Wild Thoughts from Wild Places, page 19
If his hope is fulfilled, Sunday’s big turn will be grander and more giddy than any before. This year’s festival is the twentieth, after all, harkening back across two decades’ worth of good-spirited tomfoolery and athletic dedication to the time when Hall himself was one of the first free-heel ski bums in America. But well-catered tomfoolery for a thousand visiting skiers demands some serious preparation, and on Thursday there’s still much to be done.
Hall has been awake since 4:00 A.M., working on last-minute details and devoting a modest bit of concern to the weather. Snow coverage on the mountain is skimpy. The winter has been dry and, notwithstanding the resort’s assiduous snow-wranglers, an unseasonal March thaw has stripped the runs half-raw, exposing large marblings of dirt, grass, and rock. Now there’s a storm predicted for Friday—but will it hit? If it does, will it contribute anything more than a deceptive skiff over the bad stretches? Should he worry about too little snow, then, or about a few inches too much? It could make a man crazy. The third alternative, which better suits Hall’s disposition, is no worrying whatsoever. After all, is this brain surgery at issue here? No. Global peace? No. What it is, merely, is a ski party for pinheads. (The term pinhead, as Hall and others use it, is an affably self-derisive double entendre, with only one of those entendres referring to the toe-pin bindings of telemark gear. See “Pinhead Secrets.”) Fussbudgetry being therefore inappropriate, Hall has escaped from his office to conduct a site inspection—and, not incidentally, to make a few turns.
I sit beside him on the lift, riding up through a tepid, damp fog. Below us, the slope is punctuated abundantly with knobs of bare granite, smears of mud, and patches of turf, some of the latter looking lush enough to mow. A careful skier could find a path down, it appears, but not without pussyfooting across those gaps. Where I come from in the northern Rockies, by the time a hill has ripened to this stage it has long since been deserted for kayaking or softball. But Hall’s reaction is upbeat. Oh, this—this is nice snow, he says. Yeah, he can certainly see a party on this. Having only just met the man, I mistake his genuine equanimity for forced cheer.
As we near the top tower, the fog turns to a steady wet drizzle. I raise the hood of my parka, hunkering. But the air is warm, smelling freshly of pine duff, and Hall is relaxed. Soaked hair plastered onto his forehead, he gives a small sigh of contentment and says, “I’ve never had a bad day of skiing in the rain.” A bit of rain on corn snow, Hall adds savoringly, is “like butter on silk.”
It’s my first hint that there’s a philosopher hiding inside the teacher who’s hiding inside this particular impresario.
• • •
DICKIE HALL was a professional skier by the age of seventeen, working as a patroller at certain ski areas out in Colorado and then returning east to do the same in Vermont. He worked the 1973–74 winter at Killington while living out of a tepee. In fact, he was a “tepee hippie” in those days, he says, without specifying the pharmacological details. He got fired from Killington after hijacking the chair lift one night for a larkish moonlight run; trapped halfway up when the bosses cut power to the lift, Dickie and his pals managed to escape with the help of a rescue rope they had foresightedly brought, but in the cold light of following days they still took the blame and the fall.
“That was sort of the start of my nordic career,” Dickie recalls. “Because I needed to make some money.” He talked his way into a new job as a nordic (that is, cross-country) ski instructor on the basis of quick study and a smooth tongue. Had he actually done any previous nordic instruction? Uh, no, but he’d read a book.
It was the early 1970s. Sideburns were long, pants were bell-bottomed, skiing was still in its late-medieval period, and Telemark was a province in Norway, not an American verb.
Though his experience was in alpine technique, Dickie fell deeply in love with nordic skiing because it allowed him to prowl the whole mountain, any mountain, resort or backcountry, up, down, or sideways. He liked to tour through the woods, cross boundaries, and violate expectations; he liked the sensation of skiing with flexible boots resembling actual human feet. But something was missing from nordic gear and nordic technique as he found it in New England: dexterous control. Then in an old ski book he saw a picture showing the telemark turn, developed a century earlier by the great Norwegian jumper Sondre Norheim. Although the book dismissed it as an archaic maneuver only used for showing off, to Dickie it suggested a way of combining nordic mobility with alpine control. “I realized that could be the missing link between the two sports.” Next day, with a pair of simple wooden cross-country skis, he tried his first-ever telemark turn. “I got that little swoop, even on my woodies,” he remembers vividly. It changed his life.
