Pass The Snowshoes

I would be a different person had I learned to ski. Reared in New England, there were heavily chaperoned school trips to the slopes of New Hampshire, but I was never interested. Always highly attenuated to getting hurt, I avoided dodgeball, chose tennis over lacrosse and heels over climbing boots. From where was that fear rooted?

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Skiing proves mastery of one’s body, complete alignment in the most personal of domaines, with a fearlessness I can’t even fathom. The confidence required to ski at all, forget the highly skilled, lends a year-round swagger to an already fit physique; a physical assuredness I’ve always lacked. And all wrapped up in scientifically rendered clothing, they know they’re smokin’ hot, too.

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Perched on a bench at the top of the mountain, bundled in my sausage-casing layers, I watched people of all ages and tongues begin their runs, nervous and excited, down, down, down into a vast valley ringed by mountains and conifer draped in snow. I wept frozen tears at such a display of Nature’s magnificence, and tears of regret that I would never experience the skiers’ exhilaration, speeding down a frozen mountain with sticks strapped to feet.

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Shudder the thought.