Delirium Dives: Stories from the Ski Slopes

By Ivo Moravec

"A snowflake is the most beautiful form of water"

That is one of the observations of a lifelong skier who:

• Discovered a skiing paradise in the Canadian Rockies
• Experienced a few hard lessons in a snow school
• Survived his first descent of a double black diamond
• Skied with Olympic cham

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ivo Moravec
• Release date: Nov 29, 2015
• ISBN: 9780994912800

Book preview

Špindl or Memory of Snowflakes

Asnowflake is the most beautiful form of water. Maybe that’s why toddlers, children and even adults love to play with snow, in snow, or surrounded by snow, building snowmen, digging tunnels, throwing snowballs, sliding on sleds or skis. Snowflakes are perpetually recycled water, after all, so they must remember a lot. Maybe everything.

This white tiny lace that lands on my palm? I see myself in it. I am three years old. I have another kid’s skis on my feet for the first time. Watching myself, I vividly feel excitement and exhilaration spiced with a bit of fear as I am released from my father’s arms to slide over twenty feet of snow into my mom’s embrace.

I must have liked the experience, because this snowflake shows me at one year older. Now I have my own skis, found somewhere in the attic of my grandpa’s country home in Chotouň, and I am skiing down the slope behind our cabin. If not for the light-reflecting snow it would be dusk already, but I refuse to go inside. I have yet to ski the slalom course that I set for myself with sticks and ski-poles, especially the last gate where I have installed a horizontal bar that I will have to duck underneath. Since I reach barely above the knees of my present almost two meter tall self, that will be no problem. Today, having ducked so low, I would never straighten back up, but, small, I was so close to the snow that falling was nothing but fun.

This flake, the one with a tag bearing the number seven: dear me, am I really schussing down that big, that really big hill on Pec pod Snežkou, in the real mountains? And for the first time riding a chairlift there, all the way up to the summit of Snežka, the highest mountain in Bohemia?

What about this pinkish snowflake with a whiff of some vaguely familiar smell? Ah yes, acetone. My family is getting ready for the season, and I’m preparing the skis, which means leaning them against the central heating radiator, spreading lots of newspapers underneath, prying open the little can of special bright red acetone paint and painting the wood bases of all the skis. This is partly to smooth over small scratches and gouges inflicted by the previous winter, partly to make the skis go faster and partly to prevent fresh snow from sticking to them. How old am I? Hard to tell. I was entrusted with this job between the ages of ten and fifteen.

Why is this flake trembling a bit? Oh, I see: my first craziness. Returning from a trek with a group of friends along the ridge above Špindl, I insist on skiing down to the valley instead of taking the lift, like all the others. One guy, almost a grown-up, has volunteered to accompany me, though he is neither a good skier nor familiar with the layout of the runs. So instead of skiing the intended easy Tourist run, we find ourselves fooled onto a run for downhill racing. It seems quite flat at the start, but by the time there is no escape it has bared its teeth: terribly steep and pocked with moguls. My first contact with bumps. Contacts, I should say, because my behind is blue before we make it down. Some of those bumps were almost bigger than I was. Well, beginnings are often painful.

And this flake is Petrovka, a lodge on a ridge high above Špindl. I am almost twelve. As was the custom of the day, the lodge employs two counselors, one for culture and one for sport. The former takes care of evening entertainment, organizing games like musical chairs, while the latter normally acts as a guide for tours and treks. Back then, skiing consisted mostly of trekking through the beauties of mother nature. On this particular occasion, it happened to be snowing and treks were prohibited, so a downhill skiing course was offered. We ski-packed fresh snow on a meadow and spent two mornings on it. There I learned, to my astonishment, that it matters which ski carries the most weight, when to shift the weight, where to put my butt, how to manage my upper body and shoulders so as not only to turn, but to do so smoothly, with skis almost parallel. Through this good man, the gods revealed that there is a mechanics of skiing and suggested the direction of my efforts for many years to come.

