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Writer's pictureJack O'Brien

An Ode to Winter (or They Never Mentioned We'd Get Old)

Updated: Sep 9, 2023


It’s 5:00am as the alarm dutifully sounds. Last night the sky was full of snow, and it kept falling. A foot of fresh powder lies on the deck and in the driveway, who knows how much fell four-thousand feet higher in the mountains. He wakes up his wife as he lurches from bed, hurrying to put on gloves, jacket, hat – tools for what is to come.

With little time to spare, the snowblower fires right up. The driveway is hastily cleared, making way for exit. His wife rushes to grab her things for the day, more throwing them inside her car than packing them. Snow still densely fills the air, driving to Earth with purpose.

Driveway cleared, and car ready, a soft cry breaks the silence. Inside his pocket, a baby monitor shows a little one rousing. His wife bids farewell as she makes her way to work. And as multitudes rush to the mountains, he returns inside, chores barely finished, to greet the morning with his baby boy.


The sun rises on a beautiful powder day, and I’m digging in at home with my cherished one-year-old. I wouldn’t trade this for anything, but I can’t ignore the crushing anxiety of missing out. No one ever told me about this, I didn’t read about the transition of becoming a ski town dad in Powder. Maybe that wouldn’t have made great reading for most. All I’m saying is that I’ve had to experience this for myself, like many before me. In our youth centric world of skiing, precious little about aging is written, filmed, hell, even talked about. The fountain of youth is what we all drink from, regardless of how much that’s fantasy, ever reinforced by the media our beloved subculture feeds from.


And it makes sense that the skiing narrative is so oriented toward the young and unattached. At its highest levels, the sport requires a physicality that starts to escape us as the clock approaches 40. Even many of the oft-romanticized ancillary ski town endeavors – things like après bravado, and late-night intoxicant-fueled romances – require a sprightly disposition, not to mention a blissful freedom from many adult responsibilities. Skiing and its culture is the embodiment of vigorous youth, giddily stumbling home after last call as the snow flies, second star on the right, straight on till morning.


But none of us are the Lost Boys (well, not like the story at least). And the graying guys who think they’re Pan haven’t been taking care of themselves since the winter of ’96. At a certain point, most of us move on. And like your buddy who had twins last winter, no one has heard from us in a while. We made decisions, sacrifices and – yes – unfortunately, occasionally settled. But it all happened for a purpose.


Nights on the town turned to evenings with our spouses. Powder days till noon turned into rushed resort tours at daybreak before work. And waiting tables with the fastest crowd in town evolved into various 9-5s so we can pay the daycare bill. We’re still here, but like the great rock acts of the 70s who flamed out in their 20s, those of us still around at 35 have entered a sort of protracted if early irrelevance. At least as far as the ski world is concerned.


No, we don’t know the bartenders anymore, but we haven’t given up the dream. We have entered a new world that is seldom mentioned in ski lore; we’ve moved away from the absolute focus on skiing and ski town life and on to true adulthood. And that transition isn’t always easy. There often isn’t a framework for understanding truly growing up in a ski town. Most of us came to this life to avoid responsibility, and those we witnessed going to the straight and narrow seemed to be giving up the dream – and were rarely seen again – they had new lives, new friends, new children. Often it’s a mystery what even happened to those people or what they now do.


But little did we know, one day we wouldn’t want to stay up all night, or that we had to keep an eye on our cholesterol. Or – good God – that we’d want to have kids.


But time marched on, and here we are. We are happily in this new stage of life, but it isn’t without some struggle to understand what life in a ski town means now. A life of skiing is remarkable in many ways – in how fun and fulfilling it is, but also how self-absorbed it can be. Powder and summit fever are solo endeavors that mostly benefit the lone experiencer of those emotions. Likewise, it's hard to be a good dad and go last-call, first-chair. It’s hard to be a good dad and get any chair sometimes. And that can be a tough reality to the previously die-hard skier.


It’s all the more challenging to grapple with this reality of missing out when the ski world outwardly shirks these responsibilities. Many ski town locals – friends, relatives, colleagues - choose not to have the same obligations. And more broadly, movies about or including fallen ski heroes influence the culture. These films, beginning credits emblazoned with the departed’s largest sponsor, invariably interview those left behind who unwaveringly state – without much context in the film – that they would have never asked their deceased spouses or friends to change as that would have fundamentally altered who they were. While that may be a true sentiment – and it surely sells tickets to ski movies – it adds an overdose of live-for-the-moment, responsibility-be-dammed ethos into the ski culture that just doesn’t match with the regular adult sensibilities and realities almost all of us eventually succumb to. I in no way want to diminish what those close to popular skiers who have perished go through. But the existing paradigm in ski media often portrays these stories theatrically and one dimensionally. For all of us – especially those of us with kids, dying for skiing would hardly be an acceptable outcome, no matter how much it’s part of who we are. But these stories are framed as the height of passionate skiing. They are the creation of heroes.


The slightly aged, present, and responsible parent doesn’t easily fit into ski lore. And that can leave those in that cohort feeling a little adrift as they enter that stage. Because we want to be good parents, and we want to ski. We just have to figure out what that means for ourselves.


But there’s more to life than skiing – I don’t have to tell you that. Eventually chasing romance, good times, and powder are supplemented with the often mundane, even difficult obligations of real life. Our parents get old and sick. Our friends even get sick, or struggle. Just like we might. Our kids come into this world, changing the scope of our lives’ meaning from then on – and absolutely for the best.

And skiing is always there, but not like the ski media likes to show it. Regardless of the incessant march of the clock – but maybe because of it – it’s easy for our media to neglect the deeper parts of life when skiing is so easy to frame as endless good times, or generically heroic in the face of mortality.


But life in the mountains, and life in general, is a mosaic. You could jump into the cliché; you could say that skiing does reflect life as improvisation, or that it is a transcendent endeavor, and all about the moment. But the true beauty of our full existence – the fight for meaning, the endurance through sorrows, the redemptive quality that so embodies being – can’t be illustrated in ski porn or Instagram filters – but it’s there in every ski town. That real life is happening all around us, and constantly.


I’ll still wish I was up there. Missing a powder day might always sting a little. I guess I can’t say I’ve fully made my peace with moving on from my life devoted just to skiing. But I still get my share. Ready or not, frustrated or grounded – but absolutely blessed, this is where I’m at. This is real life.

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