The forecast brought tidings of powder,
And the weatherman’s warnings grew louder.
“On ice cars will skate,
The storm skiers will sate,”
Instead Friday served soupy warm chowder.
Now we’ve all got that best friend we hate,
“At the trailhead, I’ll meet you at eight!”
The alarm time they dread,
Eight still finds them in bed,
On Saturday both Bens ran late.
One Ben won’t leave town unfed,
The other (for one night) was wed,
‘Spite an evening of ale,
That Ben broke all the trail,
And should really have left me for dead.
Daybreak that morning was pale,
Soft light bathed the peaks to be scaled,
The party was spritely,
I walked in back rightly,
My legs had the heft of a whale.
Short days and my fitness pair nicely,
Fall training I have taken lightly,
But days now get longer,
In March I’ll be stronger,
So long as I hike the Bowl nightly.
In rev’rence we reached the top somber,
Until Matt regaled us like songbirds,
“Here’s to good friends!
The means earn the ends!”
We dropped in to find snow, deep and bomber.
This time of year ski conditions tend to be pretty variable from day to day. Where last week it might have been twenty below and windy, tomorrow it could rain to 8,000 feet. The snowpack tends to be a little thin, and weather in the valley is frequently wildly different from weather in the mountains. As the season is starting to ramp up, the quality of the skiing is kind of a crapshoot.
Because of this, most water cooler and brewery conversations starting around Columbus Day John Lennon’s birthday navigate toward whether you’ve been skiing, where you went, and how it was up there. This is a highly subjective kind of conversation. Some people are only interested in deep powder, others just like being out in the mountains, and others allow their definition of “good skiing” to shift with the tone of the season. If it’s been nothing but breakable crust for a month, after all, a non-breakable crust starts to look pretty good.
More often than not, it seems like people feel a need to justify the time and effort they spent to go find snow, which leads to palpable inflation in the quality of the skiing between the time your roommate took off her boots and the time that you met her for a pint. If you’re looking for a reliable story, you’re better off asking your grandfather about the biggest fish he ever caught than your buddy how the skiing was on Halloween.
What’s interesting about these early season conversations is how much superlative language is used to describe skiing that tends to be subjectively marginal. In fact there seems to be an inverse relationship to how fantastic the reports of skiing are, and how good the skiing really was.
So how was the skiing, really? Here are some helpful hints.
“Bro, so epic.” – No it wasn’t. Aside from being categorically wrong, it probably didn’t even meet any of today’s lax standards. The powder was not over their head. They probably hit a bunch of rocks. This person is really just trying to show that they’ve been out already, and have insider knowledge that you, the patient skier who approaches skiing by the season or by the lifetime, do not. Don’t sweat it.
Epic, bro.
“It was awesome up high.” – It was pretty good, after a terrifying drive and a long walk. Worthwhile? Probably. The best skiing since last February? Certainly not. The season’s just getting going, but if you’ve got a day to spend sniffing around for a turn or two, head to the alpine!
“Not too bad, actually.” – Right here in an honest answer. Hit any rocks up there? You know it. Buried trees and willow? Yep. Carry the skis for a while before even putting them on? Probably. But way back there, the skiing was nice. Maybe they found an inch or two of soft snow on a rain crust. Maybe they found a few hundred feet of sastrugi to lap. Whatever they found, it scratched the itch for Thanksgiving turns.
The dog prefers more of a supervisory role.
“It’s good! Let’s get out.” – No hyperbole here. Just an honest assessment that if there’s skiing at all, it’s probably a good way to spend some time. If it was all just breakable crust, this person would tell you about it. So go find your skins, change the batteries in your beeper, and try to get all your crap at least in one place. The next time this person calls, you’ll want to be ready to go.
How was the skiing? Just check Instagram! That’s sure to be reliable.
“Pretty fair.” – You blew it. The casual understatement. The humble nonchalance. This person had a damn good day, and you probably should have gone when they invited you. They know it’s a long season and it’ll be filled with good days to come, so they’re not going to rub it in. But let there be no doubt, this person found the goods, and probably only hit a couple of rocks.
At the end of the day, though, the only way you can be sure is to go out and see for yourself. Who knows? It might even be ok.
I used to drive kind of far to get to work. A couple of years ago I had a ten mile commute with fourteen stop lights. There were two different ways to get from my house to the office, but they each had fourteen lights and at rush hour it took about 45 minutes to drive. In Missoula, Montana, the little mountain oasis, I had a commute that wasn’t all that different than if I lived in suburban Chicago.
Driving begets driving, and as long as I was behind the wheel it was easy to run out to the box stores on Reserve Street after work or drive someplace for lunch. I went through about two tanks of gas a week, and in the height of my last summer at that job it cost more than $4 a gallon to fill the tank.
