Sunday, April 19, 1998

Closing day. Everybody on lift crew wore Hawaiian shirts over their jackets and the top shack had a boom box going with the Beach Boys on a loop. At two o'clock they did the pond skim at the bottom of the beginner hill and about forty people in costumes tried to ski across a pond of meltwater, and about thirty-eight of them went in. A guy dressed as a hot dog made it all the way. The crowd lost its mind. I have never seen anybody so proud.

I rode the last chair of the season with Julie. I didn't say anything the whole way up and neither did she. You could hear the bullwheel and some birds and the snow going soft under the trees. Then we skied down slow, like, slow, stopping every hundred feet, because once you get to the bottom it's summer.

Final count: 104 days on skis this season. My best ever.

Big news: Julie and I got a place. It's a one-bedroom over a garage in Frisco, $650 a month, and if you stand in the bathtub you can see Buffalo Mountain. Beaker helped us move my stuff, which took one trip in his Jeep, because all I own is skis, a futon, and a box of CDs. Beaker says the condo is going to be very quiet without me. Beaker has never been quiet a day in his life.

Guide school starts Monday, May 4. Summer page coming soon. It's gonna have a river on it.

Thursday, March 19, 1998

Spring break. The lines are twenty minutes long and half the people in them are college kids in jeans. Jeans! On skis! Nobody warns them. By two o'clock they're soaked and blue and they still want to know if we can "make it go faster."

Spring snow is my favorite snow nobody talks about. It's ice until ten, it's perfect corn from about eleven to one, and after two it's mashed potatoes and people start falling in the unload area in slow motion. If you know the schedule you can have the best morning of your life and be on the deck with a sandwich by noon.

Mom called to ask what I'm doing this summer. I told her I got hired on as a raft guide down in Buena Vista, on the Arkansas. There was a long pause and then she said, "Is that a career?" I said it's a summer, Mom. She said, "Jordan, you're going to be twenty-six." Which is true. On April 9th. Which I did not need to be reminded of in March.

Julie is going to work at a bike shop in Frisco this summer and I'll come up on my days off. It's about an hour and fifteen minutes over Fremont Pass if you don't get behind an RV. Which you will.

Saturday, February 21, 1998

Julie's day off and my day off lined up for the first time since New Year's, and it dumped the night before. Somebody up there reads this page.

We were at the bottom at 8:15. We skied the trees all morning, the steep glades where nobody goes because you have to traverse forever to get there. Face shots. Actual face shots, where the snow comes up over your head and you breathe it and you come out the bottom laughing like an idiot. Julie skis like a page out of an instruction book, quiet hands, everything even. I ski like somebody dropped a piano down a staircase. We get to the same place.

We ate lunch on the chairlift. (Don't tell my supervisor. He reads this. Hi, Mitch.)

Coming home on 9 after dark there were eleven elk standing in the road by the golf course like they were waiting for a bus. I drive that road like a grandma because of stuff like that. Julie says I'm the only lifty in the county who uses his turn signal. My dad taught me to drive in a Buick in the snow in an empty grocery store parking lot and some things stay with you.

Sunday, January 25, 1998

BRONCOS!!!!!!!!

Thirty-one to twenty-four over Green Bay. FINALLY. After all those Super Bowls they lost. I'm from Chicago so I'm not supposed to care, but I've lived here three years and you can't not. When Elway went flying through the air and got spun around like a helicopter the whole bar stood up at once and somebody's beer went all over my shoes and I didn't even care.

After it was over everybody went out on Main Street in Frisco and honked. There's maybe twelve cars on Main Street on a normal night. Tonight there were about three hundred. Somebody's dog was wearing a Broncos bandana and riding in the back of a truck with its ears flying. Julie wore an orange hat with a pom-pom the size of a grapefruit.

Other news: Julie left her toothbrush at our place and Beaker didn't throw it out. In this condo that's basically a marriage license.

Friday, January 9, 1998

Worst ten seconds of my winter so far.

