POWDER

I wrote this after a pre-Covid (just) ski trip with my oldest lad, a friend of his and my longstanding skiing buddy. I’m posting it now partly because I’m looking at going again in the New Year and partly so the top post on my blog is not about a funeral. 

I recognise the noise I make as I rise up from the low chair of the gondola ski lift and ease myself gingerly into the icy air of the lift station. It’s the noise my father used to make at the end of his skiing career: part exhaled air, part a groan that starts at the knees and finishes, stifled by embarrassment, at the base of the throat. My friend, same age as me but marginally fitter, hears it.

“Don’t tell me,” he says, “Next year, you’re going to get fit.”

It’s an old joke, repeated more than once every time we have skied together for the last twenty years. The boy, my boy, just grins at the old guys, picks up his board and heads out into the billowing snow, joshing with his pal, a newly qualified skiing instructor just back from the powder fields of Japan..

We might not have made it out this morning; even the boy was on the edge of calling it off, sorely tempted by the opportunity to nurse his hangover and catch up on lost sleep before we head to the airport at lunchtime.

Yet, here we are.

Outside, everything is white: the ground, the sky, the lift station; after a few minutes, we too are white. Today, even the air is white, full of falling, dancing, swirling snow. We find our way to the top of the run by brail, feeling out a path from marker post to marker post, unsure what is piste and what is off-piste. Surprisingly, after the crowds of the previous, much sunnier, day, we are utterly alone, a sense that is deepened as the mechanical hum of the lift station is replaced by the ethereal almost-silence of the snow under our skis.

We head for the trees and the extra contrast they will bring to the scene, allowing us, or so we hope, to see the pillowy undulations in the untracked snow.

And then, after a few deep, cleansing breaths, we’re off!

Snow blows into our faces as we carve tracks between the trees, the wide, sweeping turns of his snowboard causing the boy to accelerate away from the tighter, snaking turns of our skis. I make three or four fast turns through an open glade, then some more careful ones as the trees become tightly packed, hearing the reassuring rush of my friend’s skis to my right, as he finds his own line.

It’s deep in the trees. Very deep. I have to un-weight my skis to bring them to the surface for each turn, then let them sink,  quickly finding the smooth, sinuous rhythm I’m looking for. I allow myself more speed, a mound of powder flying into my face as my skis hit it.

Veering left, back towards the piste, I find another open glade and claim it as my own, marking its surface deeply with a succession of strong, clear S’s, their shape as individual as a signature. This would be joyful to do alone; but to share this with my son and my oldest friend is absolute perfection.

When we eventually re-join the piste, we’re all “WooHoo!” at each other and fist bumping, the excitement lighting our eyes.

In that moment, we all know, without a shred of a doubt, that the next few hours of our lives are going to be extraordinary.

And so it proved.

(It feels a bit wrong to add this here without asking him. It’s from a sunnier day on the same trip, and it’s such a joyous thing that I wanted to share it)