Excerpt from a memoir in progress

“My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing.”
Aldous Huxley

…happiness is priceless. It is also a compass and an elixir, and there is always a price for great happiness. The capacity to pay in the coin of the kingdom, whether the realm is material, spiritual, mental, emotional, physical, social, political or psychical, is the difference between bankruptcy and wealth, joy and disaster. Being true to your self is always authentically hard and often risky. Not being true to your self is always soft and usually falsely secure.
The joy of skiing may not be available to every skier, just as the joy of living is not seen or experienced by every human. The path to joy, all-encompassing, fully committed, no retreat, no prisoners taken and no excuses offered joy, goes through passion, and not everybody is comfortable with and willing to trust their passions. Those who do trust them include the world’s musicians, vagabonds, woodcarvers, long distance runners, poets, Isadora Duncans and John Muirs. Skiing is many things to many skiers (and something else to non-skiers whose lives are touched by it)‑‑‑athletic endeavor, outdoor activity, exercise, social forum, escape, personal statement, lifestyle, search, adventure, cheap thrill, relaxation and vacation‑‑‑and it is all or some of these at different times to every skier, including me. But skiing was and is primarily a joy that took me through passion and taught me to be comfortable with myself and the world, at least during those hours on skis. In due time that information seeped into the rest of life.
Skiing saved my life.
The elements of joy on a pair of skis can perhaps be described, but joy is just a three letter word if it isn’t inscribed in the mind and heart and soul by personal experience. Clean air, often cold, always refreshing. Wind. Sunshine. Falling snow. Sometimes rain. Fog. Clouds. Pine and Fir Trees and some Aspens in the Tahoe Basin, sometimes white and drooping with the weight of snow and then clean and green and stark against the snow covered mountains down which we skied. Mountains, especially the mountains. There is nothing like a mountain unless it is a snow covered mountain, or a mountain range, or a snow mantled mountain range. Snow is miraculous, an exquisitely beautiful substance which comes in many forms continually in the process of transforming into another variety of snow and eventually returning to soft water making its hard way back to the sea. Snow can be powder, corn, ice, wind pounded, glop, slop, hardpack, crust, sastrugi, Sierra cement, blue ice, surface crystals two inches high of such intricacy and fragility and delicate beauty and geometric form that nature herself stops to pay homage. Snow can run in melting rivulets upon itself. Snow can fall from the sky with such gentleness that one could be buried and die within its cover without ever hearing a sound. An avalanche of snow can sound like a bomb or the whisper of two sheets of silk moving against each other. Snow can land on the ground or on previously fallen snow with the weight of a feather, and it can be driven by wind to stick on the side of vertical cliffs with the fury of a needle in the eye. Snow, among the most beautiful of nature’s range of materials, gives life and saves lives and it can kill.
Anything that gives life and is the home of joy can kill and will.
Snow and mountains comprise the ground of skiing. The action within that lovely arena formed and saved my life, developed my character with all its strengths and weaknesses, and sustained, illuminated and made conscious to me my soul. The way I think and write and relate to people and to the world has been informed and guided by skiing.
First was the clean clear thrill and focus of the simple act of skiing, followed closely by the slightly less clean but even sharper focused and more complicated thrill of competition. For many years competitive skiing was the most important aspect of my life. That which was first became second and skiing became buried beneath the competition. The best of both always comes from the heart and always will and I became a ski racer. But first was the skiing, the art of the turn, on hard pack, on ice, in powder and in storm, the grace and beauty of holding the line of an arc of your choosing by the power and skill of your control, with a freedom and reason and esprit that is all your own and feeds the soul with unrefined nutrition. There is great satisfaction, accomplishment and personal growth, as well as other legitimate reasons to immerse oneself in competitive endeavors, but the joy of skiing is available to every skier while the joy of competition by its very nature is non-organic, non-democratic and comparative (winning and losing, winners and losers, success and failure according to man-made standards) and is more thrill than bliss, more war than peace, more ego than heart, more trial than joy.
But first and always is the skiing, along the line of happiness in an arc of your choosing.