He began searching for a pair of cross-country skis with metal edges, which would vastly enhance his control. There were none to be had, until he persuaded the Karhu company to send him a pair of its camouflage-white model, made for ski troops of the Finnish army. He matched the Karhus with a used pair of Vasque ski-mountaineering boots, several sizes too big, which he got from a friend. Now he had one set of gear that would work for backcountry yet also allow him to carve turns down the steep slopes of any resort in Vermont. Meanwhile, out in Crested Butte, Colorado, a fellow named Rick Borkovec and some like-minded skiers were also rediscovering the telemark turn, but in his own part of the country, Dickie Hall was a lone pioneer. Did the new approach catch on quickly, I ask, or was he just completely crazy as far as other folks were concerned?
“I was certifiable.”
After a year or so, though, he started to win over a few of his more adventurous friends, both from alpine and from nordic, as they saw that he could ski anything they skied, and more. Unaware of the Crested Butte group, Dickie and a handful of cronies became a cadre unto themselves, practicing the happy subversion of telemark and assuming they were the only people on the planet doing it. They even gave themselves an acronymic aegis—BLOPSTI, standing for Blown Out Professional Ski Touring Instructors, a tweak at the actual sanctioning organization (EPSTI, or the Eastern Professional Ski Touring Instructors) from which most of them had emerged. On a nice spring day in 1975, they gathered at the Pico resort near Killington for a party in celebration of telemark skiing, good company, and their own ragamuffin sense of liberty.
“That was the first festival,” Dickie says. He still has the group photo.
About a half-dozen years later—years during which Dickie had been teaching telemark, staging telemark races at various New England areas, and promoting this new brand of old-fangled skiing in every other way he could dream up—the notional BLOPSTI aegis was replaced by another, only slightly less notional: the North American Telemark Organization, also known as NATO. The dignified name and the copycat acronym are Dickie’s way of flashing a wink at those people who take their skiing, or their world in general, too seriously. “It’s not a real organization,” he reminds me when I ask when exactly it was founded. Real or not, this NATO has thrived and grown. On the efforts of a small paid staff and plenty of volunteers, it now sponsors dozens of telemark clinics, workshops, races, and camps every year, from Tuckerman Ravine to Denali, from West Virginia to Japan. And of course NATO, not Dickie alone, is the sponsor of the 20th Annual Telemark Festival at Sugarbush.
It’s a vest-pocket operation with global reach. It has an 800 number. It addresses the public (as its founder too sometimes does, though not often) with a straight face. The best way of avoiding confusion between Dickie Hall’s NATO and the NATO of Bill Clinton and Helmut Kohl is to remember this: Dickie’s is the one based in a converted loft behind an old wooden house in Waitsfield, Vermont, furnished with a computer, a phone, a telescope, a Japanese kite, a poster of a Viking warrior making a telemark turn, a gumball machine full of M&M’s, and a collection of toy trucks. Clinton and Kohl’s is the other one.
• • •
OVER THE past two decades, Dickie figures, he personally has taught 30,000 people to telemark ski. Instructors trained by NATO have trained still other instructors and skiers, and the videos that Dickie has produced with his cinematographer partner John Fuller (such as Revenge of the Telemarkers, a nice mix of goofball entertainment and lucidly explained technique) have spread his voice further. He brings an evangelical zeal to the whole enterprise, a zeal carrying far beyond any mere dedication to athletic prowess, fun-mongering for its own sake, or earning himself a living. He seems to believe that teaching thousands of people to telemark ski will somehow make the world a happier, healthier place.
