What's Next, Ridley?

One day, my uncle and I were perched at the top of “Number 9 Express,” at the top of the Supreme Chair at Alta and looking across at clouds streaming past Mount Superior.  “Skiing is more like flying than flying is,” he said.  “I’ve always preferred skiing.”  Then he disappeared, sailing smoothly down the steep track between the trees.

I knew exactly what he meant.  Actual flight isn’t what it is in dreams until you’ve actually done it.  And then, of course, it changes.  I still have dreams in which I’m managing difficult landings.  But my uncle’s comments were a surprise, nevertheless.  He flew for much of his life and he loved it.

When I think about flight and what captures the experience at its deepest and most beautiful, two books come to mind Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Wind Sand and Stars and Charles Lindbergh’s We.  Both are classics, easily found and often read, at least by those with an interest in aviation.  They capture, the novelty, brash-heroism and beauty of the endeavor when it was new.  Saint-Exupéry remains a particularly powerful example of how the exploration of a new physical and scientific frontier can also summon the intellectual best of those who pursued it.  Flight, particularly in a single engine plane,  makes Newtonian physics visceral and philosophical in a way it isn’t ordinarily.

Here’s a simple example.  One day I was flying with my instructor over Antelope Island, practicing emergency landings.  (We weren’t actually landing, just going through the procedures, choosing a landing site and then flying low over it to see how good the selection was.)  We were in one of the school’s  3 Piper Tomahawks, a low-wing trainer with a nice big tail.  My instructor mentioned that they’d originally had 4.  The fourth had been flown in inappropriate conditions as a storm was coming in.  The pilot attempted to return to the airport but the storm’s wind velocity exceeded the maximum airspeed of the Tomahawk.  The little airplane was blown gently backwards into the side of a hill on the island.  The injured pilot survived but a spent the greater part of a miserable night with the wreckage.

When I think of the best books about space flight, a forgotten and neglected classic comes to mind:  A House in Space by Henry S. F. Cooper Jr.  Cooper’s book is a history of Skylab , a set of manned missions in the cesura between the Gemini and Apollo programs utilizing the Gemini capsule technology and a space station improvised from an Atlas booster second stage.  Cooper was one of the first to look at all aspects of space flight and recognized the importance of simulation and engineering.  His wide purview enabled him to identify questions and issues which are at the technological and physical heart of the pursuit of manned flight.  It’s surprisingly pertinent today when robotics is offering a viable alternative for many missions.  And Cooper, through the words of the astronauts, like Saint-Exupéry and Lindbergh before him, gives you a sense of what it’s really like to fly in space, from the explosive creaks and pops of an orbiting spacecraft as it sails through a 400 degree temperature change with every sunrise and sunset every twenty minutes to the relentless astronaut preparation to make flying and dealing with the most knotty and obscure emergencies natural.  It’s a neglected classic worthy of rediscovery.

I think my favorite line in “The Right Stuff” belongs to Sam Shepard portraying Chuck Yeager.  “What’s next, Ridley?”  (Comet Lovejoy by Dr. Robert Jensen).

Go in Beauty

What is chess, do you think?   Those who play for fun, or not at all, dismiss it as a game.  The ones who devote their lives to it, for the most part, insist it is a science. It's neither. Bobby Fischer got underneath it like no one before him and found at its center... art.  (“Searching for Bobby Fischer” by Steven Zaillian and Fred Waitzkin)

When I was thirteen, I was afraid of heights, due in part to a fall I took when I was eight which broke my right arm.  That December my mother died suddenly from a deep vein thrombosis.  The following January, my maternal uncle, William, decided to attempt to teach me to ski.  “Attempt” is the operative word: equipment then was still primitive.  My boots laced and provided minimum support, my skis were simple ash boards with metal edges.  Standing up on them, making them go in the direction I wanted them to go, even on a groomed slope, required significant effort and a technique which was contrary to a natural sense of safety.  To this day I think the reason I was first able to get on a chair lift which would swing me thirty feet into the air for the first time was that at that point in my life I didn’t care that much if I lived or died.

