Observations on a Powder day

Now, more than ever, I think about the days of the week in terms of conditions—bluebird, powder, wind hold, late open, rain, and humidity levels. The weather report dictates my activities for the week. This week: a storm is rolling in. The parking lot tells the story before the lifts do. More cars than expected and a little signal that the 7 to 7 schedule I kept for so many years is not universal.

I share the lift with retirees, silver-haired and unhurried. They speak of condos purchased and sold and of of towns in Switzerland as if it were a neighboring county. I will google these destinations as I eat my contraband turkey sandwich in the lodge. They ski with the confidence of people who have already arranged their exits. I find myself wondering how deliberate it all was—whether the real estate and the freedom were planned decades ago or simply accumulated, quietly, while they were elsewhere. Work, for them, is a completed chapter, something referenced like an old address you no longer forward mail to.

I spend time with the dropouts mid—morning. They share stories of employers doing them dirty. You hear about Ray? Firings are framed as inevitabilities rather than decisions. Yes, she missed her first day, she admits, almost as an aside, because she thought she started in February, not January. But they could have been reasonable. The other spent too much time with the juice. It seems hard to get a handle on work when the handle is hard to put down. But all this is of no real concern, snow is great today — best in years.

Somewhere toward the end of the day I find the people who are most similar to me, but also a world apart. The third group is still technically inside the system. Thirty- and forty-something white-collar workers glancing at phones while on the lift, answering emails without urgency, without conviction. They don’t seem guilty for being on the mountain instead of the conference room. They seem mildly inconvenienced by the need to respond at all. Their boots stay on during the work week, and their posture suggests a kind of professional shrug. I notice the absence of ambition, the quiet acceptance of being neither fully present at work nor fully gone from it, and I wonder how they arrived here—or if it simply happened to them.

All of these groups do not count the day in terms of hours but in laps. Their annual goals are days on mountain. 40, 60, 120 is what I hear. Last year I got 15. Snow quality is discussed with forensic seriousness. Talk of sharks off of chair 6. Guiding principles like, “pins only if you got skins” are shared with dry resolute delivery. A quiet authority, a directness and a moral clarity.

Skiing this week was instructive. The best snow quality they’ve seen in Washington in ten years. I would never have known if I was not on this break, and who knows how many other days like this I have missed.