At the same time, privately, he harbors ambivalence about the telemark category itself. Being chary of neat categories in general, he’s chary of that one too. Telemark skiing—how do you define it? With reference to a certain type of turn? Once he would have said so, during his foolish “purist” days, but no longer. A certain type of ski? Definitely not. A certain type of boot-and-binding arrangement that allows the heel to come up and the knee to go down? Naw, that doesn’t cover it either. The real essence of Dickie’s program is to unify a whole assortment of techniques—virtually every good ski move that has ever been improvised—and use a simplified, versatile set of equipment to transcend all the boundaries separating one stretch of snow from another.
“What we’re doing now, you can call it telemark skiing,” Dickie says, “but it really is skiing the way it was invented. Put your skis on, go wherever you want, use lifts, don’t use lifts. Go to the woodpile, go behind your house, go to the store, across Greenland, go to Denali, go to Aspen.” That all-terrain adaptability gives telemark, in his view, a robust future. “I’ve met a lot of people who used to alpine. I’ve never met anyone who used to telemark. Because you don’t have to give up anything to take it on.”
Some devotees prefer other labels for this way of skiing: nordic downhill, norpine, backcountry . . . the list goes on. But Dickie has his own cagey reason for sticking with telemark. “It’s really telemarketing, in a sense,” he admits. “We’re using this little fancy turn without heel bindings to get people into a world that’s much larger than they even perceive.” They come to learn the telemark turn. He and his NATO associates give them that and much more. “But if I called what we do the North American Skiing Around Organization, no one would buy our movies or come to our clinics. Right?”
P.T. Barnum himself would understand.
• • •
“I WASN’T gonna teach today,” Dickie says on Thursday afternoon. But the butter-on-silk conditions have soothed him, and the press of unfinished festival preparations seems forgotten. Having watched me in my own tele gear trying to follow him through a steep mogul field, he finds that he just can’t not teach.
So I get three personalized pointers from America’s most renowned and influential telemark instructor. First, shorten those adjustable poles still farther. Second, keep those shoulders squared down the fall line. His third piece of advice is more cryptic: “Don’t be a telemarker.” Be a complete skier instead, he means, for whom the telemark turn is only one tool among many. In my case that calls for more parallel turns intermixed with the telemarks, to add quickness and save strain on my legs. He has often given the same unexpected advice to other students, most whom look to him as the guru of telemark in eastern America: “Don’t be a telemarker.” It’s a characteristic sort of tip from Dickie—catchy, arch, and at first impression as mystifying as a koan, but packed full of good sense.
On Friday afternoon, accompanying him again on an inspection of the hill, I see another example of this pedagogic style. A heavyset man in a multicolored coat grinds his alpine boards to an unsteady halt not far from where Dickie has paused. “I don’t get forward enough,” the man mutters to himself.
Dickie overhears him and hollers a friendly “Nice coat!” by way of hello. Then he offers a suggestion that might help the stranger redistribute his balance. “You need your hands farther forward. Think about keeping your gloves away from your coat.” Deadpan, Dickie adds: “Some people say, the farther your gloves are from your coat, the better you ski.” Laughing, the man vows he’ll try it, as Dickie plunges away down the next pitch.
During my four days of skiing at his side, I witness a number of these Dickiesque bits. “Okay, let’s talk about underwear,” is how one teaching moment begins. “Let’s talk about breakfast food,” is another, and with his pole he begins drawing a large fried egg around my feet. Ski with your boots in the yolk—so as not to sprawl out into an exaggerated stride—is the take-away message from that one. For still another, Dickie does his impersonation of the character Lurch from The Addams Family. As we weave down a trail, he shouts me a reminder: “Move your pockets back! One after another!” Draw the rear ski backward into my telemark stance, he means, rather than pushing the front ski forward. Each of these cryptic little tips, offered to me or whomever, is calculated to make telemark skiing easier, more economical, and more fun.
“Let’s talk about another body part,” Dickie says at one point, having watched my fierce efforts to control my hands and my shoulders, to harmonize my eggs and my underwear and my pockets. “The hole under your nose,” he says, pointing. “Make sure the corners are turned up.”