This divine enlightenment came in handy two winters later when I was spending a March school break in Špindl. Waves of cheering broke out from school inmates, there and all over the country, when the dour-faced anchor on TV announced an extension of the holidays into the so-called coal vacations, phenomena of Socialism. Whenever the temperature dropped to around minus five, with maybe ten centimeters of snow, the perfectly planned economy began to sputter and choke. Either there was not enough coal or not enough railway cars to transport it. Anyway, existing supplies were directed away from such public buildings as schools and toward industry. Education of the next generation could wait. I was lucky to be waiting out the break at Špindl. I walked up the meadows, skied down, walked up, skied down. Now and then, money permitting, I took the T-bar or even the chairlift. For these, there were at least one-hour lineups, but that was still better than having to walk up every run. Despite all the walking, I got in an awful lot of skiing and improved tremendously. Compared with the usual one week of skiing, plus perhaps another weekend or two per season, those three weeks were miraculous. Twenty-one days of white enchantment, during which a few snowflakes must have gotten under my skin, entered my bloodstream and ascended into some crevice of my cortex to create a snow squall. In the higher elevations of my brain, a small glacier must have formed, one that sometimes grows, sometimes recedes, but never completely melts away.

This particular snowflake looks almost grown up. Well, I am fifteen, and it’s after the ’64 Innsbruck winter Olympics. The glacier in my brain must now be substantial. I am standing in the shop of the House of Sports in Prague, examining dark red, Czech-made Artis skis—hickory wood, with interlocking edges, the best money can buy in Czechoslovakia. 680 crowns, half the average monthly wage. I had made some extra money picking hops in September, and saved for the rest. Now I’m almost ready to part with it all. The skis have neither a wooden base nor a pertinax base. Instead, they sport something orange, something yet unseen, unheard of—a plastic called Kofix. I have heard about this revolutionary novelty, seen it on TV during races, even glimpsed it in Špindl whenever somebody there was lucky enough to have skis made in Austria. Apparently this base is fast as lightning, can be easily repaired, and snow doesn’t stick to it at all. Not a speck. Can’t be beat. It’s worth the money. Isn’t it? I hesitate two, three hours, examining the skis minutely again and again, and still I fail to realize what the gold letters spelling Downhill mean. As distinct from Slalom or Giant Slalom. I don’t yet know that, to achieve stability at high speeds, downhill skis compromise the ability to make shorter turns. I have no idea how difficult it will be to force them into any turn under thirty meters in radius. My ignorance will cost me a few years of hard labor.

And give me great pleasure, ecstasies—as a swarm of snowflakes from my teenage years now reminds me. Those skis truly did love speed. They screamed with joy when I let them point straight downhill. At least I did. That’s why that winter I skied the Tourist run—I could find my way to it now—in a straight line, top to bottom, in a tuck for greater speed, bumps or no bumps. My young legs could somehow deal with the topography then. Even today, I can break into a cold sweat, recalling those insane dashes. Did I mention that I made them through traffic? Even in the morning, when the hill traffic was lighter, there would be quite a few tourists and other beginners zigzagging from tree to tree across the run. I may have been looking at them down the nose of my teenage arrogant self-confidence, but I was obliged at least to calculate their trajectories so my straight line would not be interrupted with an intersection. For that reason, I skied along the edges, close to the trees, where most others were scared to go, unless to stop and rest. Anyone who did stop there sent me even closer to the trees or, at worst, caused me to jump over their skis. I must have been terrifying. In my youthful stupidity I was above considering that my eighty kilograms at sixty or seventy kilometers per hour could have seriously injured or even killed somebody, even myself. Only today, in retrospect and with the deepest gratitude, do I tip my hat to my guardian angel. I caught a glimpse of him a few times back then. Especially while undoing the leather thongs of my ski bindings I would glimpse him standing, pale, his chest heaving, his wings trembling a bit, removing his toque and wiping the sweat off his forehead. His eyes reproachful. But after an hour of waiting in the lift line he would have recovered his equanimity, just as my stock of piss and vinegar was refilled. He didn’t have it easy on the way up, either. First, the lift had a single chair so he had to fly; second, the chair had no safety device, nothing but a backrest, and once I fell off. He would have been grateful that, whenever he was groggy after I escaped a real disaster by the skin of my teeth, I went back to the meadow to practice shorter turns or, ironically, to instruct my parents.

