Moose in the Kitchen

I go skiing once a year. This plan is carefully tailored to keep me from ever being required to strap on the long skis. Long skis scare me. I cling to the familiar and short, beginner skis – the ones that don’t send you careening down the mountain at a pace matched only by a cheetah on a motorcycle – are familiar. If you only go skiing once a year, you never have to improve. If you never improve, you never have to strap on the fast skis. If you never strap on the fast skis, you have a greater chance of leaving the mountain with both your legs.

We drove up to Tahoe (down to Tahoe? this is why I don’t do the driving) on Friday afternoon, Meeka quivering in the backseat. Usually the dog sees the car as a convenient place to nap while she’s chauffered someplace fun. But Meeka did not take kindly to the skis and their invasion of her personal space. For the first half hour, she shoved her body all the way up against the door, as if by pushing all her weight against it she could pop the handle and escape, thereby thwarting the skis’ evil plot to feast on her tasty puppy flesh. She eventually stopped clinging to the door, but she wouldn’t sit down. She stood on the seat the whole way, refusing to curl up or in any way let down her guard, lest the skis attack. I can’t imagine what threat she envisioned, but clearly it was dire.

We stayed near Donner Lake, and determined it a lovely spot to turn cannibal. Thankfully, food was plentiful or the dog would have learned to fear not the skis, but my fork. I love the dog but more than six hours without pizza or a nice cheesesteak and I would have been eyeing her flanks.

Speaking of flanks, I have never been terribly fond of my thighs. Even when I am thinner than perhaps necessary, my thighs are solid chunks of meat that would have made me prime pickings had I turned up at Donner pass a mite sooner. But my thighs serve me well on mountains. While those thin-thighed people, people I have detested when trying on jeans, are rolling chin over ski pole down a steep slope, I am using the massive power contained within my massive thighs, vowing to never again feed them chocolate if they let me fall. They didn’t let me fall.

It turns out that I’m a decent skiier – after I’ve destroyed my lift ticket by attempting the always difficult maneuver of FOLDING IT IN HALF and proven incapable of putting on ski boots without help. I didn’t even fall off the lift, unlike the man who didn’t sit down fast enough and did a face plant into a snowbank, yelling “Don’t worry about me, I’ll catch up!” somewhat plaintively as we sailed up the mountain without him. Sir Face Plant is, as his father told us on the ski lift, getting his Ph.D. in coffee. In Hawaii. When I heard that, I almost dove off the ski lift to comfort him. And the coffee. In Hawaii.

On Sunday, I learned to cross country ski, something I’d never tried because I enjoy not having to move under my own power. I prefer gravity to assist me in my exercise. But cross country skiing was lovely. We glided along in a quiet, sunlit forest, the dog galloping in front of us. It’s a lovely little image, one that only needs smooth cross country skiiers moving in unison, sun glinting off muscled calves.

Yeah, that wasn’t us. What we were doing could be more accurately termed the “geriatric shuffle.” With an occasional flail to add suspense. I didn’t fall on the slope so steep that if you stopped and peered up you would only see a tower of white. I tipped over on the flat ground, simply because I could. Luckily, my ass is always available to take the fall. So I feed it well. It works hard.