If you had nothing else to do in Kitzbühel, you could always start a rumor.
“Did you hear? The price of beer at the Londoner is going down. Back to thirty schillings on March first.”
“Snow’s coming. A big dump expected Friday, to last all weekend.”
The price of beer and the next snowfall: rumors along these lines could set a resort alight. It was all anyone cared about, the snow especially, in that meagre winter. In December, when there was lots of snow, it was the price of the Londoner’s beer. On a Tuesday it was said the prices would go up Thursday; on the Thursday, it was said the date was now Sunday; and so on, almost two weeks of this, before the prices did go up. Then, towards the end of winter, we wondered when they would go down. Once the tourists left, once the snow was gone, mid-March, early April: the prices remained the same.
Meanwhile it didn’t snow. After all that snow December, there was snow two days in January after the Hahnenkamm races, and then nothing until February, when it came twice: once in the second week, then a four-day blizzard two days later which six straight hot days and ten thousand holiday skiers wiped out liked that. And that was it. But still the rumors: snow today, snow tomorrow, a light flurry then a blizzard at the end of the week.
The worst rumor-mongers were the Austrians. Obviously, they had the most at stake: if it didn’t snow, they lost business. At the rentals shop the tourists would come in each day, anxiously, and ask if snow was forecast for the weekend. “There will be snow soon,” my supervisor Lenz would pronounce in his most oracular voice. “Tuesday night, Wednesday morning at the latest.” He didn’t know, of course, not anymore than what he had read in the paper or seen on the evening news. But to the tourists, Lenz and Toni and all the others, the men who ran the ski school and worked the lifts, were mountain men, and mountain men could feel it in their skin and bones, smell it in the air, sniff it out, when snow was coming. Lenz was an impressive liar: I would believe him too. He had a serious look on his face, and bright earnest pop-eyes; with his callused hands and blue working overalls he had the look of a man who has spent his entire life working on skis and skiing. He never said the snow wasn’t coming, and might never come, and that really they were wasting their time. He said: “Snow Tuesday night. Perhaps for three days.” Further embellishing his forecast, he suggested precedents and patterns. “It always snows the last week in January. There was snow yesterday in the Vorarlberg and the Italian Dolomites. Thirty centimeters in East Tyrol alone. The snow is coming very soon.”
But alone with me Lenz was different.
“Good skiing, Lenz. New snow.” When it did snow, I was delighted, and took my delight to work. Lenz would hold his fingers an inch apart. “Bah, new snow. About two centimeters.”
Or when I came in, having studied the Panoramablick, the television pictures beamed back from the top of the mountain:
“It’s snowing up top, Lenz. It’s been snowing all morning.” Again the two fingers bent crooked, held apart.
“Ja, new snow. Maybe one centimeter. Tomorrow when it rains, it will be all gone.”
It was discouraging talking to Lenz about the weather. As it turned out it didn’t matter. I skied every day and in all conditions, in the worst cold, and in rain and during whiteouts. I skied little powder that winter but plenty of ice and crud and certainly bare patches. A ski could go over things one wouldn’t expect it to, I discovered, like mud, rocks, or grass (so long as it was wet), wooden planks and fallen tree branches. Once in early March I skied the bottom half of the Streif with Tip Walker, him skiing on the skis he would later sell me, when there was nothing on the trail but an occasionally muddy, messy streak of melted snow. Our act, he said, had been in a time-honored tradition.
“Austrians will ski on anything,” he said. “That’s why they’re such good skiers when they get to snow. Plus it’s the only way to stretch the season.”
On one of those warm days late in February, when the season already was nearing its end, I met up with Sarah and Kelvin and Darren on the ridge atop Hochsaukaser. Such meetings were always by chance: my uncertain hours at the store made it impossible for me to set a time or place to meet people. I might be told to come in at nine, work for an hour and a half, then be given the rest of the day free—or perhaps only until three o’clock. In those slow days in January and early February I was working no more than two or three hours a day, and sometimes had as many as three consecutive days off. Even when it got busy, as it did in mid-February and so until the end of the month, I still might have four hours in the middle of the day to go skiing. When in doubt my supervisor Lenz erred on the side of my liberty. “Nichts los ins Geschaft,” he would then say. “Gehst du denn schifahren. Come back tomorrow in the morning.”