Around that time I began seriously to follow what was going on in skiing. For a short time I even considered racing before concluding that a city boy like me had no chance against kids who grew up in the mountains. And, yes, I think I can now admit an ideological lapse: I confess that I doubted, comrades. I doubted that in Socialism everything was the best. In fact I sinned by longing to ski at least once in the biggest mountains, like the Alps. True, the Olympic runs of Innsbruck were a mere two hundred kilometers farther than Špindl—about the distance from Edmonton to Jasper—but between them fell an obstacle more impenetrable than ten avalanches one on top of the other: the Iron Curtain. The snows of imperialism were not for us. A ski trip to Innsbruck would certainly have triggered some kind of corrupting avalanche in the crevices of our brains. So there was only dreaming, watching TV races on Hahnenkamm or, later, the Grenoble Olympics of ’68. And there was skiing at home.

But how about this flake, this perfect incarnation of crystalline art: I am twenty one, and high above Špindl a new T-bar has been opened. There is good snow and not a single bump on this meadow. I have somehow lost control of myself, or else gained control, so my skis are running as if on their own. I am skiing like never before, feet glued together, purely parallel, smooth and supple. After years of trying, I have finally broken through into a style called snaking in which the feet glide sideways and back again, writing one letter S after another in the snow, fluid, undulating and floating, I don’t know why or how I can suddenly do this, and I don’t care. The happiness is overwhelming. It rises and rises and floods my throat until I howl with joy. The overwhelming orgasm of the skier. Second run, third run: it lasts the whole day. I pray that the knowhow doesn’t evaporate over the summer, that I will not have lost it before the next winter comes.

Years of plenty are usually followed by lean years. In my own situation, there was still plenty of snow, but my access to it became severely limited. There was no money for frivolities, and there were obstacles, other priorities than sliding over snowflakes: finishing university, compulsory military service, renovation of an apartment, providing for my new family. It was some ten years before I visited Špindl again, this time with my wife, Jana, and our three-year-old son, Ivo. The trip was subsidized so we could afford it. We stayed at the hotel run by the institute where I worked. And the snowflake from this trip is my all-time favorite: once again I am on the Tourist run , but this time terrorizing nobody. I am snowplowing backwards, bending forward to keep Ivo’s ski-tips together. He is holding my toque with both hands and squealing with delight. He has instantly discovered how much fun skiing can be. He is feeling the same excitement and exhilaration that I feel, spiced with just a tiny bit of fear because nothing bad can happen to a boy with both hands gripping his Daddy’s toque.

Banff or Blizzards Through the Frozen Mind

Sometimes a word is enough to trigger an avalanche. Conditions must be right, of course. In summer you might yell yourself hoarse and trigger nothing, there being no snow. In winter, there may be plenty of snow, mountains of it, but not every mountain is ready for an avalanche. The layer, or, better, layers of snow must be unstable. Then very little prompting may be required. A single word may suffice.

When we made it to Canada as fresh immigrants, defectors from Czechoslovakia, we couldn’t have cared less about skiing. It’s not that we were never reminded of the existence of skiing, even in relatively flat southwestern Ontario. A first thorough examination of the city map revealed that on its southwestern outskirts was something called the London Ski Club. Well, so what? Different challenges were now pressing. The information went into the dump of memory, but apparently just to the periphery, where it remained intact. When two years had passed, after we had found our first jobs and acquired a used car with which I delivered pizza, we made a trip to the ski hill. It would only be right to become familiar with even the remote corners of the city in which we lived, would it not?

It was Sunday and snowing. A small hill, three T-bars and a children’s tow, plenty of patrons. In the chalet there was a shop renting skis and boots. That was a novelty to us, there being no such facility in Bohemia. But again, so what? Money was scarce and needed for more substantial things. Still, the sight of the kids frolicking around the little tow lit up Ivo’s eyes. It might not be that expensive for the two of you, Jana suggested, and it wasn’t. So we abandoned our common sense to take a two-hour slide on the kiddie hill.

The fact that a mysterious déjà vu connects the before and the after of our immigration can be demonstrated by this picture, almost identical with the one described above: I am once again standing in a sports store, examining and reexamining skis, not Artis this time, but rather orange uber-Austria-made Blizzards. I’m not sixteen now; now I’m almost forty and should know better. The Blizzards have Kofix, oh yes, silver and much improved. Once again, I’m checking them, flexing them, caressing them, and just as before I can’t decide. Two months ago I started a job at the Ford plant south of London, so I can afford these skis, especially since they are last year’s model, and on sale,