let's get philisophical....

[lax]

here's a paper i wrote last spring about why i love skiing. turns out soul skiing has lots of cool parallels with the ideals of thoreau and emerson...

i find it an interesting re-read. the paper would have been alot better with a couple more edits, but i got lazy. fyi- i had an amazing teacher who encouraged us to write "in the now," letting out thoughts flow, hence some of the more stupid/non-traditional paragraphs in the beginning...


thought mags would enjoy this read in the summer....


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Tim Kelliher
Self on the Run
Final paper

YAY SKIING!!!!-A Platonic Search for my Irrational Over-Exuberance for Skiing


My journey out to Utah was a test; do I really like skiing enough to say ‘fuck it’ to everything I’ve been told to desire my whole life, mainly the accumulation of material wealth and establishing a family, and listen to my gut, my inner soul, and devote my life to the activity which has made me so excited I have begun to shake; so crazy that I’ve made a 5 hour drive at 4am; so depressed for a lack of it I almost failed out of school last term (I got my first D!). I don’t know why I like skiing so much, but I think the reasons I do are very similar to the ‘self on the run’ mentality, which I define as the Thoreauvian idea of listening to your inner soul, what pleases it the most, and this causes you to experience life in a whole new manner; the characters in the books we’ve been reading have all expressed this epiphany by exclaiming at some point something along the lines of “something's, like, crossed over in me and I can't go back, I mean I just couldn't live” (Thelma and Louise); about how their whole outlook on life has changed and they feel “the triumphant joy of living to the fullest extent” (p. 37, Into the Wild). Even the tagline for Thelma and Louise stumbles across this magnificent change by advertising the movie as one where “Somebody said get a life... so they did.” When I ski, “I don't ever remember feeling this awake” (Thelma and Louise).

I’d say the main reasons I like skiing are for the powder and the adrenaline, which provide the most joyful experience ever and force me to live in the moment, in the present, something I’ve discovered I naturally love to do. As I think I’ve told you before, I have ADD, and maybe as a function of that, I love to live in the moment, but often when I try to I end up acting like an idiot, because I will start doing random tasks, but give up on them after like 5 seconds. This applies to almost everything I do, including writing this paper and discovering what the hell I want to do with my life; I hate planning ahead and would prefer for things to sort themselves out naturally: I never picked a major, I just took various classes I though I would enjoy and ended up liking political science, but I have no idea what I would do with a PS degree and its making me nervous to be honest. See even those past four sentences (I can assure you that happened naturally, I was trying to “live in the moment” and not plan the structure of my paper) all that stuff about ADD and polisci are way too detailed and has nothing to do with skiing, but a minute ago I thought it would help my paper; I’m retarded. I have a weird memory as well and I forget good ideas quickly so I try to act on them immediately; right now I had something to write, but forgot it…hold on. Oh yea, as a result of this ADD/doing 5 things at once and getting none of them done to accomplish something I often focus 100% of my energy on a task I know is necessary and apply myself intensely to it to make sure it gets done; I’ll clean my room for 30 minutes and obsess over it with only major emergencies able to distract me (not even a Sox-Yankees game), and for those thirty minutes the only thing that matters is how to fit all my clothes in my drawers. I love skiing because it forces me to focus, which is somewhat true for all sports but moreso for skiing, because its so fun and if I didn’t focus completely in some situations, such as jumping off a cliff, I might die. My mind focuses so intensely that skiing “becomes a clear eyed dream…a trancelike state” (p. 142, Into the Wild). I don’t know why, but I guess the feeling I get from it is so great that it allows me to focus and I am drawn to it so badly that I often get distracted nay pulled into thinking about it, or talking about it with my group of “ski-bum wannabe” friends, or looking at skiing websites while I’m supposed to be writing a paper.

