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On Learning to Ski
By Dorie Valenti
I was not quite 10 years old, so I don't remember much about learning how to ski except for a few vivid memories, and these involved taking instruction from a man who did not speak English. A significant advantage of learning to ski from someone who did not speak English was that he could not depend on logical explanations for anything he was trying to teach. He had to show me.
My instructor was Austrian; he taught me the Austrian method, which apparently meant walking on our skis on flat ground, sliding one ski back, sliding the other ski back, sliding the other ski back, and again, over and over. It wasn't long before boredom encouraged me to learn to skate on skis, and the Austrian and I skated along. He would stop and perform a kick turn, and likewise, so would I, sort of, and we would return from whence we came. Now, mind you, back in the day, as in my day when I was a little sprout in the early 60s, skis were very long, and kick turns required finesse, coordination, grace, and athleticism, none of which I possessed. I can't remember how many days I spent on flat ground perfecting my skills, but I remember the day I got to climb. After all the flat ground workouts, sidestepping came quickly. The kick turn on the hill posed a slight challenge, but after many tumbles, I got it okay, and up we went.
The Austrian showed me how to snow plow. We went down at an angle, always on the traverse, and when we got to the side of the trail, we would stop, do a kick turn, and traverse to the other side. On one of our runs, he taught me the snowplow turn; all I had to do was touch my boot with both hands, and YES! A perfect turn. The stem christie followed, as did the herringbone. We would herringbone up and stem christie down, and then my father decided that I was ready, that I was prepared for a ticket!
My father bought me a ticket for the rope tow.
I grabbed the rope, and —are you kidding me?!
Herringboning up the mountain was more manageable than holding onto this rope, so I let go, but my mittens stayed with the rope. Bare-handed, I strapped on my poles, faced the summit, and herringboned up, racing to the top, racing my mittens stuck to the rope. Sadly, my mittens won that day. I watched them whip around the pulley machine. I watched them going down on the return, mangled and hanging on by threads, passing me on their way down as I climbed up. My mittens lapped me; this is true, but this is also true; this would be the only time my mittens would beat me to the summit because, from my vantage point at the top of the rope tow, I saw the J-bar springing into action. If I played my cards right, yes, if I played my cards right, I knew my dad would buy me a J-bar ticket.
