Hard work making it look easy

When it was more difficult, skiing was definitely more elegant.

The simple act of staying upright on two long boards as one shot down over a frozen surface was wonder enough, but then making turns along the way, actually steering the darn things. It was amazing.

Now add the style and grace of some of the first skiers from places like the Tyrol and Norway we saw -- Hannes Schneider, Stein Eriksen, for example -- and skiing was something near miraculous.

Schneider's son, Herbert, who took over the Cranmore Ski School from his father, said when the United States was getting into skiing in a mass way, in the '50s and '60s, that it took about six years to rank as a proficient skier. By proficient, he meant intermediate.

But everything moved slower and took longer in the wooden skis era, including the drive from Boston to Portsmouth, N.H., then the interminable grind up Route 16 through town after town until, traffic light by traffic light, and the local lumber company truck creeping along under its overload, we would arrive at Cranmore and haul our stuff into an inn or clubhouse or rented farmhouse.

Actually, I was a late starter, and my first ski trip was with a class trip with a bunch of friends from Thayer Academy to Wildcat.

We stayed on a farm, and in those days I was more interested in riding horses, and had a wonderful morning in fresh snow on a horse who got feeling young and frisky and made me wonder if controlling skis could be much harder than controlling this spirited mare.

I found out that afternoon; it was. My skis were a pair of red-and-blue painted Monarchs, my boots a lace-up leather, resembling some cross between an ice skate and a bowling shoe. My teacher was some college kid who really made me look bad in front of my girlfriend. He would demonstrate a few linked turns, skiing a hundred yards or so and then looking back up the hill, imploring me to do the same.

Now let me explain that instructor's teaching technique: Imagine you are taking a golf lesson from, oh say, Tiger Woods. He would say to you, watch my drive, and then unleash that amazingly whiplike swing of his as the ball, with a click, lifts high and straight, bound for a perfect 300-yard ride.

"Just do that," Tiger would say as you stepped up to the ball, utterly as clueless about hitting it after watching Tiger as you were before.

Anyway, the big issue for me was whether to have my girlfriend go after the instructor so she could get down and look up the hill at me attempting to follow, or go second myself and feel her eyes behind me, beholding my wobbling, teetering, misshapen form crawling down through the snow. I was a football tackle, and it showed.

Those who start skiing as children never have that problem. No, it isn't about fearlessness or rubbery resilient bones, sinew, and cartilage. It's about easier physics -- less mass, gravity, much shorter righting moment, about muscle memory on the blank slate. Something about all the above, I think. Anyway, start skiing as a teenager, and you'll never attain the level of one who starts in single digits. Which does not mean the whole adventure of the sport is any less enjoyable, and perhaps the little gains made, the little victories, are even more treasured than they are to the lifetime natural who takes grace and elegance for granted.

Because, face it, skiing is not about getting down the hill fastest -- though that is fun -- or even about the amenities of beauty in the winter outdoors. It's all about grace and elegance. At the Lillehammer Games in 1994 there was a masters race with an old-fashioned theme -- period costume and equipment, a sort of giant slalom course set down the front hill with posts fashioned from gnarled tree limbs with flags tied on the ends.

The idea was to commemorate the glories of Norway's skiing history, and so the racers wore 8-foot hickory boards, leather boots with rawhide thongs, and carried bamboo poles with big round baskets. All except Eriksen, who wore a period-looking Dale sweater with big pewter buttons, a kerchief at his neck, suede-looking knickers, but thoroughly modern plastic boots and composite racing skis.

It didn't take long to figure out what was going on. Ever since his gold- and silver- medal performances in the 1952 Oslo Olympics, Eriksen became a legendary teacher in the United States -- head of a half-dozen ski schools in the Rockies, and one of the developers of Deer Valley, Utah -- whose trademark was always elegance. His style, built on his gymnastic training, was flawless, gorgeous, and there was no way, even for a history exhibition, that the silver-coiffed Eriksen was going to take a step back from that elegance he was known for.

Well, in case you haven't figured it out, I never attained the elegance of a Stein Eriksen. To extend the golf analogy (when I took a golf lesson from Rusty Gunnerson at North Hill a few years ago, I whacked the ground so many times I developed tendinitis of the thumb for six weeks), I was as far from Stein Eriksen as I was from Tiger Woods. The comparison breaks down at the knowledge that I love skiing as much as I hate golf.

Somewhere along the way, ski marketers figured out that Americans have very short attention spans, and that if you ask someone to stick to a sport for six seasons before attaining intermediate status, he just might go bowling in the winter. You can knock pins down with the first ball. So snow production -- blowing and grooming -- created an ever-improved product, and the sweet spot in ski equipment continued to grow until Les Otten could advertise that if Sunday River ski school could not teach you to ski in one day that your cost would be refunded.

Take your eye-high parabolic skis to a broad white boulevard and know what? It is easy to ski these days. Until, that is, you get off the big boulevard and hit some big ice bumps, perhaps deep powder in the trees, and then take it all onto a 38-degree pitch. If you can make that stuff look easy, brother, you truly are an elegant skier.