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Downhill Racer

By Katharine Niles

I ditched the lesson. Instead of putting Chris in kiddie ski day care, I decided to teach and ski with him myself. This was downhill skiing, not Nordic, and Chris had skied downhill precisely twice before. Ergo, this was not going to be any heady exploration of moguls on black diamond slopes. No, this would be up and down, up and down, Lift 7, "The Graduate," for repeated mastery of a short run with a few tricks up its sleeve.

I first assumed the position that once blew out my friend Ayla's ACL when she was helping her daughter learn to ski. I approximated a wide snowplow and accommodated my son in between that snowplow. I told him to bend his knees, relax, not rely on me too much, and keep his skis parallel to mine. As we began to turn, I explained how skiing was just a matter of shifting your weight from one leg to the other. "Right, le-eft," I said, effecting one turn. "Left, ri-ight," I said, effecting the other.

"Oh!" he said, and after two or three runs, to my astonishment he let go of me and bombed competently the rest of the way down the hill.

This from Mr. Caution!

"Chris!" I said, catching up to him with my only speedy, parallel skiing of the day. "That was great!"

And then the words every parent wants to hear, be it about skiing, homework, doing drugs, or driving safely, came out of his mouth. "Well," he said, "you just have to think about it." I scraped my jaw off the snow and, smiling, proceeded with him to the lift.

Downhill skiing is environmentally heinous, rife with Texans with Big Hair and poor skiing skills, and possesses a party-hardy attitude with all the emotional maturity of a high school sophomore. I love it. I love it in spite of those things; I love it because it is, besides being the most fun you can have on a snowy mountain, incredibly Zen. I have two mantras as I approach a slope: Meet the Mountain, and Trust Your Turn. Chanting these, I enter into a conversation and meditation with a living, breathing, undulating entity. It is a spiritual experience, seriously, and there are few things better. And because I have largely taught myself (with a little help from my friends), I found I was a natural teacher for my son.

We fell apart a little after lunch, however. We tried Lift 4, "Twilight," which indeed took us farther up than I had anticipated. We floated above the kid's ski school and into the clouds. Chris, scared and frustrated, wept. I snapped at him. But we got down, double snowplow style, and promptly went back to trusty Lift 7.

This time, Chris skied almost entirely without my help. The top part was steep and went under a bridge. Chris skied straight down and fell only when he tried to stop as the slope leveled out. The next portion involved a hairpin turn. Before I could reconsider the wisdom of letting a boy who knew the principles of turning without much control over them go by himself, he took off, missed the turn, and got hung up like a tuna in red netting. When I saw he wasn't scared, I started laughing. It could have been unfunny, of course. Beyond the red netting were a cliff and a construction site below it. Chris made a comment about the unfunny possibilities. But he wasn't scared. He got back on and did the rest of the hill just fine.

So it is, I thought, skiing down after him, that the mountain and my son have begun their relationship. It is my hope, of course, that this relationship will be life-long. It is my hope that he learns that there are many conversations to be had with many creatures, not just human ones, and that skiing is a great teacher of this. I think he gets it already. I think he gets it, because he exuded great, smoky curls of delight all the way home, and what better indication of a happy relationship can you have?

Katharine Niles, a teacher at Fort Lewis College, lives in Durango with a dog, husband and son, Chris. In 2005, her novel, The Basket Maker (Grey Core Press), won the Editor's Choice Prize: Fiction at the Book of the Year Awards at BookExpo America, the largest book publishing event in the United States.