Ass Over Teakettle
Life Lessons from (Not) Skiing
Right now we lucky folks here in Europe are enjoying an unofficial holiday known as Ski Week. The kids are off school, so everyone heads to the mountains to go skiing.
Everyone except me, that is. I’m with the Irish comedian Dylan Moran: “Why would anybody want to go skiing when you could sit in the comfort of your own kitchen and break your knees with a hammer?”
I did try skiing once, at a resort in Wisconsin with the adorable name Trollhaugen. I managed to make it down the bunny hill all in one piece. But never again!
As befits my Norwegian ancestry and Minnesota upbringing, I prefer Nordic skiing. A park reserve near my childhood home has miles of groomed trails that wend their way through forests and meadows and around (and across!) frozen lakes. We spent many happy days there. Closer to home, we skied on the streets. A favorite memory is of mornings after a heavy snowfall. If the roads hadn’t been plowed yet, my parents would strap on their skis and glide over to the grocery store to pick up breakfast fixins.
Alas, here in Switzerland the cross-country trails are totally beyond the capacities of midwesterners like me. Weather permitting, you will find my husband, Matt, and me on winter hikes in the mountains, where we share the trails with cross-country skiers. They are badasses! The elevation change on those trails is typically more than 300m/1000ft. In my opinion as a former flatlander, any trail with a thousand-foot drop is well into the downhill category.
Here’s a slope that’s more our speed: Buck Hill, the beloved downhill ski resort just south of the Twin Cities. To the Swiss, the hill in the photo below would not qualify as a downhill piste. It would be a cross-country trail, and an easy one at that:
I don’t mean to dunk on Buck Hill, though. Great things have come out of Buck Hill! The slope in this photo is nicknamed the Lindsey Vonn hill, because she trained there as a child. My friend Steve, who took the photo, trains there too, and he has skied advanced runs in Norway, Switzerland, and Austria. So here’s our first life lesson: We need to start slow! It’s how we build up skills so that we can tackle greater challenges later.
Today’s title comes from one of my favorite comedians, Wisconsin’s own Charlie Behrens. Based on his years of skiing in Wisconsin, Charlie fancies himself quite a good skier. So on vacation in Colorado, he attempts a black diamond run. Here is his hilarious account of how he crashes spectacularly, going “ass over teakettle”:
Our second lesson, then, is, it’s important to know our limits. In my case, I have always been fit, but I’m so klutzy that I sometimes just fall over for no reason at all, like a fainting goat. So no downhill skiing for me, ever, and no cross-country skiing in Switzerland either. I can live with that! (Literally.)
We can apply this lesson to our interactions with other people too: What is easy for some is difficult or even deadly for others, and we need to meet people where they are. A hiking group for parents at our international school ran into this issue at the start of every school year. People arrive in Switzerland eager to hike in the mountains, not realizing that an “easy” hike in Switzerland usually involves a minimum elevation gain of 200m/656ft, which is tougher than it sounds when you’re not used to that much exertion—or, for that matter, the altitude. On one such “easy” hike, two new moms, both Muslims, arrived in modest dress and sneakers. It was a hot day—the rest of us were in shorts, t-shirts, and hiking boots—but they uncomplainingly soldiered on, over kilometers of rough terrain and steep ascents.
Our leader, Julia, eventually put me in charge of the more experienced hikers so we could go ahead while she stayed with the ladies. They made it back safely, albeit hot and sweaty and an hour after the rest of us. I commend those intrepid ladies for sticking with it! But maybe Julia could have warned them that an easy hike in Switzerland is a challenging hike anywhere else.1
Which brings me to our next lesson: Sometimes the smarter, braver choice is to quit. On a winter hike a couple of years ago, Matt and I encountered an older British lady at the bottom of a piste. She was confused and shaking with fear and adrenaline. She had come to Switzerland with friends for a ski vacation and, like Charlie, she was quite a good skier back home. But she was totally unprepared for Swiss pistes, even the “easy” ones. Thankfully, she had managed to get to the bottom of the slope unharmed, but she vowed never again to ski in Switzerland. Matt and I stayed with her while she regained her composure, and then we walked her to the train station so she could return to the town where she was staying. We ran into her at the end of our hike, by which time she was happy and relaxed. Which makes sense. As I have argued before, sometimes we need more quit and less grit.
