RIP VAN VöLKL

One Thursday a few winters ago, I tossed my long-unused Völkl skis and Rossignol boots into the bed of my old Toyota and drove to Missoula for a weekend with my daughter and her family. Ski season had just begun, and there had been talk of taking the two grandkids up to Snowbowl for a day on the slopes. They were little bitty things at the time – six- and four-years-old – but they were Montana kids and eager to keep doing the next fun outdoors-thing with the adults. I was delighted at the idea of joining them – even though I had not skied for twenty years.           

Learning to ski had been a great point of pride for me. In 1967, when I was a high school kid, age 16, my parents moved me from a small town in western Pennsylvania, where no one skied, to Denver, Colorado, where everybody skied. I started dating a girl named Debbie Kvarfordt, whose last name alone gave away the fact that she was born to excel at winter sports.  Her whole family skied – Mom, Dad, little brothers, tiny sister, all of them skied. They had a young St. Bernard named Woody, and he skied. My first winter dating her, Debbie suggested that I join the family for a fun day on the slopes. I was an athletic kid, well-coordinated except for my apparel, and Debbie assured me that I would have no trouble picking up alpine skiing. 

            “Anybody who can walk downhill without falling can learn to ski,” she told me.  “Besides, everyone in my family is an expert – we can teach you in no time.” 

            Debbie perhaps had forgotten the fact that she, and her little brothers and tiny sister, had all learned to ski before they went to kindergarten. Little kids on skis are like dung beetles: no amount of falling can hurt them. They stand only three feet tall, and they have not developed self-consciousness or the ability to fear. I was six-foot-three, and shy, and deeply sensitive, and readily embarrassed. I had never been on skis. 

            But I was a good sport and agreed to go. Debbie’s dad Jack, an attorney I greatly admired, assured me that I was doing the right thing.

            “Anybody who can walk downhill without falling can learn to ski,” he told me.  “Besides, we’re all experts – we can teach you in no time.” Jack added that we were going to a super-friendly ski area (I remember him saying “super-friendly.” He used the word “super” a lot.). It was Geneva Basin, one of the last mom-and-pop operations that still held market share right around the time when Colorado ski resorts were going corporate and glitzy. Geneva was a self-described family-friendly ski area with a loyal clientele of down-home people who did not need to glitter on the slopes. I somehow took all of this to heart, picturing the area as gentle and bunny-like, where family members of all ages skied together all day long, moving placidly as if they were bundled into a small motorless boat on a slow river. I would be with the Kvarfordts, all of them experts showing me everything I needed to know. I would be safe and well-instructed, and in the family boat. 

            None of that is an accurate description of what happened.

            Debbie and I peeled off to hit the rental shop where I had to obtain my equipment. It took some time to get me fitted with a pair of alpine ski boots, which felt exactly as I imagined walking in concrete blocks might feel. I immediately nicknamed the boots Jimmy Hoffas. Then came fitting the bindings to the boots and adjusting the proper release tension, so the boots, when I fell, would not remain attached to the skis, which might veer off in opposite directions, splitting me up the middle like a turkey’s wishbone. By the time she and I were ready to hit the slopes, the family had all headed to the top of the mountain, where, instead of staying together in that cozy boat I had imagined, they fled from each other in five different directions. 

            Debbie remained patient with me for around the first hour. She started tossing skiing terms at me, apparently thinking that if I picked up the proper terminology, I would somehow transmute the words into physical alacrity. She said, “poma lift,” as we shuffled forward toward an icy rope racing along the ground at our feet. I could see that the “poma lift” was a device for dragging you up the hill. You were supposed to grab the rope, grip it hard and lean shoulders forward and bend your knees and push hips back, and the powerful thing would tow you up while you stood on your skis. It didn’t work that way for me. I fell about sixty times going uphill, often having to roll away from the poma path so that the four-year-old behind me would not ski over my legs. I thought, If I’m falling this much going uphill, what’s it going to be like coming downhill? 

            It might have taken me an hour to get the top of the poma lift, which of course went up the easiest and lowest bunny slope on the area. The downhill was considerably more difficult.  Even on that tiny and forgiving hump, skis ran terrifyingly fast. Debbie didn’t tell me that the way you control your speed is by turning. So at first, I didn’t turn. I controlled my speed by sitting on my ass, or just falling, in an effort to save my life. 

            Debbie decided that I needed further instruction, so she started with the ski terminology again, tossing out words like “snowplow” and “stem christie.” I was sweating like a pig by then, and deeply flustered, embarrassed to a state of permanent red, which made me look like I’d been out in a boat and gotten sunburned, but I did pick up on the idea of the snowplow maneuver as a means of braking. You make a “V” with your skies and push your knees toward each other until it feels like your hips are about to pop out of their sockets. But the stem christie eluded me, even when Debbie demonstrated. 

            “You just plant your pole and ski around it,” she said, now beginning to join me in frustration. “Plant your right pole and ski around it to the right, then plant your left pole and go left. Like this.”