I must have had the whole afternoon off or I would never have ventured so far over as Hochsaukaser. From the top of the Hahnenkamm cable car it took a good half hour to reach, and even longer coming back: the slow chair up Pengelstein, the long lines stuffing the entrance of the Silberstube T-bar, that long plodding walk back to Jufen where you could ski again. Once you had descended Jufen you still had to wait your turn to ride the Ehrenbachhohe T-bar to where you could ski all the way into town. There was a short cut of sorts, following the ramp from Jufen to the Steinbergkogel and from there up the triple chair to Ehrenbachhohe, but still it was time, time, time frittering away. It was only worth doing when you were in no rush to go back.
The ski instructors I would meet were in no rush: I envied them that. Not they: time on their hands meant no work at the ski school, and consequently no income. I was always surprised by how little work there was for the foreign instructors. At first they had relished it, enjoying the free time for free skiing, but not anymore, as poverty set in. I saw Sarah first, the diminutive New Zealander, finishing her lunch at Pengelstein:· You could always find people you knew at Pengelstein, if you went in between twelve-thirty and two: a further search turned up Darren and Kelvin at one counter, and sitting by the hearth, the eccentric Swedish instructor Peter Robahr, who in his thinning black hair and dark features didn’t look conventionally Swedish. Peter was notorious among instructors for working black—teaching on his own and pocketing all fees—it had been weeks since he had even bothered turning up at the ski school. He had just finished such a lesson, and was now enjoying his lunch, when Kelvin and Darren and Sarah came up to us with the idea of trying the off-piste on both sides of the Hochsaukaser. It was outlined thus: we would ski off the cornice behind the restaurant and find a chute and then traverse at its bottom across the shaded bowl of so-called ‘Avalanche Valley’ to the sunny pisted side. From there, we would take the quad lift, schuss the ramp that led to the piste but instead head straight for the cols of Schwarzkogel. There was an old goat-herder’s track Kelvin knew, shown to him by Tip on a previous excursion; and it would lead us each time to the Hochsaukaser lift.
“Let me finish my beer,” Peter said, beginning his second.
“I think I'll have another,” he said when finished. “Would you like one?”
I said no: not so confident as the others I wanted all my wits about me. I had never skied Avalanche Valley (in fact had seldom ventured off-piste). That was the name we had given it, and one could see why: a steep bowl topped off by shaky cornices that could give way after any fresh snowfall or stretch of warm weather. The snow was thin now and already rotting, and it was not absolutely safe. After about two hundred meters the steep chutes flattened out, and one could begin the long traverse in relative safety, but still one had to get down those two hundred meters.
Kelvin went first. Together the five of us left Pengelstein restaurant from its rear deck, stepped into our skis, and went right over the edge. So far, so good: the slush seemed light but solid and our skis cut through it easily. Kelvin quickly drew us to a col between two boulders tightly situated, no more than two ski lengths apart.
“I’ve always wanted to go down this one,” he said.
He went, turning once then twice, swiftly, followed by Darren, who took half the snow down with him. His person disappeared into the gap, we heard instead his ski, scraping rock. Peter, due to go next, hesitated.
“I don’t know,” he said. “It doesn’t look good.”
It didn’t: the snow cover was down to less than a meter’s width. You could schuss the first twenty yards to avoid the problem of having to turn in it but that left little margin for error when the gap between the rocks widened slightly and you would have to turn to reduce speed. By then you would already be going fast, and if you fell. . . well, it would be on rock.
I saw all this running through Peter’s mind: he was beginning to sweat, and he wiped his brow. He removed his gloves and stuffed them in his pocket. Meanwhile Sarah had begun her traverse above us, looking for another chute, something safer.
“Keep going, Sarah,” Kelvin shouted from two hundred meters below. “Keep going! There’s another one, there, wider.”