Some are born quitters, some achieve the ability to quit, and some have quitting thrust upon them. My heart goes out to Lindsey Vonn. Last week she decided to continue competing in women’s downhill after tearing her ACL, and she crashed fifteen seconds after beginning the run. Vonn claims that her prior injury had nothing to do with the fall, but, to quote George Costanza, it didn’t help. And yet while it might be true that Vonn shouldn’t have attempted that run, pointing it out, especially when the consequences are so devastating, is neither necessary nor kind. Vonn broke her tibia severely enough that the injury is likely to end her career as one of the greatest skiers of all time.
You and I would likely never choose to compete on an injured leg, but elite athletes are different from the rest of us mere mortals. As David Foster Wallace argues, they inspire us because they give us a vicarious experience of the divine:
There is about world-class athletes carving out exemptions from physical laws a transcendent beauty that makes manifest God in man. . . . Great athletes are profundity in motion. They enable abstractions like power and grace and control to become not only incarnate but televisable. To be a top athlete, performing, is to be that exquisite hybrid of animal and angel.2
Imagine embodying that power and grace and control for your entire life and then losing it all in one short, sharp snap.
Vonn’s crash recalls the scene in Ted Lasso, where Roy Kent suffers a career-ending injury:
At the end of the clip, Roy’s girlfriend, Keeley, understands that Roy’s life as he knows it is over. She ignores his attempts to rebuff her and sits next to him. She doesn’t say a word. She doesn’t exhort him to look on the bright side (“well now you can be a coach!”) or give chipper tips (“you can spend more time in yoga class now!”) or inflict recriminations on him (“you knew you were too old to play, so what did you expect?”). No. She sits quietly with Roy as he begins to grapple with the terrible loss of the sport that has given his life meaning.
Our final lesson, then, is that when someone we care about is suffering, we don’t have to fix it (nor are we even able to, most of the time). Still less should we blame our loved one for their suffering. Instead, we can simply offer our caring presence. In a recent interview with George Saunders, Ezra Klein shows us the way:
here’s how I describe comfort: The fundamental exchange of comfort, when I offer it to my children or when it has been offered to me, is somebody sitting there with you, no matter what is happening, and saying: I am here, and I love you.
How about you, readers? Have you ever discovered you were in over your head and decided that discretion was the better part of valor? Have you ever helped a friend who was going through something tough? Please share your thoughts in the comments!
The Tidbit
Time to turn to warmer climes, to wit, New Orleans. Yesterday was Mardi Gras, or Fasnacht, as it’s called in Switzerland (or Masopust’—“meat desert”—as it’s called in Czechia). I know we have all heard “House of the Rising Sun” a million times, but this soul version will blow you away. LaVance Colley shows off his extraordinary vocal range (at least three octaves!) and expressive control of dynamics for a truly virtuosic performance. Plus the brass musicians do a little dance.
To be fair, the ladies may well have been grateful to Julia for pushing them to attempt and ultimately succeed at a task that was difficult for them. I have often been grateful to Julia for how she challenges us, including the time she persuaded our group to ford a swift, rocky, glacial stream barefoot. We made through and were proud of ourselves!
David Foster Wallace, “How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart,” in Consider the Lobster and Other Essays (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2006), pp. 142–43. Italics in original.
During time of suffering, to "simply offer our caring presence" . . . it's biblical, in the Job story, chapter two: "When Job’s three friends Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar heard about all the troubles that had come upon him, they set out from their homes and met together by agreement to go and sympathize with him and comfort him. They sat on the ground with him for seven days and seven nights. No one said a word to him, because they saw how great his suffering was."
Yes! I think I am still sore from our easy hike down that Swiss mountain a couple of years ago. So grateful you didn't need to call the rescue team in to retrieve me.