The New York Times-20080125-As Natural as Sneezing- But So Much More Fun

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As Natural as Sneezing, But So Much More Fun

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MY first ski-area season pass, encased in hard plastic with an old-lady brooch glued on the back, dates from 1973 -- one piece in a sizable collection of ski-related junk. But even though I've been skiing for more than three decades, I still get that little belly flip of anticipation on a ski morning when the car rounds a bend and the windshield suddenly fills with a trail-laced mountain.

Most people clearly remember the day they learned to ride a bike. But I can't remember not knowing how to ski. It's as if the act is imprinted on my DNA, as innate as laughing or sneezing.

The quintessential image of skiing, immortalized in ski movies, is a tanned, grinning skier plunging through two feet of fresh powder, cerulean skies and jagged peaks in the backdrop. My humble beginnings on snow did not reflect that. I learned to ski in the rolling hills south of Buffalo. The snow was bulletproof, the sky gray and our faces hidden behind scarves. After two decades of skiing in the East, I discovered what I'd been missing. The years spent carving ice, it turned out, were merely preparation for an addiction to powder.

It started as a baby-sitting arrangement, really. In 1968, my parents had left Ireland for Buffalo, where skiing is the de facto winter pastime. Before long my five siblings and I were disappearing into the trees and scaring the stretch pants off my mother. She plunked us into the race program at a local hill, she freely admits, so that someone else would keep an eye on us.

We trained two nights a week and raced on weekends. In the car, the checklist became a mantra repeated time and again: Hats-gloves-goggles? Skis-boots-poles? And then we said the rosary, which is what Irish Catholics with limited skiing ability do before sliding headlong down an icy slope in the dark.

We took turns shimmying into our ski duds in the back of the station wagon. Night skiing in the nether regions of New York is a chilly proposition, so we'd pack on the layers: cotton turtlenecks, floral wind shirts, down vests. Under an inky sky, we skied between the pools of light cast along the trail's edge. Our breath hung thick in the cold air. We would stay out until a blast from a snow gun sent us into the lodge for hot cocoa, our fingers like icicles. Back home, our parents poured us into bed for debagging -- British slang for tugging off somebody's pants.

Skiing is widely known as a rich man's sport, but flush my family was not. We ate meals from a picnic basket, skied in hand-me-downs, shopped ski swaps, and wore downhill suits sewed in the basement. Instead of paying a ski technician to set our bindings, we clicked into our skis in the living room and hurled ourselves forward while Dad stood on the tails. If we released with, say, medium effort, we figured the setting was correct.

Before long, skiing became our raison d'etre. While my high school friends watched MTV and cruised the mall, my siblings and I played hooky for weeks at a stretch to train at Whiteface in the Adirondacks. The trails there were so infamously rock-hard that we sharpened our edges each and every morning. Nights before ski races were spent hunkered over work benches, lovingly fussing over our skis. We used an old clothes iron to wax the bases and dripped molten P-tex, a kind of polyethylene candle, into any gouges. To this day, the noxious smell of a ski tune-up leaves me with a fuzzy glow of nostalgia. We spent the holidays skiing in Vermont -- more than once in garbage bags, rationalizing that rain made the snow a pleasant creamy consistency.

In college, as most students were heading to Fort Lauderdale for spring break, I made my first pilgrimage west, with my roommate, to Alta, Utah. Intent on returning with tans, we spurned sunblock and skied in Hawaiian shorts. First Western lesson learned: Bare skin sliding on frozen granulated snow is a lot like soft cheese raking over a grater. And after one sunscreen-free day, our faces blistered and our eyes swelled shut.

But the experience ran more than skin deep. Awed by the steep pitches, the downy snow and the piercing blue skies, I returned to Utah after graduation to wait tables and teach skiing. I made my first attempt at deep powder, but with my East Coast pedigree and rail-thin skis, I cartwheeled from top to bottom. When things finally clicked, I realized that all the skiing in rain and on marble-hard ice was merely groundwork for this: the weightless feeling of floating in virgin snow, thousands of tiny crystals billowing overhead.

Later, I took a job as an editor at Skiing magazine and, in the name of research, went heli-skiing in Alaska, snowcat skiing in Canada and ski touring in France. Between testing gear and interviewing Olympians, I fixed a lot of dangling modifiers. When the magazine moved from New York to Boulder, Colo., I followed willingly. Though I've since left the magazine to stay home and raise future Olympians, my husband and I have put down stakes in Colorado.

From my first crush (he was my ski coach) to my prodigious thighs to my current ZIP code, skiing has informed my life. Right down to the toenails I lose every season by ramming my feet into the front of my boots, I am a skier. I also have the scars to prove it. In college, I hooked a tip on a slalom gate and shredded my anterior cruciate ligament -- in the strange orbit of the hard-core skier, tearing one's A.C.L. is considered a rite of passage. I earned bonus points for rupturing the same knee years later.

Now that I have three children of my own, it's my turn to collect the odd bits of flotsam: season passes, ski lesson report cards, the neck brace from the unfortunate Boy Meets Tree episode. We chant the hats-gloves-goggles mantra in the car and debag the kids at the end of the day. I see my own lifelong passion mirrored in my 7-year-old's grin as he seeks out stashes of untracked snow, entranced by the magic of disappearing skis.

One day, these early memories will dissolve, and he'll feel that skiing is something he's always known how to do. Just like laughing or sneezing.

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