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Put all your weight on the gliding ski… The words from the instruction video I watched the night before float in my head. Each ski glides out sideways, at an awkward angle from the body, and it glides fast. If your weight’s not on it, you’re left straddled between your two skis and you fall forward. But when I try to go with it, I lose my nerve at the speed and hunch over stiffly to brake myself.

Lean into the ski…Trust the ski… The instructor’s final words. Doggedly determined to reach that state of grace, I go out and practice day after day. Miraculously, the snow lasts all the way through January. Each day I do four laps around the same little loop. At first I can barely move; my limbs are wooden with fear. Slowly I gain confidence and, by the end of each session, I’m doing a passable imitation of elementary skate skiing. I’m frustrated to find, though, that every day I start right back where I began the day before. The knowledge doesn’t last the night.

I tell myself that I’m a slow learner, to have patience; I try and
boost my flagging spirits with encouragement, praising myself for every moment that felt almost right and consoling myself for the many more that don’t. Often, other skiers pass me, swooping along on one leg, their bodies bobbing rhythmically as they transfer their weight from one foot to the other. Some of them—usually men—offer me advice, tips. Clad in Pearl Izumi lycra outfits, they patiently explain about pushing out sideways and rolling over during the glide onto the inside edge of the ski, which is ridged to help you push off onto the other side. I thank them through glasses fogged up with steam. I already know all the descriptions and explanations. But nobody seems to be able to explain how I get from knowing about this sport to knowing how to do it.

I can’t believe how hard this is. Every muscle aches. Although I’m in pretty good shape physically, I have to stop every hundred yards and lean on my poles, winded. Even the stride skiers overtake me, in a new incarnation of the race of the hare and the tortoise.

On these daily expeditions I discover that snow changes. It’s different every day and often it changes noticeably during the time I’m out skiing. I become very sensitive to the appearance and feel of the snow, because it determines how fast I will go that day, how much I will fall, and how much I will enjoy the ski. After a fresh fall at around 25ºF, the snow is soft and fine. As the temperature rises, it becomes heavy and moist and slippery. In very cold weather it is dry and crunchy and hard to move on. When the temperature has risen and fallen, it turns to ice on the curves, crackly and wickedly fast. If the sun becomes intense, bare patches develop on exposed areas. If the track was groomed more than a day or two ago, it’s harder for me because it’s packed and grooved and slippery from other skiers, and I can’t get much purchase on the surface. I’m always hoping for the perfect snow conditions. I also know that here in Madison the perfect conditions are so rare that I should give up hoping for them—I have to learn to ski in imperfect conditions. Otherwise I’ll never get out.

Noticing the snow is an unexpected gift of this frustrating and, for me, still unfinished apprenticeship. Something that decades of habit had made invisible to me has been brought into sharp focus; for skiing demands that I be utterly present to what is beneath my feet, second by second. It demands that I keep my knees flexed, not locked, so that I’ll be able to keep my own center of gravity balanced over that 1¾” wide slat as it slides. It demands that I engage in the most difficult—and the most common—form of trust there is: to stake everything on something that’s in motion, in conditions that change by the instant.

I finish my practice outings calmer, because for an hour my mind has been intensely fused with the surface of the planet and with my own muscles and nerves and bones. The leap I must make onto the ski, a leap that must be repeated over and over again, from side to side, is a leap of faith. I have to have faith in the world and in myself in order to launch out sideways with enough force to propel myself diagonally forward, laying my herring-bone tracks in the snow like a giant sea-bird, open wide into the future.

Published in Silent Sports, December 1998.