Conversions

No, this isn’t a religious post. It’s not about converting tablespoons of butter into grams, or pounds into kilograms.  It’s not even about the conversions between dollars and Swiss francs I made (somewhat gleefully) in my head as I turned my credit card over time and again during our trip to Santa Fe over the Christmas holidays.

No, this is about skiing.

Last Sunday I did my first back-country ski outing of the year. Correction: my first back-country ski outing since winter 2005, when Marc’s parents were here for two months and we could do whatever we wanted on the weekends without worrying about being bad parents.

We were going to go back-country skiing last year, except it didn’t snow. The year before that, we rented an apartment in a ski area for the season, and went there on the weekends instead. The year before that, well, I don’t remember. It can’t have been that memorable. Now the babies definitely don’t need sitting anymore. What’s more, they have strong opinions on how they want to spend their weekend mornings (such as sleeping), and these plans usually don’t involve us. We’re once more free to head to the mountains.

Maybe I’m getting grumpy in my old age, but I find that ski lifts, crowds, music blaring from loudspeakers on ski parks, decks of sunbathers drinking alcohol at 3,000 meters, and – did I mention it? — crowds – just make me grumpier. Any time school’s out in Switzerland, the entire country goes skiing. The slopes are packed with people moving at high speeds. The red-and-white helicopters are busy buzzing back and forth transporting accident victims to hospitals in the valleys below. The autoroutes get backed up for miles. Thanks, but no thanks.  The only kind of skiing I’m interested in doing now involves strapping skins on my skis, shouldering a backpack containing a bar of chocolate, a thermos of hot tea and warm mittens, and heading for a mountain.

You just don’t get this kind of solitude and awesomeness in a ski area.

It’s pretty stupid to go traipsing around in the “back country” on skis, though, unless you know what you’re doing.  Every weekend, people who go off-piste in the Alps end up buried in avalanches — even people who are accompanied by mountain guides.  Not only am I not quite ready to die yet (the novel isn’t done), but I also don’t want some poor hiker to come across my rotting corpse in June when the snow starts melting. (It does happen).

So, since Marc and I definitely don’t know what we’re doing, we did the only sensible thing and turned to the pros. We joined the local chapter of the Swiss Alpine Club. We took an avalanche course. We learned to “read” the layers of snow, we dug endless avalanche beacons out of snowdrifts, we practiced shoveling at high speed with little metal shovels, and we learned to climb up mountains on our skis and ski down through all manner of different kinds of snow. We also toured a cheese-making place. I bet you don’t get that in US avalanche courses.

To climb up a mountain on skis, you have to do switchbacks. You cut along the slope for a while, then you turn and go the other direction, in a complicated ballet-like maneuver called a “kick-turn,” or, in French, a conversion.

Several years ago, I had mastered the conversion. You turn the uphill foot about 130 degrees (think 4th position in ballet), then lean forward into the slope and lift the back ski up, kicking the tip in around the ankle of the planted foot and sliding the ski alongside its mate. Here’s a picture of someone doing one:

In this photo the person hasn’t yet swung the right ski up alongside the left ski, which is planted. Depending on the steepness of the hill and the snow conditions, this exercise can be seriously nervewracking.

Sunday’s Alpine Club outing was rated F for Facile (easy), so the hill wasn’t steep. The snow was nice and deep and powdery. No problem getting a good foot plant in it. I was enthusiastic, third in the line of 9 people climbing up the slope.

Wow! This feels good!

Did I mention that the critical thing about the conversion is that you need to lean into the hill?

Everything went fine until I forgot that.

I swung my uphill ski 130 degrees around, up the zigzag. Then I put my weight on it and lifted the back ski off the ground.

Two seconds later, I lost my balance and promptly fell backwards down the hill. Everyone was watching me. Now when your head is down the hill and your skis are up on the slope above you, you’ve got to do some maneuvering to get things sorted out. I had to wait for all of them to climb past me to get myself upright again.

Merde! I cursed, humiliated in the extreme. My face was hot and I felt the suspicious prick of tears behind my eyes. I avoided looking at anyone as they skied past. I just knew they were all laughing at me.

All of them, that is, except one very nice guy called Alex, who very gently and calmly said he was going to show me how to do a conversion. Which he did, emphasizing the leaning into the hill part. I practiced a couple of times and felt a little less like I wanted the earth to open up and swallow me up.

It was a good idea to practice. It’s one thing to mess up your conversion on a gentle slope in cushy powder. It’s another to mess up on a steep slope with a pile of rocks down below. A little humble pie is preferable to brains splattered on rocks, any day.

We kept climbing. The higher we got, the harder the wind blew. It started spitting snow. Genevieve, a 70-year-old energy bomb of a woman just in front of me, was struggling and had to stop and breathe hard several times. At the top, the wind was whipping the snow up into our faces and we could hardly see a thing. Nevertheless, we engaged in the Swiss kissing ritual. Kiss, kiss, kiss, – it must have been at least -10 C with the wind chill, and as each person arrived, he or she had to make the rounds. I admit I air-kissed a few. My fingers turned numb as I took the skins off my skis and tried (not very successfully) to attach them to their paper backing. Oh, so this is why you’re supposed to use the plastic backing and not the paper one, I realized. Man, I really am out of practice.

Alex seemed totally unfazed by the weather and went around offering everyone a dried fig.

Our leader wisely counseled us to keep each other in view during the descent. This is why you go with the Alpine Club, I thought, as we blindly followed him down the slope. They know what they’re doing. For all I knew, he could have been leading us off a cliff. On the positive side, I only fell once and I don’t think anyone saw it.

At one point we had all stopped together and there were two skiers still above us. Everybody watch Rita, said the leader. Rita, a little round gnome-like person in a purple parka and a pink knitted hat with a pom-pom on top, didn’t really look like an athlete. Once she turned her skis down the hill, though, all that changed.  She just kind of floated effortlessly back and forth down the slope. It truly was a thing of beauty. The rest of us were more or less making our way down the mountain – Rita, she skied.

Once we were out of the worst of the wind, the leader found a spot under a tree to eat our lunch. No kidding. Apparently, part of the definition of an outing is that you have to stop for lunch. I think it’s part of the Alpine Club charter. I took advantage of the opportunity to try and get technique tips from Rita.

Genevieve was too exhausted to eat anything. Maybe she shouldn’t have skied the entire previous day and then come on the outing as well. Getting old is the pits, she informed me.

An hour or so later, we were heading back to Lausanne, after a stop in a bistro for hot chocolate and mulled wine on the way (that’s also part of the definition of an outing). Nobody mentioned my humiliation. When they asked what I did, I told them I was a writer. Writing a novel.

Wow, I thought to myself as the words came out. If I’m saying it out loud, I guess it must really be true.

Yet another kind of conversion. 2012 is starting out very auspiciously!

Photos: CAS Morges

 

 

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *