Gone Skiing

Sierra ski racing in the mining days. New England Ski Museum.

“Hans Castorp found that one quickly gets readiness in an art where strong desire

comes in play. He was not ambitious for expert skill, and all he needed he

acquired in a few days, without undue strain on wind or muscles. He learned to

keep his feet tidily together and make parallel tracks; to avail himself of his stick

in getting off; he learned how to take obstacles, such as small elevations of the

ground, with a slight soaring motion, arms outspread, rising and falling like a

ship on a billowy sea; learned, after the twentieth trial, not to trip and roll over

when he braked at full speed, with the right Telemark turn, one leg forward, the

other bent at the knee. Gradually he widened the sphere of his activities.

.     .     . 

He rejoiced in his new resource, before which all difficulties and hindrances to

movement fell away. It gave him the utter solitude he craved, and filled his soul

with impressions of the wild inhumanity, the precariousness of this region into

which he had ventured. On his one hand he might have a precipitous, pine-clad

declivity, falling away into the mists; on the other sheer rock might rise, with

masses of snow, in monstrous, Cyclopean forms, all domed and vaulted, swelling

or cavernous. He would halt for a moment, to quench the sound of his own

movement, when the silence about him would be absolute, complete, a wadded

soundlessness, as it were, elsewhere all unknown. There was no stir of air, not so

much as might even lightly sway the treeboughs; there was not a rustle, nor the

voice of a bird. It was primeval silence to which Hans Castorp hearkened, when

he leaned thus on his staff, his head on one side, his mouth open. And always it

snowed, snowed without pause, endlessly, gently, soundlessly falling.

~ Thomas Mann, excerpt from Chapter 6, The Magic Mountain, 1929

Such is the call of the wintry mountain. And so it happens this week is winter break--that time of year the Suburban Soliloquist unplugs and leaves the mortal flatlands for the higher, hiemal call of the Great White North, where she revels on the gleaming slopes of powdery snow, and the surrounding territory's majestic views. (With skis much shorter and lighter than the twelve foot wooden slats of the nineteenth century.)

At last.

Next week, after she's halted to hearken the echo of her own skis scraping the snow-wrapped summits and long, winding trails of the White Mountains, she'll  be back to the muddy, mortal flatlands and the hypertextual webs of ether. 

Aren't you all looking forward to this year's extra day of winter? Perhaps it might even bring snow to suburban streets, parks and fields. One can only wish...