October 29th, 2008
“The young do not know enough to be prudent, and therefore they attempt the impossible, and achieve it, generation after generation.” —Pearl S. Buck
As a little girl in Minnesota, I sat around and dreamed of skiing. Nevermind that the nearest “hill,” Mt. Frontenac was 45 minutes away and has now become a golf course. I’d scribble pictures of skiers doing daffies and spread-eagles in my notebooks, draw ski company logos, and daydream about being in the mountains of Utah. The first time I used Photoshop in a computer class, I cut and pasted my 12-year-old buck-tooth school picture face onto the image of a skier jumping out of a helicopter.
When I moved to Utah at age 15, I had a new dream. I went to a school with a ski academy, and many of my classmates were able to get out of school to go ski race. I wanted this so badly, and pleaded to my principal to let me get on this program. “You’re too old,” he said. “Besides, you don’t have any race results.” I remember the despair and misery I felt walking out of his office my first week of school, being the awkward new 10th grader in a 50-student class, mostly made up of students who had been there since they were 2. “Lifers” they were called.
But I didn’t give up. I took advantage of every opportunity I had to sneak away for an afternoon powder day, skipping classes and driving cautiously in my 2-wheel drive Ford Escort wagon so I didn’t get caught. The first day a new friend invited me to go skiing at Snowbird, I showed up in a pair of sunglasses because the foam in my goggles was all torn up. He went into his car and threw me a pair of Smiths…”Wear these, you’ll need them when we get to the top of the tram.” I struggled so hard to keep up with him that day, but after run one, I was lost in the woods, struggling to get my long, skinny skis out of the powder.
I’d sit in class, waiting for graduation, while I listened to the ski racers talking about their recent adventures to exotic places like Austria and Bogus Basin. As soon as I graduated, I skied every single day, non-stop and wanted to meet everybody in the Cottonwood Canyons to find some new friends so I could redefine myself–I wanted to be an extreme, big mountain skier. I was trying to find acceptance and love and adrenaline, to fill the hole, to balance the chemicals inside my head. “Go to school,” family and friends told me when I talked about my dream of becoming a professional skier. I felt the same way I did when I walked out of the principal’s office that day, dejected but more and more determined.
Now, they see my ski pictures and are proud. My parents have pictures of me skiing and rock climbing all over their offices at work. I may not be traveling around the world living the rockstar life, but accomplishing what I have has made me realize I can do anything and everything I want to (law school, business school, design, acting, politics…), and that I don’t have to live my life the way society tells me to. I think about all my friends now, and I see how lucky we are. We never accepted that you had to just go to college and work in our exploitive capitalist society, leaving its laborers with that dreadful sense of alienation. We’ve carved out an existence for ourselves — when people told us time and time again that it was impossible.
Now, as I’m stuck in school again, I look out the window and drift into a daydream where I am at the top of a peak somewhere in the Wasatch, watching the sun rise from there instead of in the classroom. But I know it will be soon, so I turn my attention back to the teacher’s lecture and remind myself it’s just a few more weeks…
Here’s a characterature my brother-in-law drew for me when I was 10.
Posted in Film & Photography, Salt Lake City, Skiing, Social Commentary
