February 27th, 2006
Skiing
Every muscle in my body is sore. Fortunately, this is a very good thing. It has been a very, very, very long time since I exercised to the point of really being able to feel it. Twenty-five miles on my bicycle around town on a Saturday just doesn’t do it anymore. But now, I am tiptoeing around like I’m barefoot in a room full of mousetraps with a spine board on my back.
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I went skiing in Fukushima over the weekend, travelling the Tohoku Kosokudoro (Northeast Highway) past Nasu, much like I did when hitchhiking to Sendai last summer, only this time in the lovely accommodations of a modestly sized tour bus. Unfortunately, this time there was no complimentary showing of Whiteout.
I’ve been skiing only four times in my life, though recently I’ve been doing so more frequently with staggering acceleration. The first time I went I was being hosted at the University of Utah, having been accepted as a Ph.D. candidate to their School of Computing. It was actually a really nice program, and I was entertained in a manner almost on the level of a dot-com bubble Microsoft intern. We had about three banquets, two parties, a drinking night, and to top it all off went to Alta just outside of Salt Lake. I tried my best, but had a problem with regulating my speed. It was late March, and consequently the snow had thawed and refrozen into a very hard layer of ice. I left the slopes up with a concussion because I couldn’t for the life of me control my high speed falls. At the mixer later that evening, I ended up spending most of the affair in between the tiger silk sheets of my host’s bed, just wishing everyone downstairs would party a little quieter. My head throbbed with wincing agony for three days.
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One would think that this would discourage me from going again. Yet, for better or worse, I’m not one to learn from pain, or more positively, have it discourage me from doing something twice. In the winter of 2004 Mikiko and I joined a tour group in Nagano with one of my old friends from ATR. Unfortunately, the three years of not skiing had hardly improved my skills and resulted in one more concussion, with me missing yet another party to the dismay of my hosts. Perhaps I am doomed.
However, I’ve now been skiing twice this year and surprisingly had no major injuries, which I believe is on account of rain. Both times started out rather dry and uninspiring, with lots of people to wait behind at the lifts and to carefully pick my way around on descent of the bunny slopes. Luckily though, Sunday was an absolutely horrid day weather-wise as it was foggy and raining with steadily strengthening winds for the better part of the day. What this did was drive all the “casual skiers” off the slopes and into the cafes and hot springs to beat an early path back to Tokyo. This left the dedicated (read: crazy) to go about skiing harder and harder, taking on slopes of increasing difficulty, making upwards of six runs an hour. The rain poured and I mummified my cell phone with toilet paper to keep it mostly dry in my drenched inner coat pocket. The more the crowd thinned the bolder I got, tackling steeper slopes with quicker turns until there were precisely five people left on the mountain.
So alone I set to zigzagging down the intermediate courses with flair, my legs compressing and unloading like the suspension of a finely-tuned car, lowering my stance to a virtual crouch, dragging the tip of my uphill pole along the ground for magnificent sweeps to curb my speed. Resonance echoed through bone as my gloved fingers raked the icy ground. Though I occasionally found trouble keeping my weak leg in line on turns to the left, the converse was rife with the satisfaction of simple physical purity, much like a perfect golf swing. I fed off of the frothing verve that erupted from the harmony with earth; a bond between the snow, my heart, and the universe. It pleases me to no end to have my temerity repaid several times over with such visceral, tangible rewards. The beast that lies within hungers to exert itself with such abandon, and the thinking man which holds its leash is ravenous to sing about it.
[All in all, I ended up skiing for about seven hours on Sunday, right up until they turned lift off at the resort. I was the last one down Andromeda (Why are so many slopes named after constellations?), and the nighter four color lights of blue, purple, green, and yellow cast fanciful shadows across the thinning powder. I must have started exerting a certain air of accomplishment as I was asked once to carry an errant ski up the lift by an attendant, and cheered on by two separate groups of people while braving the woods to retrieve a lost pole.]
