A Wolverine Is Eating My Leg (36 page)

The trick here is training. Sure, that once-impossible slope is still scary—it will get the anxiety-producing adrenaline pumping—but practice reduces adrenaline levels and diminishes terror. Like rats subjected to regular sound-blasting, the trained skier should exhibit higher levels of the good stuff, of the noradrenaline, which produces both euphoria and that preternatural alertness that begins to coagulate time itself.

Filmmakers have known that slow is fast since at least 1954. Before that, directors tried to suggest supernatural speed by filming a sequence in fast motion. I am think of F. W. Murnau’s 1922 classic,
Nosferatu
, with Max Schreck starring as the most horrid Dracula ever. Schreck, rising from his coffin, the long fingers, gnarled in front of his splendidly terrific face as if they were talons, is enough to send the faint-hearted running blindly out of the theater. But the scene in which Nosferatu’s black horse-drawn coach makes supernatural time along a mountain trail generally draws laughs from modern audiences. Fast motion is funny. Horses run ridiculously. Cornering is jerky. Fast motion is Chaplinesque. Subjectively, it just doesn’t feel right.

In 1954, Akira Kurosawa tackled the problem of filming incredibly fast action in
Seven Samurai
. When the bandits rode into that fictional sixteenth-century village, the seven samurai chopped ’em up in slow motion. And it worked.
Other directors began to catch on: ah so, they seemed to say in unison,
slow is fast
.

In 1969, Sam Peckinpah used slow-motion techniques in
The Wild Bunch
. The final slaughter in a Mexican village, circa 1913, is a symphony of violence, and like most deadly violence, it happens with a rapidity so intense that the most horrifying sequences are realized in slow motion.

In the seventies, the idea that slow is fast came to television in two successful series: “Kung Fu” and “The Six Million Dollar Man.” Inching into the eighties, a series called “The Incredible Hulk” presented the physiologically sound idea that a man under enormous stress might call on unimagined wells of strength. Like those women you read about who lift Camaros off their trapped babies, the Hulk only tore down buildings when that mother, Necessity, dictated. And he did it in slow motion.

These filmic techniques work because everyone has suffered through some degree of strong stress. Everyone knows, at least subconsciously, that time seems to slow down when we endure intense experience. Our bodies remember: slow is fast, slow is strong.

We don’t actually think: hey, let’s maximize regularized stress to stimulate the old noradrenaline secretions, get high, and watch time decelerate. What we do is push it right to the raggedy edge because it’s fun, because it makes us feel good.

What we do is think: I can ski this slope. We think, I’ll really burn up the hill this time. What we do is take calculated chances because they make us feel good.

I’m at the top of a good run called Pierre’s Knob, at Bridger Bowl outside Bozeman, Montana. It’s a little after four and the lifts are scheduled to close at 4:15, but if I tear down the knob and cut over to the middle lift down the short, steep expert slope called White Lightning, I can probably make one more run.

Now, I know this is a dicey situation. I’ve been skiing straight since ten this morning, with no time off for lunch. My legs are a little shaky. The big sky is glacial and gray, and it’s getting difficult to see the bumps. This, I know, is
the time of day when people get hurt. They get hurt doing exactly what I am doing. They get hurt skiing right up to the edge of their ability when they are tired and it is late and the light has gone bad on them.

No matter. Here I am, blasting down Pierre’s Knob—best run of the day, I’m really burning—building up a head of steam for the short flat before White Lightning and ohoh, a little shot in the belly because I almost lost it there … but, yes, I’ve got it back, I’m in control and I can see all the way to the lip of White Lightning. My mind’s eye can see the way I’ll take it. No stopping at the top to read the slope: I’ll just bang right over the lip in a shower of snow and be down to the lift before caution can assert itself.

The run is so steep that you can’t really see it until you are right on top of it, and I am contemplating the line I’ll take in my mind as I roar up onto the lip. Time begins inching toward freeze-frame because something is terribly wrong here. Something is dangerously askew. Ah, there it is, right on the lip of White Lightning: the top of a small bush or tree is sticking four or five inches up out of the snow. I have the leisure to notice that it looks like a juniper and to reflect that they are sturdy little suckers. Microseconds inflate into minutes. It is plainly evident that I am going to hit that juniper. I am already skiing the raggedy edge. I am going to crash and burn unless I can somehow adjust for treacherous vegetation.

Time, fortunately, has run up against a sea of noradrenaline and is struggling against it like a mastodon in a tar pit. I’ll just put all my weight over onto the right ski like this; and I’ll lift the left ski over the juniper. Plenty of time: the bush is approaching at a single frame a second. Slow motion city. There is time to feel the wind on my face, to realize that it will probably snow this night. I am looking at the juniper, but I can see the lift below and half a dozen people waiting in line. I know that I will make the last run. I have all the time in eternity to lift my left ski.…

Except that execution trails perception. The inside tip of the lift ski doesn’t quite clear the juniper. My forward motion causes the unweighted ski to swivel savagely, and the
back edge bangs into the calf of my right leg. There is the sound of a snap, but I know it is just impact, and not a broken bone: I am tipped forward. I am about to fall. Golly, this is taking a long time. You can achieve the same sensation by standing on the bottom stair and leaning slowly, slowly forward until you lose your balance. Here it comes—Jeez, I’m halfway down White Lightning, flailing all the way, and all the people in line below are looking at me—and that’s it, I’m going down. Head first.

This, I reflect casually, promises to become even more unpleasant. I make first contact with the ground. Skis pop off and drag behind on the straps. Ass over teakettle one more time. Snow inside my parka. Everything is happening in slow motion: this is the agony of defeat writ large. I am coming slowly over on the third revolution and have no choice but to bite snow. I wonder if there is some formula to calibrate how long a body weighing two hundred pounds will slide on a 20-percent slope, given the friction of a nylon parka—whoops, over one more time—and I come to rest at the bottom of the hill. Just slide right into the last position in the lift line.

