I’m starting to write this column just before 3 p.m. on December 19, 2025. Overnight, the wind started blowing hard, waking me several times. And the temperature rose through the 40s; I kicked the heavier blankets off the bed. By morning the foot of snow in the backyard had been erased. I guess it had to happen. Nothing to be gained bemoaning it. In the little time I’ve spent writing this much, the temperature is back into the 30s and the rain has changed to snow.
It could have been worst. After the thaw – the first after a remarkably cold and snowy early December – enough snow fell Christmas Eve for a white Christmas. Enough to reopen ski trails – alpine and Nordic. Call us lucky.
In the three weeks since, we’ve had a minor ice storm, another surge of arctic cold, and a little more snow. As I continue writing – now on Friday, January 9, 2026 – a light rain is falling. Of course, cold will blow in from the northwest, laying down a thin veneer of snow on top of the ice that will form as that arctic arrives.
All of it begging a question existential in its import: why ski?
Probably we all spend too much time spent judging – everything. Other people. Circumstances, situations. Experiences. Oneself. As if without judgment – this is good; that is bad – the way is uncertain, risky, and ambiguous. And too much time worried about the judgments landing on us. We live in a thicket, blind to a way out.
One pretty good answer to the “why ski” question is: to get “out of my head.” Sometimes skiing is deliverance. Other times the catechism of good technique drags me back in, to the courtroom of consciousness; the haunted house of experience. I tell myself – like a TV prosecutor berating a hapless defendant – you’ll never be as good as you could be because you don’t work hard enough.
No wonder, what with the post-Christmas ice storm and the cold snap that followed, I found other things to do. Just the thought of trying to guide my skis across a frozen field was enough to send me in search of other ways to spend my time. Not that these other things provided more reliable means for escaping the din in my skull, but I was pretty sure they would at least be easier to pull off. What I’m realizing is that what’s best about skiing is also what’s best about these other things. They are all trapdoors through which I fall into myself. The whole crazy mess of it. That falling is the best – if not the only real – reason to do anything at all.
I first heard the expression “slow is smooth and smooth is fast” from someone who spent time in the restaurant business. It’s a great turn of phrase – until I hear in it the echo of the means-end paradigm. In Nordic skiing, smooth is fast. And we assume that fast is the goal. But it doesn’t have to be. Smooth is smooth. Which is an end in itself. When things are going well, when my actions feel smooth, like water flowing over rocks in a stream, it just feels good. I don’t know why speed is part of the arithmetic of smooth. As if the faster I go the sooner I can get onto the next thing. A mindset the feeds its own perversions.
Smooth, I feel. Unhurried. The activity – be it reaching for a mug on the shelf in the kitchen where we keep them or slide-stepping my skis around the final downhill turn where trails 10 and 6 intersect – swallows me whole. Instead of turning to the carafe of coffee before I’ve looped my finger through the mug handle or worrying about the dictates of proper form as I slide my skis into a half-stop-half-turn – everything including me is contained by the unfolding moment. I witness my finger slip between handle and cup, and clasp; I sense – eyes, ears, feet, ankles, knees and hips – my skis skidding through the turn. Clean as a whistle.
It’s those moments that answer “why ski?”
All this is of course easier said than done. Finding the same kind of focus that takes control when it’s going well is as elusive in everyday, moment-to-moment activity as on skis. And pursuing it takes a delicate touch. But it’s probably important to understand that that experience is available in everything I do. So,while there’s a nagging voice in my head telling me I should be out on my skis even when I can see the ice-glare on my driveway I’m not as slavishly obedient as I once was.
The best of skiing has always been some hard-to-name amalgam of thrill...patience...movement...stasis...control...surrender... Chasing and occasionally catching hold of something at once obvious and unfamiliar. And this is not dependent on any specific activity. It’s probably dependent on a kind of disposition. Which means it’s in me not in the activity.
Walking can be just as good as skiing, especially after the kind of thaw-freeze events recently. There’s so much to see – even the pattern of tire treads in the mud can reveal the impossibly rich tapestry of human activity and significance that caused them. Pay attention to what I’m doing and the simple act of walking delivers me to the same kind of state of...grace, appreciation...as a good ski.
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