She found the entrance he had pointed and began to go down. From the rocks, Peter pushed once with his poles and sailed over to join her; I lagged behind. The slush was heavier on my skis now, and in my traverse I nearly fell. Sarah was now at the bottom of the chute, together with Kelvin: they waited for us below. Darren had gone on, away toward the distant ridge. Above them Peter waited until I came.
“Those rocks,” he said. “I would have tried it but those rocks.” The chute we stood at now was indeed wider, as I could tell now that I could see it, and there was room enough for the two of us to go down together. The slush was now beginning to get to me. I tried following Sarah’s tracks; Peter charged down to my right and promptly fell. Here the spring snow in the covering shade of the Hochsaukaser had hardened into a light sheet crusted two centimeters at the top and soft below. In his haste to get down Peter had failed to make allowances and he twisted backwards into the ground. Still he got down before I did. I was feeling my legs weak and my knees vulnerable, as always when I have gone off-piste, and I went down in slow, easy turns, stopping for a moment’s rest after every three or four. Not so Peter, getting up and taking off, who was that much more skillful.
Darren was already six hundred meters distant. Sarah and Kelvin waited briefly and then cruised on, into the best stretch of skiing in Avalanche Valley, a few hundred meters of sheltered and perfectly-kept snow, calf-deep and untouched, on a steepish pitch. It was good for a dozen beautifully carving turns before the crud, made by sun, set in again; and the two of them plunged in for all it was worth. Close behind came Peter, going quickly into a tuck, making two wide sweeping GS turns around me then arriving at the end; and then me. I found my own small patch of unmarked snow, the cover a little lighter, perhaps ankle-deep, perfect for me, and like the others I went down, my twelve best turns of the day and perhaps the week. I came to the bottom of the chute, exhilarated beyond belief. So this was skiing! These thirty seconds had made worthwhile all the plodding at the top, the subsequent wading through crap, the treacherous descent down the chute where Peter had tripped and nearly ran me down. I looked at the others, now far along in their traverse. Darren and Kelvin stood already at the great ridge which separated Hochsaukaser’s piste from Avalanche Valley: one push with the poles, and they would be over, out of sight, the bottom of the quad chair three hundred meters below. Sarah followed right behind them, then Peter, still in his tuck, traversing at speed on a track high above us: he would penetrate the ridge at its most narrow section. I wished I could see him attempt it, but I was several minutes behind in my own traverse. When I looked up again all four figures had disappeared. I was alone in the bowl of Avalanche Valley. I looked up to my left and behind for the first time since the five of us began our descent from Pengelstein, and could see nothing man-made, not even the tip of the oak-frame structure of the restaurant. I realized now how hot I was, as I sweated into my T-shirt and sweater and felt my legs moist inside my overalls. My feet too were damp, the socks wet against my skin, and inside my white college baseball cap I could feel the sweat in my hair soaking through the headband. I stopped, breathed deeply, and rested. Unzipping my jacket I tied the sleeves around my waist, and with a weary push on the stocks was off on my own traverse, making tracks roughly between Peter’s and Sarah’s, until I too came to the ridge and went over.
The others were waiting for me at the bottom of the Hochsaukaser quad. Apparently I had missed some fun. The last stretch down to the lift had proved most adventurous of all, all four whizzing and whirling as fast as they could in a race to the bottom. Each had fallen at least once, and in Peter’s case twice, his four beers at lunch having finally gotten at him. It was this wide-open sunny side that had made Hochsaukaser popular among Kitzbühel’s skiers, a domain where one could ride at will: bumps on top, flats in the middle section, ravines and gullies and short hops over hillocks and racing along half-pipes. In this bad uneven snow there was treachery lurking everywhere, the sun above, shade, rocks and bare patches. A skier might cut away the last remaining snow, as Darren had, then on the hump above have his holes filled in by snow pushed over the edge by his partner coming swiftly to a stop. As the afternoon sun moved skier’s right to left across the bowl, there were even more tricks at play. All this Kelvin pointed out as he bundled the five of us into the lift, three on one chair and two on the next. “There and there and there,” he said, waving at the tracks he and Darren had made, where Sarah had crossed paths with Peter, sight of Peter’s great dramatic fall and just as sudden recovery and triumphant sprint to the finish.
