A Lesson In Impermanence

Words by Claire Murphy

“It gets more fun the better you get,” my mom assured me once, when I lamented that making decent turns, especially in powder, mostly felt like exhaustingly hard work. I learned to ski as an adult, in the backcountry, and it shows.

My mom and I never had the chance to see each other ski. She grew up skiing in Australia’s Snowy Mountains. I skied for the first time at Wachusett when I was 21 and then not again until a few years later. After happening upon a few weekend downhill trips with friends, I got so irretrievably hooked that I bought a touring setup for a trip out west with a now ex-boyfriend who, on our first and last tour together, was out of sight before I’d even successfully stepped into my pin bindings. When those skis arrived in the mail a month or so prior, I’d bounded into my parents’ house, undrilled sticks in tow, to show my mom. I still have them. I still ski them.

Even once it was clear skiing was an important part of my life, my mom and I didn’t talk about it much. She was fully reliant on her wheelchair by then, a marvel of modern machinery that allowed her more freedom than an ALS patient even ten years her senior could have imagined. I hated it with such visceral defiance that I refused to sit in it for any reason, not even to help maneuver it over to its charger when she was in bed, or from our van into the emergency department to which she had been transported by ambulance.

It was a futile, childish refusal. I had consented to nothing, but it all happened anyway, and I took every opportunity to deny ALS the satisfaction of my cooperation with its intrusion into our lives. But I did want to show her my skis, send her postcards from Telluride and photos from backcountry tours, and report to her when I felt like my skiing was improving. My first two winters out west were the last two I’d have with her.

On March 3, 2019, I skied the first in a series of storms that would bring sixty feet of snow to the upper elevations of the North San Juans. We got two laps in before CDOT gave us a one-way ticket back down to town. Red Mountain Pass closed that night for nearly three weeks as the storm snow obliterated all the known slide paths as well as a few new ones. By the time the pass reopened, I was back in Maryland saying my last goodbyes to my mom. The debris and damage from that historic storm cycle is still there today.

Subsequent winters have been riddled with bittersweet reminders of my mom. Later in 2019, I bought, for the first time, a new pair of skis that she would never get to see. Would she have believed I had any business on 173s? (I don’t). I skinned up into Browns Gulch solo on those skis one day a few winters ago, and when I got to the top, the glimmer of another world where I could have called her, texted her a photo, somehow improbably talked her into going up there with me, stuck in my throat and I couldn’t breathe. I took tea and cookies out of my pack and let that world be real for a minute. Tears blurred my vision the whole way down, but my legs knew what to do all on their own.

That winter after she passed away, I bought a pair of bamboo poles, because I liked the idea of an eco-friendly option and that a portion of my purchase would benefit the pandas. While it’s hardly a groundbreaking gear choice, they’re uncommon enough that people often compliment them on the chairlift, and always tease me about them on the skin track. A few days before the third anniversary of my mom’s passing, my dad emailed me a photo he’d found. A tiny kid in a red ski suit with white cats-eye sunglasses, lace-up boots, and solid wood skis was grinning into the camera under a bluebird sky. It was my mom at Perisher in the 60s, and gripped tight in each of her red mittens was a bamboo pole.

I regret now that I spent much of her illness running away, assuming there would be time for certain things - there were things to do, things to say, things to ask, of course, but later, not now, it was ludicrous to think that it could be NOW. It wasn’t sudden, wasn’t urgent, wasn’t too late, until it was.

Winter sports are a microcosm of this, a kinder, gentler version of the Great Life Lesson, that can only be learned for oneself, and mostly only the hard way. Our own and our loved ones’ impermanence is crushing and cruel to contend with. A pow day in the forecast makes no threat, no judgment as to what you do with it. It simply offers an invitation to sit with the impermanence, to load up the car even though it’s cold and you’re tired, to take one more lap even though you’re hangry, to drag your skis and your heavy pack uphill for another hour just for the joy of the few sweet minutes it takes to float back down.

Now when I’m out skiing and there’s snow on the trees, I know I’m learning to get it right, to graciously hold space for the ethereal gift of coexistence.