            She demonstrated the stem christie with perfect Nordic finesse. No wonder, I thought. With her it’s genetic. She’d probably done stem christies in the womb, not long after her father had planted his pole. 

            I did not learn to do turns that day. As far as I got was the snowplow, which I employed with grim determination, creeping down the bunny-poma slope at about one mile per hour. When Debbie felt confident that I would not need Ski Patrol to sled my broken body down to the first aid station, she left me alone to keep plowing and headed off, in what was left of her day, to hit the moguls. “Hit the moguls” was another skiing term she introduced me to but in her eagerness to get in some real skiing, she did not explain what moguls were. I assumed she was abandoning me to spend the afternoon with movie executives, which seemed to give the lie to Geneva Basin as a family-friendly place.

            That day with the Kvarfordts ended skiing for me for many years, but after college I came back into it through cross-country with ardent environmentalist friends in Wyoming, who sneered at things like high-speed quad lifts and the outrageous gondolas that came to supplant the simple two-person chair lift of old. Cross-country was a great workout and a way to disappear into the pristine hush of a winter forest; it was all about woolens and wax, and wooden skis handmade by elfin Norwegians, and my friends railed against the day-glo poly-and-plastic phoniness of the recently fashionable alpine slopes like Jackson Hole or Colorado’s new Beaver Creek Resort. I bought a pair of maple-wood Birkebeiner skis with simple three-pin bindings and hit the hidden trails to be found everywhere in the national forests. I didn’t much master cross-country either but no matter. The sport allowed for vigorous aerobic exercise on mostly flat terrain, and I found that if I simply avoided steep downhill runs, I hardly needed to make turns. I left good old stem cristie up where she belonged.

            Then came the baby.

            When the baby reached the age of five, we decided it was time to teach her to ski. We lived in Montana’s Bitterroot Valley then, and the place abounded with winter trails. We had heart-warming visions of our daughter immediately taking to the marvels of cross-country, as if she were a Norwegian. We bought her a pair of waxless fiberglass skis and sober boots, and the long poles that enable the cross-country trekker to kick and glide across spacious terrain. We talked up the trail snacks carried in tiny backpacks (things all made with M&M’s!), and the thrill of hot chocolate waiting at home after an afternoon spent in winter wonderland. We were still hippies then, still living the dream of an organic, off-the-grid, self-propelled paradise in chilly rural Montana. We lived in a log cabin three miles from the nearest town; we could literally step from our porch and begin skiing. Of course, our child would take to cross-country. It was, among other things, the right thing to do.

            She hated it.

            Too long too hard too cold no fun.

            Her friends in kindergarten taught her that, her first mantra. Her friends, it seemed, were also skiing with their parents, but they were getting to go up to the Lost Trail Ski Area atop a pass that received legendary amounts of powder. Lost Trail had two chair lifts and a T-bar, groomed slopes, and a nice warm lodge for resting and hot chocolate. The ski costumes were shiny and brightly colored; the skis had racing stripes, and none were made of wood. Motors did all the hard work; the skiers had only to step off the chair and head downhill. Fast! All day long.  We took her to Lost Trail, rented alpine equipment, and spent the day obeying gravity.  

            She was overjoyed.

            That was the end of trying to ski uphill. The three of us got new equipment; at age forty, I committed to the task of learning the arts of alpine. Her mother, who had gone to grad school in Salt Lake City, was already a good skier, but I had to do everything I could to catch up. The cross-country had helped. I felt comfortable on skis now and soon got over the fact that at six years old, my daughter could literally ski circles around me. She proved it several times, carving figure-8's around my plodding form as if I were a set of mobile slalom poles. Every time we went, it took her no time to find a bevy of athletic little kids on the slopes and she soon abandoned all thought of skiing with the old folks. 

            After a time, I began to realize that downhill skiing was a lot like fly-fishing from a river raft. In both, I lost myself in the sheer kinetics of the thing. Fly-casting was all about rhythm, a metronomic discipline which demanded utter concentration if you wanted to land some fish. I never liked talking when I was fishing, any more than I liked talking when I was reading a book.  Skiing had many of the same qualities – a faster motion but motion just the same; a clear rhythm, a definite sense of flow. It elicited in me the same kind of meditative state I had long enjoyed on the river.

            Halfway through my second year on the slopes, I was over-skiing my beginner’s equipment – a low-end Rossignol package I had purchased from Gull Sports in Missoula. I went back there mid-season, explained myself to the friendly eleven-year-old selling equipment, and walked out of the store with a brand-new pair of Völkls matched to some high-end Rossignol boots and a hot-shit set of bindings so ugly no one would buy them and they were being offered on a super-sale. The binding brand was Look, with its patented “3-D System.” I had no idea what that meant, and neither did the sales-kid, but they were reputed to be the best thing on the market. The fact that these bindings were painted in a florescent combination of chartreuse, yellow, and pink made no difference to me. I was determined to ski the hell out of them, and did for the next four or five years, buying season passes and skipping work on Fridays to continue my private bouts of Zen meditation on the slopes. I became avid, if stuck at the intermediate level. I was an avid intermediate.