“Manfred!” Darren suddenly shouted. “Manfred!”
Below our chair was the shape of the Austrian instructor Manfred, he of the bronze hide and rock star haircut, showing off his short turns on the bumps.
“Hop! Hop! Hop! Hop! Hop!” shouted Darren and Kelvin in unison as Manfred timed his turns to the beat called out above him. “Hop! Hop! Hop! Hop! Hop!”
On the last of two dozen hops and two dozen perfect short turns, Manfred fell, to howling from the chairs above.
“Yahoo!” screamed Darren. Getting up, Manfred laughed, and tried to make a snowball before we got out of range, but his effort was hurried and the snowball shattered in his hands: a second went high in an arc and fell far behind us.
“See you later!” Kelvin shouted back at him.
At the top we gathered while he explained our next adventure, the Schwarzkogel. “We’re going over there,” he said, pointing to what looked like a camel’s hump on an exposed easterly ridge. “Not where the sun is but on the other side. We’ll go in at the saddle.”
He went off, and the others followed, Peter then Sarah then me and Darren. The three before me soon outstripped us, on their straight run down. Then to my right came Darren, in a tuck. “We schuss here,” he yelled as he passed. “It’s the only way to get the speed.” Belatedly I began my schuss and got good speed but knew as soon as I hit the flat that it was not enough. Darren was right. The schuss had to be started at the top, straight down and fearless: any weakness would be punished, as I was punished now walking my skis across the flat. To the left began the pisted run, on the right the marked-but-unkept ski route to Aschau, but we were to go straight across the ridge until the speed ran out, side-step up, walk some more, and so on, until we reached Kelvin’s saddle.
“What the hell do you mean, Kelvin,” I said, huffing and puffing in my breathlessness after the long tramp, “by a saddle?”
“A saddle,” he said. “Look at it.”
“I don’t see it,” I said.
“Don’t you see it?”
“No.”
“Do you see it?” I asked Peter, who shrugged and looked away. Peter was regretting our little expedition, I could see. He had had too much to eat and drink at lunch and besides was not used to such exertion. He was even more unfit than I. He had fallen five times; he had not stopped sweating; his face was haggard and pinched at the cheeks. But still he had to come down Schwarzkogel’s hidden side.
“Look at the camel hump,” Kelvin said. “Now look at the little hump next to it. Between the two humps, you have a saddle.”
Now that he pointed it out I could see it, Kelvin’s saddle, and I said, “So all the time you said saddle you meant a col. We’re going to ski the col.”
“Is that a col?” he asked. “I don’t know what a col is. I always called it a saddle.”
We began side-stepping up the gentle hill towards the col. Here the sun burned fiercest, on our skin and through our clothes and on the ground: branches and twigs and clumps of brush stood out starkly from tiny pools of melted snow. At least this time I was not the slowest. The long tramping I had been forced to perform to reach the incline below the col had left me exhausted and out of breath, but that dispute with Kelvin about cols and saddles had given me time and restored my energy. It was a deliberate ploy, and I employed another so as to have time to pause and retrieve a chocolate bar from my pack.
“Your ski, Darren,” I said. “It looks loose.”
It did look loose, his right foot seeming to jiggle as he pressed it against the toe-piece. Darren looked briefly down, and wriggled his foot, then continued side-stepping up.
“It’s alright,” he said. “It’s always been like that. Still hasn’t come off yet.”
Instead it was Sarah’s ski that came off. We had just started our descent from Kelvin’s saddle when her tips crossed, and she lurched forwards. Managing somehow to stay upright, she followed through on the turn, but the force had knocked off her ski, pitching it forty meters on the slope ahead before the brake punched in and halted its slide. “My ski!” she cried. “I’ve lost my ski!”
Darren and Peter were already far below us, well out of reach. As usual I brought up the rear. “Wait for us!” Kelvin called out to them. “Sarah’s lost her ski!” Planting his poles in the snow, he picked up the ski, seizing it around the binding. With a rocking motion he held the ski back, then forward, then back again, and the second time he pitched it high in the air towards Sarah. It fell, a short distance below her, its surface·· even against the snow, and slid forward, and slid, and kept sliding, a runaway ski, straight past Kelvin, then far past Kelvin, until it was three hundred meters past Kelvin and as many meters from Darren and Peter, when its tail caught the snow hard and the force jackknifed the ski into the air, coming to a rest easily a quarter-mile from its owner. For several long seconds we watched the ski on its uneasy descent.