As I was fighting my way down my second and final run of that day, something magical happened:  I made two tentative, trembling snowplow turns in a row.  Suddenly, I was in control, suddenly I was free.  I could ski anywhere.  My adrenalin surged with the exhilaration of the realization.  I looked back up the hill at my uncle, a comfortable, inscrutable black shape watching over me from the top of the gentle slope.  I understood what skiing was, why people went through so much difficulty and discomfort to do it.

And I was wrong. 

And it wasn’t that I couldn’t go everywhere, which was true:   it was something else.

There had been a lot of snow early in the year.  In those days powder snow at the sides of the groomed slopes would remain un-skied for days or weeks and accumulate the depth of multiple storms.  A couple of weekends later when I could negotiate the slopes beneath the Albion chairlift at Alta in fifteen minutes instead of an hour or more, I stopped at the place where I’d made my first successful turns and looked back up the hill.  My uncle was no longer behind me.  Instead, he was perched at the edge of a steep ridge at the side of the slope.  Now it has a name, “Vail Ridge.”  Then it was nameless.  It was simply the craggy ridge that no one took the trouble to ski:  it was steep but too short.

Suddenly, my uncle “dropped in” to a short passage between two crags and in two fast, sweeping turns effortlessly descended through deep powder what to my mind was nearly a cliff.   The sight literally stole my breath.  My other uncle, his taciturn brother not given to hyperbole, used to say William skied the way a hawk flew and he was right.  It was the first time I glimpsed the deepest reason for skiing:  art.

These days, the aesthetics of sport receives short shrift, if it’s mentioned at all.  Yet, I find it in every sport with sufficient study.  One of the things I find particularly appealing about both skiing and fencing, is that anyone, at any level, can aspire to and accomplish an aesthetic moment, whether it’s a perfectly timed deceptive touch with an epee or a sailing turn in the fall line.  And with skiing sometimes the pursuit of art is the edge that enables you to find the courage or skill to ski something you wouldn’t otherwise.

These days, I rarely ski Vail Ridge, it’s too easy and not worth the trouble.  But when I do, I remember that day.  And then I also remember skiing West Rustler, a more formidable slope, with William when he was in his eighties, still pursuing the art.

Art is often dramatic and revelatory.  A particular run down Nina’s Curve, another slope at Alta, comes to mind.  I was skiing with a young man and his father on an icy, windy day.  Nina’s Curve has a particularly nice structure: its steepest stretch is also its narrowest.  It was the young man’s first time down and he was far from sure he could do it though both his father and I both knew he had the requisite skill.  He made one careful turn above the narrow space and came to face his father.

“Tyler you can do this,” his father said honestly, lovingly to his son.  And in that moment, I perceived a magic, essential quantum of confidence and strength pass from father to son.  His father went first and his son took a breath and followed.  I didn’t know if he would or not. It was a modest moment of drama revealing the characters of both.  Sometimes the best skiing is composed of small moments; interestingly it is how Hemingway’s story “Cross Country Snow” works.

I always watch Mark Obenhaus’s documentary “Steep,” about the history of Big Mountain and Extreme Skiing this time of year when I’m waiting for the snow to arrive.  A favorite moment is Bill Briggs description of his first, solo descent of the Grand Teton on skis, the only evidence of which was his solo tracks below the summit visible the next day.  If that wasn’t art, I don’t know what is.  Another moment is Ingrid Backstrom’s decent of a nearly vertical face of one of the mountains above Bella Coola, B.C.  The first skier down, Hugo Harrison, “who never falls,” to use Ingrid’s words, does so and then tumbles and cartwheels and tumbles for what seems like forever.  Perhaps the mountain is un-skiable. Nevertheless, the filming helicopter gives Ingrid the wiggle and she drops in.  And in a few long and amazingly fast and beautiful turns she makes a perfect descent.  I’m reminded of so many things, including my uncle’s descent of Vail Ridge long ago.  Quite simply, it’s art.  You can watch it here: Ingrid Backstrom in Steep

According to William Eastlake, the Navajo say “Go in Beauty.”