Skiing has many elements that I love; the adrenaline rush from cliffs and speed, the joy of floating off a jump; but the driving force behind my love for skiing is powder; I cannot tell you how long I have dreamed/thought about feet upon feet of soft, floaty, untouched creamy goodness of powder, but I would not be surprised if it totaled years. When I talk about “skiing” in this paper, I’m usually talking about skiing powder, since skiing powder is what I desire most; those light, tiny, denseless crystals which toe the line between a solid and a liquid, yet feel like gliding on a gas; “The floating sensation [of] skiing powder is otherworldly, it's such a quiet sensation - as if there are no forces acting on your body ”(shmerham). Through this phenomenon, powder becomes one of the greatest simulations of flying that one can experience. Not flying physically in a plane, but the sensation, the spirit of flying, if we could fly like birds with the wind in our face.

Jumps provide the illusion of flight in a different manner. A jump launches you into space like a rocket; the most literal simulation of flight one can experience. At the apex of a jump’s path, where the downward force of gravity equals the launching force of the jump, you become weightless, a feeling of pure nirvana. Like lab-rats to cocaine, skiers throw themselves off jumps over and over in search of that divine feeling of weightlessness. In this weightless period, we feel like we are no longer “sedate” and “are truly living for the first time,” (Thelma and Louise) living as supermen, men who can fly; in a positive way we feel like Mickey and Mallory; in the weightless moment, we feel like we are “not human… a vampire, or the devil, or a monster, or cyborg, or something like that. But [we]'re not human,” but above the human state (Natural Born Killers). The same feeling applies to powder; we have grow wings, can flym and feel as if “we're not even the same species. I used to be you...then I evolved” (Natural Born Killers).

Skiing and skiing powder are completely different experiences; powder both changes the terrain completely and feels physically like floating; These two core elements of the powder experience intertwine and complement one another. One day you ski a tough tricky line of moguls; you hop turn mogul to mogul and struggle to get put together a smooth line yet remain still exhilarated by the challenge; the next day two feet of cold smoke falls, and that challenging bumpy terrain becomes a beautiful, untouched canvas which hands you the freedom to dictate whatever crazy line you can dream up, instead of having your line dictated by the terrain (moguls); ‘whatever I can dream up is possible’ you think as you smear a fast smooth arching turn over the place where you had to make 15 ugly hop turns the day before; powder allows you to express yourself. Skiing pow like the difference between like driving over some terrain, and flying over it in a hovercraft; a hovercraft can only fly about 4 feet off the ground, and thus has to still adhere to the major features of the terrain but ignores avoiding inconsequential rocks and ruts, creating a vastly different exhilarating travel experience. The layer of powder allows you to fly over the terrain and be free to turn as you like, without listening to the physical terrain.

[lax]

Powder enables you to have absolute control; when I learned to ski powder out in Utah, I was exhilarated after I finally could ski it well. I tested myself: after pointing ‘em and blazing down the fall line until I approached “uh oh” speed (probably about 40-50 mph) I found a patch of powder and made a tight speed-checking turn on a 6 foot by 6 foot patch of snow and reeled my speed down to ‘safe speed’, about 10-20 mph, within half a second. I realized that the possibilities of the lines I could ski exploded. No longer would I have to worry about if I would gain to much speed straight-lining through an exposed, rocky chute and whether I would be able to stop in the tiny patch of snow at the bottom before the trees came up; in powder everything is possible. The predictable nature of powder takes a lot of the guesswork out of skiing; you can count absolutely that the patch of fluff over there will be soft and you definitely can use it to stop, rather than normal snow, when a hard chunk of ice can often and easily masquerade as soft lump of snow, which can cause brutal falls. In powder, you learn to trust your instincts and always ‘go for’ the sickest line.