“I really wish I hadn’t done that,” Kelvin said after a while.
“You can take your ski off and walk down, Sarah, if you like,” I said, standing next to her. “You can make your way down with your poles, and I’ll carry your ski.”
“Thanks, I think I’ll just try to make it down on my own,” she said.
Slowly and with great care she began to ski, with me following from a distance behind. She bent at the knees, and trailed her loose boot a little above the snow, holding it as close to her skiing leg as possible. Leaning out on her poles as she made her turns, she came down on her edge hard. She looked like a man on crutches: she even held her leg so. I watched her with admiration. She was such a good skier! Her technique was excellent—it was something she was known for in Kitzbühel, as perhaps the most skilled of the foreign women teaching at the ski school. Here she was in her element, off-piste, which she much preferred to the marked and groomed runs she had to teach on. She could ski on anything but ice, the reason she couldn’t ski ice being the blunt edges of her skis which had been permanently ruined by a bad tuning job at Sport Ober (or so she said). Otherwise she was fine in all snow and crud and slush, and proved it now. Such a short girl on long skis—two meters long—she carved a turn on her outside ski, leaned over it and pressed in her trailing foot, using the pole to help her shift weight for her succeeding turn. In this way, she made it down the steep to her ski. She was as fast on one ski as I was on two, I knew, even though I had held myself back to help her out as she might need it: she didn’t. On the flat a sheepish Kelvin was waiting for her, holding her ski.
“Don't touch it!” she said. “It might go off again.”
“Sorry about that,” he said. “It’s flat here, though.”
“Still,” Sarah said, and she strapped on her ski. I looked over to Darren and Peter far away. Both had removed their skis and were waiting, Darren standing leaning on his poles, Peter sitting on the snow. As we came to join them, Darren made and threw a snowball, catching Sarah on the cheek. He had aimed for Kelvin. “You wally,” he said.
Meanwhile Peter looked dead, or close to it, white in the face from the heat and his exhaustion.
“Are you all right, Peter?” I asked.
“I’m fine,” he said. “I shouldn’t have had that second beer at lunch, though.”
“It was four, Peter. Four beers.”
“Was it four?”
“It was at least four. Maybe more. I came late.”
He stood up, and in the act of standing seemed almost refreshed: color returned to his cheeks and forehead, as blood began filling his face.
“I thought it was only two,” he said.
We were on the flat section, the goat-herder’s track visible before us, but starting from a standstill it took some doing to gather speed for the drop-off. The flat ended suddenly, on its verge was the track, and you wanted to hit it hard, the little jump, to collect speed for the homeward run. I skied in the middle of the pack, hit the drop at a point where the track below it sagged, and almost fell. Quickly I righted myself, and thumped down the track with the others, the woods below and before us, as the path came across a bend and rounded onto the Hochsaukaser piste, and the quad lift.
I rode up the lift with Peter; Darren and Kelvin and Sarah sat in the chair before us. Fumbling in his pocket Peter produced a pack of cigarettes. “I’m not used to working so hard,” he said. He offered me a cigarette, which I refused.
“Americans don’t smoke,” I said.
“I’ve heard you say that before,” he said. “Why do you say it? It isn’t true.”
“I always say it. It’s my stock line whenever I’m offered a cigarette. I have a stock line for each occasion.”
“What do you say when someone asks to borrow money?”
“I say I don’t have any money to lend.”
“That’s not very interesting,” he said. I told him I was working on it, upgrading my boring stock answers to at least tolerably interesting ones. Then he told me his dream. He had now spent five winters instructing in Austria, was thirty years old, and sick of ski schools and poverty. He and a friend in Stockholm had a small interest in a boat, which they wanted to use to ferry vacationers over to a nearby island. On the island there would be camping, fishing, swimming and sailing: perfect for holidaying Swedes.
