The family took a trip to the mountains this weekend. Skiing is an impossible sport. From where we start, the drive north takes four and a half hours, if you don't hit bad weather or traffic, but you always do. This time, on our way up black ice slowed the interstate to thirty, allowing for a leisurely view of the spinouts. Then there's the equipment. Once, when the kids were young, my wife and I started listing items that needed to make it to the slopes; we stopped counting when we reached on one hundred. The expense, the risk - who needs any of it?
Yesterday, on the ride home in the van, someone asked, "What do we like about skiing?" The question was friendly, and it elicited a serious first answer, concerning the beauty of the surroundings. Soon we were on to the usual jockeying based on roles, parent and child, brother and sister. Consensus was that the last day had been the least thrilling, with scratchy surfaces, blown snow on ice.
Annoyingly for all present, I was euphoric. Monday had been magnificent! Because of the tough conditions, groomers had smoothed out some difficult trails, and although the mountain is one we've visited often, I had been able to take runs I'd never tried before.
I am - I have confessed as much - a fanatical mediocre skier. Surely, an attraction of the sport for the kids must be that by age six you're better at it than your father is. Someone asked how I'd managed to make it down a particular double black diamond slope. The immediate answer, volunteered by our resident wiseacre, was "stubbornness."
That quip strikes me as about right. I have some sense of "why I ski," and here, too, the list could be a long one. One reason must be the incongruity of the act. I don't belong on the mountain. I'm urban, cerebral, unathletic, uncoordinated, not at all handy, and reasonably comfort-loving. Carved turns and I make a beautiful-woman-with-Woody-Allen mismatch. But don't we aspire to the very grace we lack?
Stubbornness explains a lot. I'm damned if I won't make my way down, and not just sideslipping either. I'd prefer to answer "why ski" in terms of exhilaration or the conquest of fear, but my persisting with the sport bespeaks a certain obstinacy; when I succeed (in limited fashion) that same trait must count among the explanations.
It's not that I like to think of myself as rigid. Much of what I value - creativity, empathy, problem-solving - depends on flexibility or multiplicity of viewpoint. But cussedness can be a virtue, or so I remind myself when dealing with patients who show that side first. Stubbornness gets you stuck in tight places, yes, but it gets you out of some, too.