The controllable combined with the untouched canvas-like nature of powder allows for one to look up after a run and examine one’s work. Just as businesses seek to be the most efficient in money managing, skiers seek to squeeze every ounce of fun and joy from a terrain; usually popular lines will be repeated because they provide the best experience; why would you carve two high-speed turns down the middle of the face, when you can maneuver along the trees on the right side of the bowl, hit the 20 footer and cut left along the ridge to hit the small natural hip at the bottom? The satisfaction of looking up at one’s work, and seeing the line flow from cliff to hip with rhythmic natural turns satisfies the human mind; a good line is a work of art; Aristotle would call a well-executed line “fine,” while Thoreau would marvel at the practicality of a line being the “true purpose” of the terrain; the line is the exact way the terrain was meant to be skied; a fact supported by the satisfaction one feels standing back and admiring your work. This satisfaction and the supreme feeling of joy we get from skiing come from us fulfilling our true purpose; just as Mickey is “a natural born killer,” we feel like we are ‘natural born skiers’ (Natural Born Killers).

Powder serves many functions which complement one another culminating and creating an absolutely amazing experience (when done right). Powder redefines terrain. It’s as if the clouds throw down two feet of pillows everywhere, which not only slow you down and encourage you to aggressively attack lines, but also lowers the consequence for falling and reinforces this aggressive absurd style for skiing; going way too fast through really tight spaces, jumping off high places, always pushing the limits of how fast, high, smooth you can go. I like doing all of these things when I ski normally, but powder amplifies them. Powder encourages you to go for the craziest, most ridiculously awesome line, because you know you will be in control, yet if by some chance you do screw up, the powder shall cushion your fall. The control of powder contrasts the riding of the river in Deliverance.; on the river Ed had “to find a way to make [the canoe] move like we want it to” (p. 73); he did not have absolute control over his body. When Ed gets out of the river he remarks that his “body was heavy and hard to move without the tremendous authority of the rapids to help it”; in powder the body controls nature: the concept of conquering nature thrills the soul, but in water nature owns the body.

Inevitably, other skiers have learned the wonders of powder skiing and it becomes a scarce commodity; after noon at most resorts untouched pristine powder only lies in the deepest of trees and in the most well-kept of secret stashes. Powder hunting becomes a competition; whose theory of “where the powder lurks” will triumph? Powder hounds sniff out powder stashes around the mountain in a desperate battle against time as they know that during the time they hypothesize and seek out the location of a powder stash, other powder hounds around the mountain are eliminating other stashes. Just as Thelma and Louise desperately search for freedom with ever-shrinking possibilities, ski-bums search for an ever shrinking amounts of powder; just as Chris McCandless searches for the true untouched wilderness in the face of modern development, “where you can only experience natural silence on 2/3 of the grand canyon,” while skiers face an uphill battle in search for ‘undeveloped powder’ (Into the Wild).

In one of my favorite state of minds while skiing, I am exploring the uncharted mountain. Having a trail map and trying different trails takes half the fun out of it, imagining yourself as a pioneer of mountaineering and glancing out at a peak and deciding spontaneously ‘to conquer that peak next’ makes the experience more exciting and natural. Just as in Heart of Darkness, where the lure of the last ‘unmapped part of the Congo’ lures Conrad to the unknown; unknown and unmapped terrain has a certain mystical draw; and in Turner where the reinvention of civilization occurs just beyond the borders of civilization, the reconquering of the wild occurs just beyond the boundaries of the chairlift, while after a fresh dump of snow, you cannot see the tracks of other skiers and you feel as if you truly are discovering a completely new untracked part of the world. I, like McCanless, find that I enjoy skiing the most when I have “simply got rid of the map,” because with no “blank spots [remaining] on the map” at least in my mind “the terra would thereby remain incognita” (174).

