An Engineer Learns to Ski

The first time I ever put on downhill skis, I shuffled straight to the lift and, at the instruction of my seatmates, took my first-ever slide as a jump from the chairlift.

I slid, two little sleds on my feet, in an uncontrolled straight line that stopped when I ran out of momentum.

That was the first lesson: little friction, all momentum.

It was a work trip, a retreat my colleague had finagled, and he and another ski-savvy work friend balanced with me at the top of the blue run. I looked dubiously at the slope, my long skis jutting over the precipice, ninety degrees from safety.

“You don’t have to just go down,” they said. “You can go across.”

And that was lesson two: I turned my skis until they were nearly parallel to the safety of the mountain. I slid and crashed not down, but across. At any point on the side of the mountain, there is an up, a down, and an infinity of angles between that correspond to acceleration.

I said aloud, “It’s like riding a vector field.”

I looked at the slope with fresh eyes, imagining little blue MATLAB arrows, making a map on which to chart a course. I let my skis angle slightly down, but on a course for an up. I slid, leaned into the hill, succeeded, fell down. And again, exhilarated, dubious, outlandish, all at once.

It got better.

Actually, I was feeling pretty good by the bottom of that hill. Cocky. I knew I wasn’t good at skiing, but I thought I’d basically got it, that the rest was practice. Just ride the vectors, but better.

I’d only been skiing another two or three times when I bought skis. I bought them for the express purpose of saying yes when invited on a ski trip, rather than mentally dithering about the price.

I didn’t have a car at the time. I bought myself skis and poles at the Play It Again Sports and carried them in my arms to a condo I was borrowing in Seattle’s Belltown.

I find that my learning tends to be a mix of intention and getting out of my own way. If I owned skis, I’d basically owe myself the yes, so the money wouldn’t go to waste.

It worked. I rode the train down into Oregon, where a friend was finishing a roadtrip, and we drove to a local mountain. He took me to the top about halfway through the day.

Almost immediately, I realized that my ski-across trick doesn’t work on a mountaintop, where every direction is down. What do you do to slow down?

The mountain was beautiful. My attempts were not.

After a quite dicey several minutes, including butt-sliding, skis crossing, little runs that went much further and faster than I meant to go, and finally a bit of skis-off walking, we got to a flatter place.

I don’t know if there’s a name for the technique he showed me, but it’s a way to keep the skis on and still get down. You stand upright on that meridian of the vector field, skis orthogonal to the up-down slope. And you tilt your ankles downhill. The ski flattens and slides on the snow. You un-tilt your ankles. You stop, a few inches lower down. It’s a way to slide without having to actually ski. You don’t have to go forward, ergo, you don’t have to turn. Critically, you never have to point your skis down the hill.

I’d say that’s lesson two and a half, though it’s a full level up in dignity. You can still be afraid of steep slopes, but you can get down them.

It’s been about six years (and maybe five or six ski trips) since my first-ever ski, but I think I’ve just had lesson three. At the risk of making the same mistake twice, now I think I get it.

Here’s the thing. I had thought that slowing came from turning fast: ski across, in tiny zigzags. But it’s paradigmatically different.

It’s more like skating backwards. It’s technically a turn, but it’s more a shift in weight. Acceleration control on a steep hill is about shifting all of your weight as you pivot onto what’s now your bottom foot. The ski digs in: imagine powder spraying down. It’s a stop that hasn’t fully stopped you because you’re moving pretty fast by now. That upper foot swings around parallel just to get out of the way.

I know this is hard to visualize, but I’m hoping there’s some one person out there like me, who loved learning swing dance at my engineering college because it was phrased in terms of angular momentum. Certainly, you have to body-intuit the motion, but many things are easier if the concept is already in your head.

My tired thighs shook with effort at this breakthrough: I was at the middle of my second day of skiing, and it takes an unbelievable amount of effort to snowplow down a whole mountain for a day and a half. But I finally got the rhythm: leg pushes down from the hip, skating upward against gravity as momentum keeps me moving down the slope.

The best part about being wrong was seeing that now, with this form of deceleration, I could stay in a lane. I don’t have to sweep across the whole slope trying to turn my skis uphill. And since there’s more control, I’m not in everybody’s way. I can go fast, because I’ve figured out how to properly slow down.

The best part? It’s fun, suddenly. It was fun already, but fraught: a scared-fun, a challenge-fun. This, finally, is more like dancing. Your body knows, so your mind can let go.