“I’m okay,” I announce to the world at large. No one has asked me. They are all too busy laughing. I have provided an example of comedy skiing at its best. But I made it. I’m the last person on the lift this day.

And I am not in pain. Adrenaline, noradrenaline, and another substance secreted by the body in times of stress or pain—betaendorphin, the chemical structure of which resembles morphine—all combine to numb pain. In a ten-minute ride to the top of the mountain, these substances begin to be reabsorbed. What this means is that the body’s natural painkillers have worn off. What it means is that I come off the lift and collapse, feeling like I’ve been trampled by a lot of fat people riding elephants.

It takes over an hour to side-slip down the mountain. The sun has set, snow is falling, and the world has entered another ice age. Time and motion, at last, are one.

T
hey’re up there now, on the ridge above the Bridger Bowl Ski Area, risking their lives, catching clean air, running the avalanches and the Orgasms, banging chutes, kicking the snow loose, packing it down, controlling the danger, stabilizing the slope. Most of those who ski below don’t even know they exist, the powder hounds and pinheads, the air patrol and chute divers. Up above the beginners and intermediates and merely expert skiers, the Bridger Bowl extreme skiers are pounding down nearly vertical avalanche chutes whose very names suggest insane degrees of difficulty: Psychopath, Madman’s, Cuckoo’s.

They embrace the concept of terminal wipeout and broken bones, of the face wash and the endo—not to mention the possibility of being buried alive under several tons of snow—like voracious lovers. The skiing can get kinky on the ridge overlooking Bridger Bowl. The runs that aren’t named for psychological aberrations invoke the pleasure of sex: Mr. Creamjeans, the Tits Traverse, Tease Me Dear, and the Orgasms, which everyone calls the O’s.

And if they weren’t on the ridge, these extreme skiers pounding up and down in their own psychopathic or pornographic frenzy, those of us confined by the limits of our ability to lower slopes would be exposed to one of the more unpleasant forms of death, white and cold, thundering down from above.

The theory of geographical determinism supposes that
the physical environment of a people influences its institutions and culture. This theory might hold, for example, that in America slavery was largely confined to the South because climate and soil conditions there conspired to produce labor-intensive crops, like cotton, while Northern agriculture was best suited to family farming. This may or may not be so—it seems a pernicious idea to me—but there is little doubt that the natural world determines the sort and quality of athletes. Does anyone doubt that there are more and better surfers currently living in Hawaii than in Kansas?

In Montana, one small ski area, catering primarily to locals, produces some of the finest specialized extreme skiers in the world. Impossibly steep slopes falling through shoulder-width canyons of rock will produce both broken bones and excellence. “Fear,” as Coleridge said, “gives sudden instincts of skill.”

The hill that gets all that adrenaline pumping is Bridger Bowl, located just outside Bozeman, Montana. The mountain is particularly prone to avalanches because of its verticality. While most ski areas are located on mountains with rounded tops, Bridger rises sharply to a narrow ridge. To get a sense of the mountain, imagine that the floor of your mouth is the bowl. The ski lifts begin at the root of your tongue and stop at the gum lines. Above the groomed slopes are the jagged teeth of the ridge.

The bowl is sheltered from the wind, and the only place it really blows hard is up on top of the ridge. Snow sweeps up over the back of the mountain and forms a huge overhanging cornice that shadows the vertical cliffs below. For the most part, it is dry, powdery snow that falls here—called cold smoke—and it fills the canyons and forms pillowlike slabs on the steep slopes below the cornice.

The pillows spawn avalanches. Given a bright warm day, for instance, the snow will form a sun crust. New snow atop the crust will have a different crystalline structure, due to inevitable differences in water content, rate of fall, and temperature. it is the interface between snow layers that causes problems. As falling snow compresses, the crystals
round out, quickly losing their star shape. Now, with a great slab of new snow sitting atop a bed of icy ball bearings, which in turn is balanced atop hard sun-crusted snow, the pillow is unstable, and any little thing—a loud noise, a skier moving silkily over the surface—can cause hundreds of tons of ice to begin rolling downhill.

Several years ago, one of the high pillows slabbed off on a warm spring day long after Bridger had closed for the season. The avalanche rumbled down into the bowl, pushing the air before it so that half a dozen one-hundred-foot-high Douglas firs were bent nearly double with the howling force of hurricane-level winds. When the mass of snow rolled by the trees, the wind stopped, at once, as it never does under ordinary circumstances. The trees snapped upward so violently in the sudden calm that they broke off about halfway up. You can see these fifty-foot-high stumps about three-quarters of the way down the mountain. They provide an uncomfortable feeling of claustrophobia under the Big Sky, a sense of massive weight hanging precariously above.

No one has ever been seriously injured in an avalanche at Bridger Bowl since it opened in 1954, and this is because the ski patrol is particularly sensitive to the danger. Every morning at first light, before most of the day’s skiers are even awake, seven to ten members of the patrol walk the ridge, knocking down the snow that overhangs the cornice. They toss hand charges—two and a half pounds of dynamite—into the pillows that form fifteen to twenty feet under the ridge.

Meanwhile, other patrol workers fire a seventy-five-millimeter recoilless rifle into larger, lower pillows. The mounted gun throws a high-explosive plasticized tracer that knocks loose spectacular avalanches.

Joel Juergens, the twenty-nine-year-old director of the Bridger Bowl ski patrol, calls this sort of work “control.” After substantial snowfall, “a dump,” Juergens will examine the twenty-four-hour pattern of winds and eyeball the slopes for areas of potential danger. “If there are areas of instability,” he explains, “we deal with them.”