At least once a ski season there is a run that is so wonderful, so perfect, so smooth that I finish it up knowing that singular run was worth the entire price of the season pass. There are always contender runs, but I can recognize them as contenders. When I hit the one, I know it. There’s no mistaking it.
I got it on Wednesday. After a morning of pretty aggressive skiing with a friend who wanted to jump every cornice and hike to every nook and cranny at PCMR, we decided to take the high West Face traverse all the way around and ski the Puma Bowl/Pioneer Ridge side of Jupiter Peak. The snow was perfect, deep and light. My skiing worked just right with fluid turns that just floated down the face of the bowl. It’s hard to define the run-of-the-season, but you know it when you get it.
When I got home, I was looking at a magazine and came across the alarming headline that said, “Americans Report Risky Behavior.” What next? First the economy comes unhinged, and now we’re taking unnecessary risks. So just what sort of risky behavior are we engaging in? Well, according to Consumer Reports magazine, 73 percent of us “sometimes use cotton swabs to clean [our] inner ears.” A shocking 61 percent of us don’t have rubber mats in our showers or bathtubs. And 39 percent of us will sometimes eat the dough when baking cookies. Only 18 percent of us clean the dryer lint trap after every use. It’s a wonder American civilization hasn’t completely collapsed.
I sat there shaking my head over such high-risk, dangerous activity. Then I thought it over and had to admit to being guilty on all fronts, especially the cookie dough. I’ll eat a bowl of dough and call it dinner a couple of times a week. The article was silent on the number of Americans who spend their days jumping off cornices in avalanche-prone places like Scotts Bowl or the Daly Chutes. With the layer of ice on the road in front of my house, walking out to get the latest issue of Consumer Reports out of the mailbox seems to be a lot more dangerous than showering without a rubber mat.
I think the odds of my getting eaten by a mountain lion at my house are much greater than the risk of injury from an errant Q-tip. I’m more likely to be in an avalanche than to get a dose of the quick-step from eating raw cookie dough. If the folks at Consumer Reports think we are living close to the edge because we don’t clean the dryer lint trap after every load, we’ve got more serious problems than the economy. If life is feeling a little too settled, and you need to shake things up a bit, well, apparently you can go out on a limb and eat cookie dough. It’s not exactly “Fight Club,” but there’s no better way to get back in touch with your animal spirits than to muck out your ears with a Q-tip. In a shower without a rubber mat. While the dryer is running.
This whole notion of risk-taking was brought home, literally, over the holiday weekend. My sister and her family were out at the ranch, staying next door at the old family house. One of my nieces lives in student housing at the University. The apartments are all filled with destitute married students, and they run a kind of free-box/recycling center. She found a little baby quilt that she thought was very cute and was going to donate it to the cabin, where there is no shortage of babies. Her older sister recoiled in fear, as if confronted with a Q-tip. “I hope you washed that in hot water with lots of bleach.” Apparently she was afraid the quilt was infected with fleas, lice, small pox, or the Ebola virus. A recycled, but apparently freshly laundered, quilt was an unacceptable risk.
Over the course of the three-day weekend, I mentioned that I had been to a birthday party for a good friend who had just turned 70. To celebrate, he went out skiing with a bunch of us and kept us going from first chair to last. My niece thought that was some kind of superhuman effort, and unreasonably dangerous, poor judgment for a 70-year-old. I explained that it really wasn’t even unusual. The gang I usually ski with has an age span of about 25 years, and on a typical day, most of the runs we ski are double black diamonds.
She thought that was amazing, and dangerous, and pointed out that her parents, my sister and brother-in-law, are closing in on 70. The idea of them skiing at all was completely preposterous. She was right, of course. Neither of my sisters nor their husbands could make it down Claimjumper in a toboggan, let alone under their own steam on skis.
Then it hit me. My almost-70-year-old friends are a generation younger than my almost-70 siblings. My family members aren’t pathetic semi-invalids (and I’m not just saying this to avoid being alone at Thanksgiving). In Salt Lake, they are probably more active than average for people of their advanced years. They shovel their own driveways, walk all over their neighborhoods and hold their own against large packs of feral grandchildren. On their side of Parley’s Summit, they are active. On this side of the summit, they are the people the rest of us are supposed to check on after a big storm. Eating rare hamburger is actually a big risk factor in their lives (they have rubber bath mats in their houses).
Park City is a very different community. It’s perfectly OK for a 70-year-old to decline to hike Scotts Bowl, especially when the reason is that he wants to get two runs down Portuguese Gap and is running short of time. It’s easy to forget how different mountain people are from the flatlanders. But we are.
Now if I could just figure out how to get this Q-tip out of my ear
Tom Clyde served as Park City attorney in the 1980s and is the author of “More Dogs On Main Street.” He has been a columnist at The Park Record for more than 20 years.