breakthroughonskis.com

more than two decades of ski writing, ski teaching, and ski publishing by Lito Tejada-Flores

Ski Writing

          A Dinnertable Conversation

          about Ski Technique

             for Bob & Karen Chamberlain

 

A ski life is full of great days, great turns, great ski trips to far-away mountains, and of course, great skiing friends. Bob Chamberlain is one of my oldest and best skiing friends.

Bob is a student of mathematics and philosophy, a photographer in the Cartier Bresson tradition who has always kept his camera trained toward mountains and mountain people, and a lifelong powder hound. We've spent a lot of time together, on the slopes and off. A few years ago, after a particularly stimulating dinner where the talk revolved, as always, around skiing, I went home and wrote this poem for Bob and his wife Karen.

 

 

The path, initially at least,

seems clear, the skier at first

 

skis dotted lines—turns,
traverses, schusses—& finally learns

 

something called technique, only then
can one discover snow & begin

 

to carve out real runs from this white
& yielding medium: there isn’t any right

 

or wrong in such descents
& for a while skiing makes sense.

 

But with enough time, with no
more fear & a calm mind, the snow

 

itself begins to change: more & more
ice resembles powder. As before

 

we return to abstractions & find
the mountain has its own lines,

 

planes, shapes & curves: go back
to skiing dotted lines—a black

 

on white pattern of movement & form,
pure form—a new world is born.

 

But we’re still not there, behind
even this intersection of mountain & mind

 

we sense something always simpler, skiing
not as metaphor but synonym of being.