• • •
THE STORM misses, the weather turns sunny, the Sugarbush groomers do their snow-saving work expertly, and the festival hums like a clock. Registration is high, not quite the thousand skiers hoped for but enough hundreds—drawn from New York and Pennsylvania and Massachusetts and Maine and Quebec, as well as the immediate area—to constitute an overwhelming presence. “Safety straps required. Please don’t scare the alpine skiers,” reads a notice at the bottom of the schedule of events. All over the mountain, throughout Saturday and Sunday, telemark is the prevailing activity and mouth corners are turned up.
A quiet Norwegian named Lars Vik, dressed traditionally in knickers, knee socks, and suspenders, wins the men’s slalom with a sleek 34-second run. The clinics—beginner, intermediate, and advanced for adults, as well as beginner and advanced for young kids—take place on schedule, including one intermediate session taught in the comedic mode by Dickie himself. The costuming of some skiers (a Mad Hatter stovepipe here, a propeller-equipped beanie there) helps to remind us all that this is a profoundly frivolous affair, not a ski-industry fashion shoot. The party on Saturday night is a jovial crush of bodies marinated in Catamount beer, loud rock and roll, and the stink of sweaty Capilene, amid which a seemingly tranquil Dickie Hall, separated for now from his clipboard and his walkie-talkie, finds time to dance with his wife. Sunday is another lovely day of corn snow and sun, with the bump contest beginning at 11:00 A.M. on the same steep mogul run where Dickie gave me pointers.
Everything so far has flowed along with just the right blend of careful planning and amiable nonchalance. The only bad management decision of the entire weekend is made by the three bump-contest judges, one of whom is me, when we opt at the last minute to allow each competitor two runs instead of one. Since Dickie has promised us autonomy (“Here are the rules: There are no rules,” he explained, “there are no standards, and bribing the judges is okay”), he flinches presciently but doesn’t overrule. The disastrous result, however, is that by the time we announce the bump winners, it’s too late for Dickie to assemble everyone back at the gentle slope above the lodge for the World Record Attempt Group Telemark Turn. One o’clock has slipped by; in terms of collective energy and focus, also, the moment has passed. The crowd, like the corn snow, is melting away. And so the 20th Annual Festival of the North American Telemark Organization fizzles to a close, with lots of happily exhausted skiers saying their goodbyes, but no big turn. No new record. No linkage of hands, followed by 188 individual pratfalls, as testament to the unifying fellowship and liberating diversity of telemark.
As a responsible party, I feel horrible about this omission.
Never mind, Dickie tells me. Every festival is different. Next year, he says, we’ll keep the bumpers to one run. It’s okay, David, he says. Not a big deal.
He too is exhausted, emotionally if not physically, and the disappointment shows through.
• • •
BUT WHEN I visit him next day at his office in the little loft, Dickie’s buoyancy has returned. With a good night’s sleep and a quiet morning at home, he has found a more satisfying perspective on the big turn that wasn’t. “I think it happened,” he says. “It happened at one o’clock. Over two hundred people were doing a telemark turn at that moment.” Maybe their separate but simultaneous efforts constitute the new big turn, he posits. Telemark skiing has come a long way in a short twenty years. “Maybe we don’t need to hold each other’s hands anymore,” Dickie says.
Is this forced cheer? Having gotten to know him much better in four intense days, I don’t think so. Besides, so what if it is? We’re not talking about brain surgery or global peace, as the man says; we’re just talking about skiing, roughly as it was invented and rediscovered. Seated beside the gumball machine, Dickie gives me his unassuming grin. The impresario has faded away, the teacher is on vacation, the clown is resting, and what I see is the philosopher.
Eat of This Flesh
It’s an experimental procedure, as far as I’m concerned. The work will take about thirty minutes. Wearing a gray short-sleeved scrub shirt, Dr. Don Thomas performs briskly, with an experienced physician’s offhanded precision. His knife is sharp, his preparation has been judicious, and for a while there will be no sign of blood. First he opens himself a beer and passes one to me.