The highest level of skiing remains concerned with pushing limits; new innovations in technology allow for wider skis, better control, and lighter equipment, but for the most part, the essential element of how fast, far, and high skiers are willing to push themselves. Pushing the limits, happens in most high-level aspects of skiing, but none lend themselves to the ‘self on the run’ mentality more than recent freeskiers who push the limits of cliff jumping. In the name of adrenaline and progression of the sport, high-level freeskiers throw themselves off 50 foot cliffs routinely; even I have worked my way up to a 40 foot cliff after only a season of cliff jumping. Society, or the average non-skier would consider jumping off a cliff larger than 15 as ‘really stupid’ and anything over 30 as ‘completely insane’, where in the ski world 15 seems regular, even wussy, and 30 feet seems like a decent respectable cliff drop. Up in the mountains, secluded from normal society, a ‘groupthink’ mentality forms, which skews what is ‘normal’ for a skier to do; ‘everyone is doing it’ and this dangerous mindset subtly emerges. A flaw lies hidden in this groupthink’ mindset, because although the risk of falling still remains, the skill level of many skiers has risen so high that the chance of them actually falling remains somewhat miniscule (in the face of high consequences). However, testing the limits daily inevitably produces injury because no one is perfect and a small mistake often means a season ending injury, as most pro skiers run into every few years. I believe this same ‘groupthink’ mentality forms for selves on the run; alone, or with one other person, in the solitude of nature they have no rules or society to moderate their thinking. Louise and Thelma build up gradually to the point where “something’s, like, crossed over in me and I can't go back, I mean I just couldn't live.” Louise eventually expresses that she can’t stand the thought of “incarceration, cavity search, death by electrocution, life in prison” compared to their new “awake” life. Their group de-valuing of death and appreciation of their new life culminates to the point where they irrationally agree to “not get caught…keep going” off the cliff into death; were they not so caught up in the moment perhaps they would have made a more rational decision, but they committed absolutely to their new ‘self on the run’ mentality, even to death. Some pro skiers flirt with progressing skiing to such a level that death can be an acceptable outcome also.

[lax]

The true insanity of cliff jumping emerges for those skiers who act more like stunt dummies than skiers in trying to push the limits and set records for cliff hucks. Just like ‘selves on the run’, Mickey and Mallory, my friend in Utah tried this spring to break the 245 foot cliff hucking record set by pro-skier Jamie Pierre last year; he actually came up short, flying 230, bounced off a rock and escaped with minor injuries. The skiing community divides over this issue; some don’t consider huge drops skiing because no one skis away from them (Jamie Pierre was dug out of his bombhole), some think the drops are ridiculous yet would never consider anything close to it. Leo describes very large cliffs an out of body experience, unlike anything he has felt on this world. I can mirror some of that sentiment to a degree, when I launched off my first 40 footer my adrenaline was pumping so loud that I only actually remember pieces of it. Just as in the self on the run mentality, exhibited by Lewis, Thema and Louise, Lickey and Mallory, with the commitment to a new form of living, the ideal of living for one’s inner desires, death loses importance. In the pursuit of adrenaline, often a skier must push himself beyond the limits of your comfort. The best adrenaline comes form uncertainty; adrenaline really starts to flow a half second after you launch off a cliff, when your mind begin to question the drop, which seemed so safe and easy from the in-run, but now threatens your existence. Having an “oh shit, I might die” moment sends your body into overdrive with adrenaline and forces you to live in the moment and concentrate on taking the necessary step to survive this fall right now; LAND!; SKI!; avoid that rock!; skirt past that tree; STOP!!!! Adrenaline is the body’s overdrive, its survival mode., the body’s acknowledgement of death followed by the quest for life.

I ski because the sport transcends me into a ‘self on the run’ mentality; “Skiing allows me to transcend my human limitations, allows me to float and to fly. Skiing takes me beyond myself. ” The adrenaline and powder in different ways force me ‘into the moment,’ and provide the most amazing sensations and experiences. I really love skiing.



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i quoted shemerman and hobietony in my paper...hah! (and thanks)

[highflyingpilot]

Good read. Recently, I've been thinking more and more about what keeps drawing us to the mountains and drives us to such great lengths. All that I've come up with thus far is that we are searching; searching for that moment where we realize we have (however briefly) achieved perfection, skied the perfect line, lived the dream. I am by no means religious but I truly believe that there is something otherworldly about the mountains, something that can't be readily explained in words, something that drives us to the ends of the earth in a never ending search. Just my philosophical 2 cents I guess...