could think that I should live a bit more as I ski: take a few more risks, be a bit more in the moment, trust that the best runs come after beginnings that require very difficult moves indeed, know that the best snow is usually found where few others make the effort to tread.
I wish I could think about any of that with clarity, but I’m not in the moment. I’m not home at my computer writing this post and calming reflecting on the fun I had this weekend. No, I’m still standing next to my car, heart beating wildly as I scan the emptying parking lot for a time machine to take me back just three minutes so I can remember to unclip both sides of the chains, desperately wondering what the hell to do to solve the problem myself quickly, without fuss, and not inconvenience anyone.
But if you gave me a choice between not going skiing and thus avoiding this shame spiral or having a day of skiing and the resulting wild grasping at shoulds and coulds and woulds? I would choose the skiing-plus-shame option. Every time.





