The Lost Art of Ski Bumming

By Wayne Sheldrake

Testimony: I broke my first bone diving out of a crib. Apparently, I had a thing about freedom. I broke my first leg my third day on skis. I was eight. My father said that was it for me and skiing. But I got my mother on my side and helped the divorce along. She was hooked, too.

She told everyone she was married to her ski-instructor boyfriend so she could get free season passes. This made me a ski bum. I missed a lot of school. With the confidence of a parent defending the religious rights of her child to worship in the faith of her choice, she always provided me with the same signed excuse. It said: “Our family went skiing.”

I was learning.

It’s a religion. Whether you can’t ski for shit and you are just in love with a mountain top or you’re a speed shaman and velocity scrapes the barnacles from the hull of your existential angst—you have to believe to pull it off.

Like any religion, it can kill you if you aren’t careful, and if you are. Like any religion, it is full of miscalculations and sacrifice. I’ve had my share. I had a bad habit of hitting trees. The first snapped my leg like a wishbone and I was lucky not to lose my right foot. Friends strapped me to a board, slid me in the back of a 1978 Datsun B210 station wagon and took me home. The bones are still crooked.

The second tree, less than fifty feet from the first, comminuted my pelvis. “Comminuted” means broken into so many pieces it was impossible to count them. My ortho said, “You’ll never run again.” I said, “Who gives a shit about running?” I was bed-ridden for nine weeks. The tenth, I skied.

Miscalculations and sacrifices accumulated. A physical therapist commented that my X-ray packet was the second thickest she’d seen. I was insulted. “Who had the thickest?” I asked. She said, “A rodeo clown.” I said, “I could do that.”

I was a little confused when I passed my twenty-fifth birthday. I never thought I’d live beyond twenty four, but I was happy. On the mountain, time itself seemed to be erased. All I needed was a pair of skis. I didn’t stop for food. I didn’t stop for water. I didn’t use sunscreen. (Only pussies wore sunscreen.) It’s probably true that sometimes I didn’t care if I died—because I was so happy.

I wasn’t just a free-spirit. I was free. I knew how I wanted to live and if I died in the process, so be it.

My friends did crazy things, risky things, too—all the time, every day. Everyone had a story or two about how dumb they and how they almost screwed up and died, and what a rush it was. They shook their heads and talked about luck. They got off on it—on knowing they’d almost died.

The big time skiers at the big time resorts did these sorts of things for glory and the camera. That’s cool. My buddies and I did it in the down under of Colorado when no one else was watching—because it was glorious. We were tight, garage band tight. It was a really cool life.

Surviving terror can lead to a kind of joy that makes the traumas of “real life” seem less intimidating. Common emotional stresses become blasé. Your weird family and your personal problems don’t really seem that deep. Some people have to get close to death to really figure life out—really close, so that when they back off whatever it is they thought was so bad…it doesn’t look so bad anymore.

That’s exactly what freedom is: knowing how you want to live and knowing you could die in the process and forgiving yourself.

Like I said, it’s a religion—skiing and freedom both.

I tried going straight. I thought I could and should. I thought I could take that feeling that I always had on the mountain with me, that feeling that I’d lived my whole life with the sense that something particularly fine was about to happen—something that would make life simple and clear. My earliest memories on the slopes were filled with visions of this simplicity and clarity.

Even when life seemed tangled and dark, skiing—the visceral and spiritual elation of it—promised transcendence, or at least moments of it. Even in the long wait of summer, I knew that I was headed for what I was meant for. Good things were coming. As September passed, everything else I’d ever done seemed temporary, part-time—what I had to do until the expected came to pass. It’s a beautiful sensation, always getting what you want, and I always did because what I was waiting for always came—once a year, every year: winter.

But I got the real job anyway. Sometimes I took Friday’s off, to ski. Then I got a promotion. It meant no skiing on Fridays. I lasted until the first week of December, and quit. Everyone thought I was nuts. I wasn’t. I was remembering to defend my religious right to worship in the faith of my choice. In my religion we ski on Fridays.

See, in winter, my fantasies seem profoundly real. The unstable structures of the season collapse on my psyche, and the rest is a slide toward a dreamy neverland. In the face of the first snowflake, I see the face of God, and in those that follow lesser but infinite gods. Mundane existence comes to a freezing halt, and I feel convincingly that I’ve arrived in exactly the place at exactly the time I was meant to be.

Why not live this way? What’s the alternative? To live believing you are in the wrong place at the wrong time? That’s called Hell.

Not long ago I was skiing with a Holy Man. He had never tried “real life.” He’d skied on a gigantic mountain for decades. He showed me secret places, places I could only dream of skiing. He knew the name of dozens of chutes, and the names of every person who had ever skied them. It was a short list, a brotherhood. He was showing me how he’d become who he was.

After a climb to a prominent feature, he pointed a ski pole down a mind boggling rock crevasse and told me he’d waited seven years for exactly the right conditions and exactly the right day to do it, and hadn’t done it since. That’s devotion.

I looked around at the immensity that dwarfed us. I loved it—gullets and shafts, crowned ridges over deep cleaves, fluted drops into gutters that poured down abrupt walls. Above it all, snow-filled bowls. “Why wasn’t I here when I was 22?” I asked him, wistfully.

He said, “If you had been, you’d be a whole different person now.”

I knew what he meant. I’d only been there a day and already I was a different skier, and a different person, forever.

Are there still ski bums? Yes there are. The Holy Man I mentioned—he’s Larry Segal, 2005 Masters US Extreme Freeskiing Champion. Squaw gives him a ticket just to stick around. I could have as easily mentioned my pal Scott Lamb, 50, the senior member of the Wolf Creek Pro Patrol, or Phil Hall who retired from IBM in 1993 and has patrolled for Eldora since, or Vail’s Charlie Howard, one of the “Top 100 Instructors in America” last year. He used to ski New Zealand in the summer and hasn’t missed a season since the 70’s. The guy that taught me how to ski bum back in the 80’s still lives in a tepee. He calls me on his cell phone to tell me when it’s snowing in Idaho and I better get up there before the whole world finds out.

They’re everywhere. The chronics, guys—and gals—that just couldn’t get away from it, and never tried. I know it looks like they’re just ski bums and they just ski. That doesn’t mean lives lived this way aren’t real. In fact, they’re realer than most. By that I mean the way they live is just as valid when it’s hard as it is when it’s easy, and it’s never as easy as it looks.

Forgive them for being so far outside the norm. Forgive them for still being garage band tight and free. Forgive them for knowing exactly where they are meant to be and exactly when and for living far, far away from Hell.

See, it’s a religion. They’re devoted. They’re believers.

We should all be so cool.