Tied tightly to the roof of the nearly new 1929 model A Ford coupe was my two-man toboggan that I had spent half of the semester of my seventh grade woodshop class making. This as my first project.
I was already freezing cold as we started to climb up into the San Gabriel Mountains. Even though I had left my pajamas on when I pulled my Levi’s over my skinny legs at 4:30 in the morning, I also wore two sweatshirts and a semblance of a windbreaker. I had dipped my 29-cent, wool mittens in melted paraffin to make them waterproof.
On the advice of my woodshop teacher, I had spent an extra $.25 on copper rivets instead of ordinary wood screws to make sure that the toboggan would hold together for a full day of what turned out to be a fun day of frolicking in powder snow.
After an hour or so of digging, we had built a left turn that would bank the toboggan but still maintain most of its speed.
We were sopping wet almost to our waist by the time we got the toboggan track built and had only taken two rides when we watched four skiers making turns wherever they wanted to and pulled up to a stop to watch us flounder in the deep snow. This turned out to be on one of the two most important life-changing moments I experienced because of the freedom a snow-covered hill could offer anyone willing to climb to the top of it on skis. This was in 1937, the year after the first chairlift was built at Sun Valley, Idaho.
I was born with good luck on my shoulders because a week later a friend of mine named Julius Butler showed me a pair of skis hanging in his garage. They had no metal edges and the bindings were a simple piece of leather that went through a horizontal mortise in the ski itself and over the top of the toe of the boot. The ski poles were made of heavy bamboo with baskets on the end the size of dinner plates.
On my next trip to the snow with the Boy Scouts, I wore my hiking boots that came almost up to my knees and had a special pocket on the side of one where I could keep a folding pocketknife in case of a rattlesnake bite. If the snake was successful in biting my leg the procedure was to take the knife and cut an X in each tooth mark and then suck the venom out of the wound. No one ever told me how I could get my lower leg into my mouth in order to drain the poison out, but at least I was prepared.
Back to the first day I got to use my new skis. I rode to the end of the road that became the Mount Waterman ski development several years later when I tried to sidestep up the hill with these tow strap skis and bindings. I watched my Boy Scout leader traverse across the hill. As my skis traversed the hill and I attempted to push my heels of the skis apart and keep the tips together, they didn’t work the way I wanted them to. My tips and tails stayed together and the heels of my boots went out to each side and dragged in the snow. When I got to the end of the traverse and turned around, I had come to a stop in the gravel on the side of the snowfield and fell out of the bindings. It was simple then to lift the skis up and point them back in the other direction and traverse back. After my fifth traverse, I felt like I was 9 feet higher than where I started.
When lunchtime came, I traded my patrol leader a peanut butter sandwich and two Fig Newtons for the use of his skis and boots while he ate half of my lunch. It was a different experience with a pair of skis with real bindings and metal edges and borrowed ski boots than it was with my 3-foot long, pine skis without edges.
I wish I could say I completed a turn on these laminated hickory skis with edges, but that was not the case. All I accomplished was getting in a steeper and faster traverse but luckily fell uphill in a long skid.
Undoubtedly, I reacted more to that first day on skis than most people do. Over the years, I have tried to figure out why and come up with a realistic answer. I don’t have one other than it was also my first day of total freedom, enough to have that first day of skiing buried in my psyche. I know that in October every year I start getting anxious and twitchy for the first day of winter when I can feel that bitter cold wind on my face and the draining of my bank account again.
Warren Miller is history’s most prolific and enduring ski filmmaker. Visit warrenmiller.net or his Facebook page at facebook.com/warrenmiller. Read more of Warren’s stories at TheTahoeWeekly.com.