Twice a week I stood at the pump, and as the meter spun frantically I did the quick mental math to calculate how many hours of my life I was pumping into my Ford Ranger. It didn’t matter if I’d finished a project at work, landed a new client, or just played flash games all day, a tank of gas cost me about two hours behind a desk.
I didn’t take this picture.
There’s a lot about that anecdote that is classically American, and a lot if it I consider bad form. But the worst part is that the foundation of our work infrastructure lies in our time, rather than what we do with that time. It tells us that we live in a system that doesn’t care what you’re doing, as long as you’re doing it at your desk.
When you are hired at a new job, conventional wisdom gives that your employer is purchasing the work that you will produce during your tenure. Conventional wisdom here is wrong. Your boss is actually purchasing 2,080 hours of your life each year, give or take, and betting that you will use that time to produce at least your salary in value.
or this one.
Of course, this assumes that you’re working a white collar job as a software engineer or something, but the fight to increase minimum wage factors into this in a big way as well. A minimum hourly base pay is, essentially, a safety net within a free market that all but guarantees that certain inscrutable employers will exploit their workforce at any opportunity. Forget for a moment that it’s not working (hence the national debate on raising the minimum wage), and remember that this position has a point. Workers in industrial America had a pretty rough go of it.
But the existence of minimum wage legislation is a necessary evil within a fundamentally flawed way at approaching work. It encourages slow, inefficient progress and allows the (arguably obsolete) 40 hour 9-5 grind to kill our fellow countrymen slowly over a 40 year career as an insurance salesman.
or this one.
Advances in technology increase our capacity to work effectively at an exponential rate. In most industries you will not be expected to churn out work at that same accelerating rate, the same way you’ll probably be fired if you start showing up to work increasingly infrequently. The result is that there’s a tremendous amount of time wasted in the average office. Your employer pays for it financially, and you pay for it with something a lot more valuable.
Even the kinds of jobs that tend to pay hourly (and low) wages place value and ownership on the person, not the work. A job on a construction site or a fast food restaurant should compensate employees in terms at least of shifts, if not as a function of production.
If the difference appears mostly semantic, you’re not wrong. Payment by the hour or payment by the shift is basically just a different breakdown of the same job. But writing a job description to a task, rather than the time it might take to do it is a significant shift in thinking. The way we define pay informs what we value as a culture, and most of us work in a system that incentivizes being inefficient with the one thing we can’t make more of.
By now most of the people I know have more or less given up on Facebook. Sure, it’s still pretty good for finding a couch to crash on when your car breaks down somewhere in eastern Oregon, and I appreciate that it’s been the death knell for the 10 year high school reunion, but most millennials are shifting to other social media platforms to keep in touch day to day. The trend is increasing, too; Facebook saw a dramatic drop in teen use in 2014.
There are probably a lot of reasons for the exodus. Certainly, the baby boomer generation has embraced Facebook and made it less cool, in much the same way that no one born after 1982 can listen to the Eagles with a straight face.
To some extent, Facebook has faded in relevance because we’ve realized that we actually don’t care what the weird kid who ate whole tubes of Chapstick on the bus in 2nd grade is up to right this moment. But ultimately, the move away from Facebook (in favor of other social media platforms that are owned by Facebook) indicates discontent with the platform itself. Primarily, that the user experience feels a lot like that scene in Minority Report:
Overzealous advertising is the most annoying thing on the internet. We all hate sitting through Geico commercials before we can watch cute animal videos on YouTube, and banner ads always mess with the way pages load on my phone. The specificity of Facebook and Google’s advertising algorithms (and their collaboration with our fair NSA) is just creepy. It’s no wonder that there’s a litany of options for avoiding advertising. Free ad blocking software is available for every browser, and skipping the commercials is one of the biggest reasons for streaming TV shows illegally.
Advertising is at a fever pitch. It’s a quarter trillion dollar a year industry, which, for reference, is about as much as is spent annually by the US Military Industrial Complex. It’s a huge amount of money, and the passion and energy behind it led Gore Vidal to describe advertising as “the only art form [America] created.”
But it’s worth looking to the next most widely consumed medium of art: Journalism. Rigorous journalism is at once creative expression and public service, and it sets trends in the public mood as much as it follows them. A free and vibrant press is protected by the first amendment, but our congress doesn’t have a line item for it. Advertising has kept the lights on for hundreds of years.
A cynic might suggest that funding journalism is a tricky proposition. No entity should be excluded from oversight by the public eye, yet private funding yields a tabloid and government funding just creates a state-run newspaper that might be hesitant to look critically at the hand that feeds it. Ultimately, honest journalism serves the public, and the public is responsible for seeing it succeed. We can do this by spending $10 for every newspaper, or by turning to the free market.
