a ski-bum mindset was at the heart of it for Lunn and the cadre of well-to-do, sport-mad Brits who became the unlikely promulgators of skiing’s recreational birth in the Alps. Unbelievably, in the preface to the 1949 second edition of The Mountains of Youth, Lunn is already mining the raw-to-this-day lament of ski-bumming’s purist soul as an innocence lost to the march of progress, infrastructure, and organization (which, ironically, he contributed significantly to), offering up his own prose as a glue to hold the tribe together:
Skiing, as I have tried to show . . . illustrates the Spenglerian distinction between culture and civilization. Every great cultural cycle begins when a nomad tribe settles down . . . It is the economy of the farm, the village and the small city which gives birth to great Art . . . It is from Nature, from Homer’s ‘life-giving’ earth that Art draws its inspiration, the inspiration which vanishes in the giant cities of a dying civilization. Ski-ing has passed through the Spenglerian cycle. It began as a culture in contact with Nature. In the Gothic phase of our sport we skied on snow moulded only by the natural agencies of sun and wind, frost and thaw. . . In those days, we skiers were as scattered as the primitive communities in which culture is born. Today we struggle in télépheriques and funiculars as crowded as the slums of our megalopolitan civilization, and the surface on which we ski is nearly as hard and quite as artificial as the city pavements which mask the kindly earth . . .
For the ski-runner the snow is no inert mantle on the hills . . . It is alive with a multiple personality. He learns to love the snow as a friend and to wrestle with it as an enemy. . . The genuine initiate of the mountain brotherhood has always been in the minority, and I doubt if the multiplication of Ski-hoists and Chair-lifts has either increased or decreased his numbers. Those for whom this book was written will always escape from the pistes. Mountaineering is not a substitute for religion but it has some of the characteristics of a devout cult. The true initiates recognize each other not only when they meet in the flesh, but also when they meet through the medium of the printed word. 4
Where Lunn beat around the bush with lofty prose, however, others simply lit it on fire. As the literary world’s best-known ski bum, Ernest Hemingway was the patron saint of the genre. In the mid-twenties, Hemingway spent two winters in Schruns, Austria, inculcating a serious ski addiction and subsequently popularizing the mindset in stories like “Cross-Country Snow”: “When have you got to go back to school?” Nick asked.
“Tonight,” George said. “I’ve got to get the ten-forty from Montreux.”
“I wish you could stick over and we could do the Dent du Lys tomorrow.”
“I got to get educated,” George said. “Gee, Mike, don’t you wish we could just bum together? Take our skis and go on the train to where there was good running and then go on and put up at pubs and go right across the Oberland and up the Valais and all through the Engadine and just take repair kit and extra sweaters and pyjamas in our rucksacks and not give a damn about school or anything.”
“Yes, and go through the Schwarzwald that way. Gee, the swell places.”5
The swell places indeed. Oh, and is it coincidence that Papa Hemingway eventually moved to Sun Valley to finish out his days? (Not that most ski bums end up blowing their brains out; mountain living is generally mind-blowing enough.) Still, Hemingway had it right: ski bumming was at its best and most raw when you were on the move in a foreign land; this was adventure by its very nature.
IN CHILE I’d landed in an outlaw life where everybody looked out for themselves and took nothing for granted. Things there were generally weird enough to debase anyone, but life took a decidedly stranger turn when I came to work one day to find that the shop owner had been replaced by his ex-partner, whom I’d been told was dead. In reality he’d been doing time in the Caribbean—having taken the fall for a larger group in some drug-smuggling scam and losing a wife and young child in the process—and now he was back to claim his share of the business that had been stolen from him. He was a warm, charming man whom I instantly liked more than his predecessor, and with good reason: the latter eventually sent a gang of coked-up, gun-toting fruitcakes and a five-ton truck to reclaim the boutique by cleaning it out in broad daylight.
“What can we do?” I’d asked the head gunman, hoping that if I helped him he’d leave the staff alone.
“Have a drink,” he’d laughed, handing me a bottle of whiskey and turning back to supervising his thugs.
Just then the new boss came in and was knocked unconsciousness with a metal pipe. This was so surreal that it was like watching a movie instead of a real act of almost murderous violence. There was a lot of blood and we were more than scared. It was then that my last ounce of innocence soaked into my polypropylene longjohns, along with the contents of my bladder.
So the taxi ride up the mountain with the Israelis was the denouement to this ski-bumming chapter of my life. I’d gone down to Santiago to see the boss in the hospital. He lay there with stitches in his head and a lost-looking grin on his face. He’d probably be OK, they said, but I knew I would never be the same.
My reflection was interrupted when we rounded a hairpin too closely and swerved to avoid an oncoming truck. With the driver braking hard, the vehicle slid through the dirt toward the unprotected embankment, hundreds of feet above the river below. With a loud thunk, we stopped with our front wheels overhanging the edge like some Looney Tunes Coyote–Road Runner cartoon. The Israelis clutched each other and mumbled prayers as the driver and I clambered into the backseat with them to stabilize the car. We all exited safely through the rear doors. The driver, to his credit extremely apologetic, not-so-much to his credit pledged that he would charge us only the half fare. Anyone else would have kicked him in the junk, but I paid without hesitation, perhaps in an unconscious effort to buy my way back to normalcy. I left them all standing on the road and walked the four steep hours back to the ski area. Mortality of every description was closing in.
Later, I sat on my bed wondering what to do, a mountain of gear and clothing adding to the mental claustrophobia. With the present snowpack, there was at least two months of good skiing left, and I’d come a long, lonesome way for it. Did I really need to leave? Was my drive to ski strong enough to conquer my paranoia? Ski-bumming of the Warren Miller car-camping style was one thing, but this was something apart. I looked out the window at golden canyons colored by the uneasy partnership of descending sun and rising smog. I picked up a pair of socks and tossed them into an open bag. Two days later I left the country.
Like a summer romance, Chile has never left me, and I recall the craziness with a fondness borne of an experience that can never be adequately described. Though much of the wildness of those days is long gone, some memories will never be dislodged: the vastness of the Andes, their wide-open slopes, legendary snowfalls, and cobalt skies; and, always, circling high overhead, the condors, reminding one that life in the mountains is a fragile proposition. And a strangely welcome struggle.
ONE OF THE hallmarks of snowhounds is how shared passion and communal endeavor can, under the right conditions, so easily be bent to the will of the id. Flash-forward twenty-eight years. These days I live in Whistler, where I make my living writing. A certain number of hours per day will deliver the required number of words by a specific deadline. I usually write from 6:30 to 10:00 a.m. in a local coffee shop. But inevitably, from mid-November through the end of April, if it has snowed any measurable amount the previous night and the 6 a.m. snow report looks promising, I will be in the Creekside Gondola line-up by 7:30 a.m. for an 8:15 opening. Rarely am I the first. A similar affliction apparently interferes with many other lives: however employed (or not), whatever façade of respectability is being maintained (or not), we are, one and all, ski bums in heart, soul, and mind.
Many in the morning line-up work nights specifically so they have mornings free in case it snows. There’s helmet-cam George and pro-snowboarder Dave and his brother.