I was working the bottom of the quad, loading, and a little kid, maybe six, sat down too far forward and started sliding out under the bar as the chair swung up. His dad was next to him and grabbing at his jacket. I hit the stop so hard I think I bruised my hand. The chair bounced and stopped about four feet up, the kid was hanging on with both arms, and the dad hauled him back onto the seat by his collar. Everybody was fine. The whole thing took maybe ten seconds.

Then the dad yelled at me for "letting that happen" all the way until the lift started again. Then at the end of the day the mom found me in the shack and thanked me and gave me a Snickers. So that's the job. Somebody yells at you, somebody gives you a Snickers.

My hands shook until lunch. The bottom shack has a space heater and a radio that gets exactly one station, and that station plays Shania Twain every forty minutes, and I sat in there with my hands between my knees listening to Shania until they stopped.

Friday, December 26, 1997

Worked Christmas. Everybody at a ski area works Christmas, that's the deal you make. I'm Jewish, so Christmas used to be Chinese food and a movie with my family, and this year it was saying "Merry Christmas!" to about three thousand people in brand-new matching outfits. I said it every time. I meant it about half the time. I think that's a good average.

Mom sent a box: Hanukkah gelt, two pairs of wool socks, and a card that said PLEASE WEAR A HELMET, underlined twice. (Mom, nobody wears a helmet. I know. I know.)

But the real news. Tuesday on my day off Julie and I drove down to Denver and saw Titanic. First real date and it's over three hours long. It's a bold move. The boat sinks. Julie cried at the old couple in the bed. I did not cry. I had something in my eye for the whole last hour.

We drove back up I-70 at midnight through the tunnel in a snow squall at 35 miles an hour with my hands at ten and two, and she fell asleep with her feet on my dashboard, and I didn't turn on the radio the whole way because I didn't want to wake her up.

Saturday, December 13, 1997

IT SNOWED.

A foot at the top, more in the trees. I got to the bottom terminal at 6:45 in the dark and wiped two hundred chairs with a broom while the snow was still coming down. Patrol went up first to do their thing, and then the line opened and there were people who had been standing there since seven, stomping their feet, hooting. There is nothing like the first chair on a powder morning. People are so happy they hug the lifty. I got hugged by a dentist.

For those who don't know the rule: no friends on a powder day. If your buddy is slow getting his boots on, you leave him. He would leave you. It's not mean. It's physics. The powder does not wait.

I got a twenty-minute break at eleven and took two runs and came back with snow in my collar and my goggles fogged and no feeling in my face and I was the happiest person in Colorado.

Also. There is a girl. Her name is Julie and she teaches the little kids in ski school, the ones in the helmets with the bunny ears, the ones who ski in a line behind the instructor like ducklings. She came through my line four times today with a train of five-year-olds, and the fourth time she looked at me and said, "You again," like I was the one riding the lift. Beaker says she's out of my league. Beaker is right. That doesn't mean I can't try out for the league.

Wednesday, December 3, 1997

OK. Hi. This is my home page.

My roommate Beaker (real name Ben, nobody has called him Ben since about 1994) bought a computer off a guy in Silverthorne for three hundred bucks and a snowboard, and he set me up with this so I would quit hogging his e-mail. He says everybody has a home page now. He says I should write about skiing because I never shut up about it anyway, so here I am, not shutting up about it in a new place.

Who I am: Jordan. 25. Grew up outside Chicago, where the biggest hill was the one next to the tollway. Came out to Colorado "for one season" after college in 1995 and that was that. My parents still say "when you come home" like it's a date on a calendar they can see and I can't.

I run a lift at the mountain. Some days I'm in the top shack, some days the bottom, some days I'm the guy with the shovel. The job is: be there at 7:30, wipe the snow off every chair, smile at people, slow it down for the little kids, stop it when somebody wipes out in the unload area, which is about every six minutes. The pay is not much plus a season pass, and on my days off I ski every run I watched other people ski all week.

Right now it's early season and we've got about three runs open, all man-made snow, a white ribbon of death with dirt on both sides. Everybody in town is praying. Beaker put a pair of old skis upside down on the porch as a sacrifice, which I'm pretty sure he made up.

Four of us live in a two-bedroom condo. Six if you count the couch and the closet. More soon. Think snow.