In order to keep the presses running revenue comes in two forms: directly from consumers in the way of subscriptions or retail purchases, and through selling advertising. Advertisers buy exposure a certain numbers of eyeballs with the calculation that some percentage of those eyeballs will convert to sales of their product at some point down the road. It’s a sliding scale of revenue, but in the end one of four things will happen:
Cover prices and subscriptions will fund the newspaper (Netflix)
A combination of paper sales and ad sales will fund the newspaper (NY Times)
Ad sales will fund the newspaper exclusively (Fox/CNN)
The journalists will starve to death (VICE/Huffington Post)
We’ve used journalism here as an example because it has one of the most established funding sources of revenue, but the rule stands for all forms of art. If you value something you need to expect to pay for it, whether outright or by way of prospecting ad salesmen.
The important distinction is that real journalism benefits from an inflexible code of ethical standards to ensure that the business and the editorial interests remain separate. As the public grows more and more weary of the constant barrage of commercials and avoids exposure by streaming TV or DVRing the game, it drives the ad industry to be more compelling.
In the past decade we’ve seen the news industry fragment. Competition for audience and our reluctance to embrace traditional advertising has filled headlines with click bait and birthed “native advertising,” which disguises advertising as news and dangerously blurs the vaunted line between the newsroom and the publisher.
The free exchange of information allowed by the internet has triggered a second industrial revolution, and led to the rapid inflation in the currency of creative property. There is a tremendous amount of content and information out there. Most of it is trash, generated basically for free and only to funnel you toward an ad.
Curious about whether or not we’re about to invade Syria, but already spent your 10 monthly Times articles on articles about dessert? Locked out of a Ta-Nehisi Coates essay because you’re not a New Yorker subscriber? Just scroll down a few Google results and I’ll bet you find it for free. I just hope he hasn’t taken a job in marketing yet.
In sort of an awkward coincidence these bad bitches are hot off the presses just in time for the Holiday season. $12 gets you one!
“Oh, I think I get it,” my dad said. “They’re like cold surfers.”
It was the morning after Thanksgiving. The family had trickled down to the living room, each filled a cup of coffee, and filed in one by one behind me to partake in my favorite Thanksgiving tradition: drinking coffee and watching ski movies on YouTube.
“Cold surfers” he said. The implications were damning. Surfing is a helluva sport. It’s as challenging as it’s beautiful, and, in a lot of ways, shares an aesthetic with backcountry skiing. In each sport the putative reward occupies a small fraction of the time spent pursuing it; hours on the skintrack yield minutes of powder turns the way hours of paddling yield moments in the curl. In each case the purpose of the sport far transcends that fleeting rush, and happiness comes from the calm of the day.
Of course this isn’t at all what my dad was talking about. He was talking about this:
We sound like idiots.
Without detracting from some of the passionate conversations that we all have about skiing, there are a few words I’d like to expunge from the skier’s lexicon, so that we all might be taken a little bit more seriously in the future. Remember, you might have to talk about this at a cocktail party.
Epic – This one is a no brainer. The pow yesterday was not epic. The traffic on I-70 on Saturday is not epic. The 11k vert you hiked one day last winter was not epic, even though it was windy and your buddy was hungover and you had to break trail, like, the whole time. The word “epic” refers to stories of heros and gods that span decades and govern the fates of nations. Nothing you have ever done is epic. I’m sorry you had to hear it from me.
Awesome – This one isn’t just misused by skiers, but I think we should carry the banner for relegating the word “awesome” to the fringes of discourse. To be in awe is to be agape with reverence and fear. To be struck dumb by wonder. Boot warmers are not awesome. Your new $500 hardshell is not awesome. The water cycle that makes it snow every year is actually pretty awesome, though, if you sit down and think about it.
Bro – Bro had a good run. I almost didn’t hate it for a while. It evoked the kinship of fraternité in the rhetoric of our time. One for all, all for one, bro. And then I spent a little time on the beach and guys I just met, otherwise intelligent, successful, articulate guys, kept calling me bro without a hint of irony. It was wrong. A cartoon. A caricature of solidarity. It’s time for bro to go. Also if you keep using it you’re just going to wind up getting ridiculed on Jezebel or something.
Sick – I never understood this one. When has sick been good? Is this supposed to be ironic? If so we should look past the work of Alanis Morisette for that definition, because it’s also wrong. The only way “sick” is a good thing is if you lie about being it to go skiing. Otherwise you’re just putting yourself in the same camp as these guys.
Fireball – I’d like to think that we’re all on the same page by now, but apparently that’s not the case. This word turns up most frequently as your jerk roommate is clamoring for a place at the bar après. Fireball? Really? What the hell, do you not watch Fox News? This shit is antifreeze. Stop drinking it.
I think I’ve covered the most egregious affronts to the skier’s image here, but if I’ve missed any, please don’t hesitate to chime in.