“Only Swedes?” I asked.
“Probably. Who else is going to come to a Swedish island?”
“Maybe I will.”
“You can come,” he said. “I might have a job for you.”
“Doing what?”
“Anything. As business grows we’ll need people. Lots of people, with different talents. What can you do?”
I thought, I can do nothing, I have no skills. Sitting on the chairlift with Peter I looked around me to the blue cloudless sky and the distant mountains, the Schwarzkogel before us, further back the Kleine and Grosse Rettensteinen. Somewhere back there, on the other side of Mittersill and the Oberpinzgau valley, was an even greater mountain range, whose summits from here one could not quite discern, the Gross Venediger and the Grossglockner, Austria’s highest peaks. The Felbertauern tunnel ran through these mountains, and one emerged from it at the other end in Lienz and the East Tyrol. Italy was not far, and in the other direction, beyond the Wilder Kaiser, was German Bavaria and Munich. From this chairlift I could feel fifty miles within my grasp, a place where once the earth had groaned and then receded, leaving lakes and wooded mountains, and here sitting next to me was a man who offered me now the Swedish islands, as the night before another had spoken of coastal France and a summer’s crewing aboard a yacht: and still another of a road through the Yukon to Alaska and the possibilities to be found there. In front of us the Australian Kelvin and Kiwi Sarah and Englishman Darren were whooping and hollering, their bodies pressed forward against the restraining bar, skis dangling below the foot-rest; and I thought, this is the life without limits. It didn’t matter how real the prospect was or not—by now I knew Peter well enough to take what he said somewhat less than seriously. But at least here such things were spoken of, and given credence by the fact of our being here in Kitzbühel, living the way we did, in beauty, among mountains, in the snow. At that moment I stopped to consider, and knew that I was happy.
At the top we gathered and went forward again, and again, and again, four times to the Schwarzkogel and Kelvin’s saddle. The first two runs I remembered to schuss from the top and held my nerve: this time both of Sarah’s skis stayed on. After the second run Peter left, to await our return in the Pengelstein restaurant, and now there were only four of us we could ski together and ride the lift together. Four people in one chair on such a day, we were never so noisy, but our noise was drowned in the immense silence of the mountains, the scorching heat of the sun, the emptiness of the piste below us. As we made our way back it seemed a perfect day’s skiing, perhaps the best I had ever done: certainly the first time I had really stretched, and pushed and pulled myself along into something new and difficult and not always safe. There would not be another time like it, not until one of those days in early March, the last day all the lifts and runs were open I believe, when I joined Tony and Anthony and Sophia for a madcap run down Hochsaukaser’s piste and then back the quick way to Kitzbühel, down the Streif then a dash through the woods off the Rasmusleiten to the road and by its side, Haus Pravda. Tony and his friends had dressed in T-shirts and boxer shorts, and smeared their faces in streaks of paint left over from carnival, like war-masks. It was skiing fast and hard, and again I had the luck of being swept giddily along in the pace set by better, more fearless skiers. As they skied and fell among the slush bumps and stones of Hochsaukaser and the Streif the scrapes and bruises piled on. The snow cover was at its thinnest then, and we all had on old skis which we thrashed, throttling the life out of them as surely as a rope pulled tight around the neck. On the last run down the patchy Streif, Tony blew an edge on his left ski nearly two inches long: it stood jutting out, a piece of corrugated twisted metal, and passed from hand to hand that afternoon in Dick’s shop others marveled at its rider’s reckless audacity. It seems strange that of ninety days’ skiing that winter I should remember most vividly only two, and in small pieces perhaps another four or five, but there it is. The moments spent actually skiing—making turns and all the rest of it—fade from view, supplanted by the next adventure out: what persists is memories of lunches at Pengelstein, conversations on lifts, those stops halfway down the Streif at Seidlalm for glühwein with Gina and the others. As I picked up my skis and began trudging through the village home, I knew I would not be taking any job, even if offered, in Sweden, or anywhere else. I was looking straight past spring and summer, to next winter; and was already thinking that I might return.
(Written in 1993 and published in Ecotone in 2008)