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O ur friends, father and son, had been dreaming of skiing the West for years. Finally, one winter, they came from New England for the long-awaited visit with our family in Salt Lake City. We sent them up to the glories of Alta in Little Cottonwood Canyon, where we believed they would encounter the heart and soul of western skiing.
Instead of the glee we expected, they came down from the mountain unsettled, disturbed by the lack of signage, by the openness of the slopes, by the ungroomed edges in the trees. This was a whole different ski ethic from destination resorts, a loose set of rules, loosely heeded. The dad in our visiting pair summed up the attitude: "Here is the mountain, here are the lifts. Govern yourself accordingly."
The next day, we suggested the gentler backside of the Wasatch. We directed our friends over the crest, to Park City and Deer Valley, to perfectly groomed snow furrowed in familiar little corduroy ridges- to resorts that took care of skiers, that acknowledged their need for comfort and comforting. They returned, ecstatic and relieved.
Old-fashioned ski areas require an investment in trade for adventure- if adventure is what you want. Such places ask that you learn the lay of the land, that you make the terrain your own, that you keep your wits about you. You have to be comfortable with the thrill of newness, willing to risk the foreign for the sake of learning and the pride of self-reliance. These less sophisticated ski areas are a dying breed-and not really what most vacationing skiers want.
We have taught our two children The Ethic. Their favorite area is Alta, where they love the feeling that they are exploring the mountain for the first time, for themselves. Investing a little energy to reach the best skiing creates a sense of achievement and an intimacy with the mountain that zippy new lifts reaching into every nook and cranny can't offer.
We live with these tensions, in the world and in ourselves. Some of us enjoy the frisson of patrolling into the unknown. Some of us are desperate to avoid it.
There is the "resort" vision of self, where we strive to match an ideal, creating a surface texture of clothes and makeup and image, commodity and amenity-all weakness and vulnerability concealed-ourselves as the Franchised American. We shape memories to tell the story we desire; we construct a gloss, a myth, behaving admirably, always. Our annual holiday letters paint happy families. We fit in. Everything is predictable, familiar, under control-what one ski company executive describes as "a collective expectation of a staged experience."
"How are you?"
"Fine, just fine."
We also come down to a list of blunt realities, our basic "ski area" natures, before modernization. A column of words spoken, impulsive acts, smells and secretions, imperfections, failures, doubts, questions, and some triumphs, each of us a poster child for singularity. Our simple and endlessly complicated selves, with all the conflicts inherent in being a citizen engaged with society, an individual in relationship with others, like a relationship with a simple "ski area" and its mountain managed in partnership with its wild and uncontrollable nature.
"How are you?"
"Truthfully, I'm on anti-depressants and my adolescent son makes me so angry that I feel nauseated." "I have never worked up to my potential." "I go to work, facilitate my family's schedule, and never have a life of my own." "My husband is in love with another woman a generation younger." "I 'm sick with regret."
Ski areas are old-fashioned, eccentric, distinctive, community-based. Small enough, still, for the staff at Alta Ski Area to call us one recent fall to say they had found a pair of child's goggles in their lost-and-found with our son's name and phone number written inside. Did we want them returned? Could they mail them to us?
We live in conflict between competing demands. We want to be authentic, and we want to be successful. We want to be both independent and needed. Free and yet loved. Smart but down-home. Expert but easeful.
I want these for myself-all of them. When I had too much freedom as a single man, I was lonely. Embedded in a family, I now must come to terms with too little freedom, too little time to pursue success without quarter. Life is a giant, teetering, fun house of trade-offs.
Interchangeable leisure experiences do not satisfy this underground river of yearning, this longing for romance and distinctive simplicity, for community and the American spirit, and for enough wildness to nourish our ancient biological connections with the land. Consolidation and corporatization displace imagination.
This is tricky territory. It's easy to sentimentalize. We all have felt the insecurity of out-of-towner vulnerability. I once saw a restaurant in Mazatlan, Mexico, that advertised, in English, "Food You Can Recognize." A woman in Ecuador traveled without her spouse because her husband in New York City "needs to know where his razor is."
Most Americans love the familiarity of franchises, the glitz of the new, the gleam of technology, the easy approach, the safety of authority. We prefer amenity and scenery over whole, willful places. Disney World attracts more tourists than any tropical botanic garden. Engineered reservoirs like Lake Powell lure more recreationists than wild rivers. We have turned the wild Earth into a lunch counter that fillets natural places into recreational bits.
At their most intense, the two land-use philosophies-maximum control vs. maximum wildland-mirror our twin faces as a culture. We tend to live at one end or the other of this continuum, prolonging the destructive duality of human-less nature and humans free to ignore or control nature. Antagonism makes reconciliation difficult, and yet we cannot dismiss the ties to the other side of the moral mountain. We cannot forget that values are attached to people, connected by mind and heart and soul.
The lean and passionate outrage of our youth can evolve into big-bellied ambivalence. What we need is a good, cathartic middle-aged crisis-forcing us to take stock of our lifetime's accumulation of assumptions, insisting that we appraise with a clear eye where we stand.
I know I sound like a Luddite. I know Twenty-First Century change will inundate my Twentieth Century attitudes. In the meantime, I will be happy to tuck my chin inside my jacket on a windy day at the top of Alta's Sugarloaf Chairlift, feeling the earth shake with the boom of avalanche guns, reveling in the view of Devil's Castle unimpaired by the fogged window of a gondola meant to shield me from the soul of the wild Wasatch.
Excerpted from Bargaining For Eden by Stephen Trimble
Salt Lake City naturalist, writer, and photographer Stephen Trimble has won significant awards for his non-fiction, his fiction, and his photography, including the Ansel Adams Award from The Sierra Club. His eighteen books on western wildlands and native peoples include: The Sagebrush Ocean: A Natural History of the Great Basin; The People: Indians of the American Southwest; The Geography of Childhood: Why Children Need Wild Places (with Gary Nabhan); and Testimony: Writers of the West Speak on Behalf of Utah Wilderness (co-compiled with Terry Tempest Williams).
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