What pushes me to ski (Part 1)

I could say these forces are gravity and pushing on my poles, but that would be far from the entire truth. Many people love and practice skiing for many of the same reasons I had tried to list some 15 years ago. These were generalities and didn’t just apply to me in particular. 

What does however, are a deep yearning for practicing the sport that began when I got a taste of it in 1957, but wasn’t able to do it as much as I wanted to, mostly because my parents didn’t see the need for me, nor could afford its cost. 

That situation lingered through my teenage years as my brother and I tried to get lift rides for free when we knew the liftie and he was nice enough to let us go. This was in the days of single-ride tickets and punch cards! So, basic deprivation became a huge fuel for my ski hunger. It’s only when I got a job as a liftie during my high school years that I got free skiing outside the school vacation periods I was working. 

What a game-changer that was! I then began to learn how to ski by watching and reproducing what better skiers than me could do on the slopes, incorporating with my homegrown technique a plethora of “bad habits” as we called the unorthodox style back then. 

This is about that time that my hunger for skiing turned into a lifelong obsession. I was training slalom in a steep slope below my parents’ house side-stepping to pack the snow and to climb back the hill, “inventing” a downhill course I called “speed ribbon” into the tree than opened to a wider meadow, a hamlet 2km away where I carried my gear on my shoulder back and forth from home… 

In summer, I was also imagining a place where I could ski year round to satisfy my need, as places like Tignes in France were opening year-round ski facilities and this seemed to be part of skiing’s future. 

 

When I got out of technical school, I immediately looked for a job and found one at an electric clock factory in the Jura Mountains, moving away from my home skiing environment. 

To be continued...