            Twenty years later, I carried that Völkl-Rossignol-Look outfit back to Gull Sports, seeking to get a tune-up before attacking Snow Bowl. Life had changed dramatically over those years. I left Missoula, moved to eastern Washington, stopped skiing and fishing, dove headlong into the most intense and enjoyable job I’d ever had, became a suburban homebody and more of a gym-rat than the outdoorsman I had always been. I kept dreaming of returning to the slopes in Montana, but somehow it never happened. My ski equipment stood in a corner of our garage in Republican Meadows. I would see those haunted objects every time I went for the lawnmower, also kept in the garage, and I would think longingly that Next Winter, By God Next Winter, I would return to Montana, get the skis and bindings tuned, and head back to the mountain runs that had afforded such pleasure long ago.

            It finally happened. I walked confidently into Gull Sports on a gray December day, lugging boots in one hand, skis in the other, and presented myself at the shop-desk, still located at the front of the store. A youngster in a battered apron received me. I noted the declining age among Gull’s employees. This guy was maybe nine.

            “Any chance of getting these things tuned up in the next two days?” I asked.

            The kid looked at my skis, then looked at me, then turned away toward the rear of the shop.

            “Hey Jason!,” he yelled to someone I could not see. “You gotta see this. Go get Jessica.”

            I stood there frozen with confusion. What was there to see? I’d had these skis tuned at this very shop nearly a dozen times. Hell, I’d bought the things here – proud of myself all those years ago with the acumen I had shown. Völkl was a top brand, known for high prices but superior performance. The lad I bought them from had complimented me lavishly, talked me up to a pair of racing boots he said I would never out-ski, and then suggested the super-sale bindings, which, though ugly, were also top-of-the-line. I’d left the store that day with the belief that I would have this outfit for the rest of my life. 

            Turned out I was right.

            Jason and Jessica came trotting up to the counter where they rendezvoused with Ty, the fellow who greeted me. Now I saw a name tag that said “Ty.”

            Before I could ask anything about this sudden and mysterious greeting at the desk, Jessica lifted her phone and asked if she could get a picture.

            “A picture of me?” I asked.

            “No, no, the skis,” she said. “They’re priceless.”

            I thought she was referring to what great condition they were in – decades-old skis with hardly any blemishes, and these things had been skied hard back in the day….

            But no.

            While Jessica took a series of shots from several angles – including, finally, a few pictures of me – Ty explained that they were not permitted to work on skis and bindings of this vintage. In fact, they were literally barred from even touching them inside the store. 

            “We can’t do it,” Ty said.

            “Can’t do what?” I asked.

            “Work on your stuff. They’re non-indemnified.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Way too old, man. We mess with those bindings and you get hurt, it comes back on us.” 

Ty stared at me for a minute, realizing I had no idea what he was talking about. He explained that components of ski bindings wear out over time, whether they have been used or not. Springs lose tension, plastic parts degrade, and no amount adjustment can compensate.

            “We gotta comply with ISO 9462, man. Nothin’ we can do about it.”

            “‘I’ what?” I asked.

            “ISO 9462. International standard for ski bindings. If you fall and these things don’t release, it comes back on us.”

  A standing army of attorneys stood waiting to sue the shit out of any ski shop that violated ISO 9462, and the easiest way to violate it was to adjust non-indemnified bindings. If a shop employee so much as touches a set of equipment this old, a crack-shot lawyer can make a case. 

            “Well, what if I just bought new bindings?” I asked. “Could we do that?” 

            There was a long pause in the conversation. I felt like I had asked a forbidden question, as if in the presence of an evangelical minister I had wondered whether Jesus was really the son of God. Finally, Jessica broke the silence.

            “Actually, your whole rig’s antique. I’ve been working here ten years and I have never seen stuff this old.” She was taking photographs to hang on the shop’s office wall, where they had a picture gallery of obsolete equipment. 

            “But these are Völkls,” I sputtered. “I bought these things here. They came with a dieresis!”

            “I don’t know what that is, but we still carry Völkls,” Jessica offered helpfully, pointing at a rack of new skis on the sales floor. I glanced at them, immediately noticing $800 price tags.

            It took all three of them to explain to me what had happened in the world of ski equipment in the years my stuff stood idle. Everything got re-designed. Skis got shorter and fatter, boots and skis both grew more responsive, making the business of carving turns on the slopes infinitely easier.

“You don’t really want to ski with these things,” Jessica said in a pleading tone. “I mean, they’re like 190 centimeters long and straight as a two-by-four. How do you even turn with them?”

“I don’t know,” I replied quietly. “They snowplow pretty good.”

            It had happened before – a Rip Van Winkel moment – as if I had fallen asleep over a juglet of beer and awakened many years later to an utterly changed world. If I wanted a set of tunable, turnable skis with indemnified bindings, I needed to come up with about fifteen hundred bucks for a new package. I realized I also probably needed an attorney, maybe like my ski-buddy of old, Jack Kvarfordt.