Wolverine Cirque

By Joseph Olshan

Wolverine Cirque, one of the steepest and most dangerous ski runs in North America, looms over this original short—a taut, gripping tale of male athleticism and love—by Joseph Olshan
Sam and Mike, top-notch skiers, hike miles off piste to face a harrowing headwall of snow, a sheer descent that challenges their skill, their endurance, and ultimately, their ability to survive.
At the center of the story is Sam’s painful and poignant reminiscence of a complicated and doomed love affair with Luc, a Division I soccer player who struggles with his identity and the surprising power of desire finally unleashed. As both men grapple with the intensity of their affection for one another, Sam is forced to reckon that his attempt to master Wolverine Cirque is really a futile effort to stay the arguably more difficult course of his declining youth.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Release date: Jul 9, 2013
• ISBN: 9781480437265

Joseph Olshan

Joseph Olshan is an award-winning American novelist whose works include Cloudland, The Conversion, Nightswimmer, and The Sound of Heaven.His critically acclaimed first novel, Clara's Heart, was the winner of the Times/Jonathan Cape Young Writers’ Competition and subsequently the basis for a motion picture starring Academy Award–winner Whoopi Goldberg. A former book reviewer for the Wall Street Journal, Olshan has written extensively for numerous publications including the New York Times, the New York Times Magazine, the Times (London), the Washington Post,Harper’s Bazaar, People magazine, and Entertainment Weekly. Once a professor of creative writing at New York University, Olshan currently lives in Vermont. His work has been translated into sixteen languages.

Book preview

Wolverine Cirque

Joseph Olshan

IF YOU COULD BE GIVEN your youth back, it might only have true meaning for a few days, or maybe even a week. A month might allow you to forget that you were ever old, but the whole point would be to never forget—to understand that your visit back in time would expire almost as soon as it began. Sam is thinking this as he and Mike soldier the last ascent up a trail in the Wasatch Mountains of Utah, skis on their shoulders, notching their ski boots into steep snowpack, eyeing the flat table above where they’ll soon stop and put on the rest of their gear. They’ve been hiking for an hour and a half in whirring, wintry silence, punctuated by groans and cackles of shifting snow and ice and by the soft wailing of the wind. The sun is high, and it’s a bluebird day. Looming constantly to their left is Wolverine Cirque, whose headwalls are built up from ice melt that has gathered layers of snow; the slope looks almost vertical in places, dark dashes of rock to be avoided at all costs. It’s an extreme descent that only solid expert skiers can drop into and be confident of surviving. The adrenaline blast of a run to the bottom of the canyon would, to those above them, be almost meaningless.

The night before, pointing to the image of the cirque on the computer screen, Mike said, You can get into it one of two ways. You can sideslip in, ski straight down the first headwall, then check your speed and pick your way for a bit until it gets wider—then he grinned maniacally—or you can just jump off the cornice, which I don’t think either of us wants to do.

At forty-five, Mike is five years younger,