FEBRUARY 14, 2023 – Michaela, the smart, cheerful nurse who administers the study I’m in, understands me well. That’s partly a result of the trouble I caused at the outset by asking questions to which she replied, “I’ll have to get back to you on that.” By regular injections of humor, however, I was able to turn the tide. Michaela no longer runs when she sees me at the clinic and answers my calls on the first ring.
She’s familiar with my skiing regimen, and yesterday asked how many days I’d tallied thus far in the season. “Seventy-eight,” I said.
“Gee!” she said over the phone. “What are you going to do when you reach 100?”
“Shoot for 101.”
Not that anyone’s counting, besides . . . ahem . . . yours truly.
Today’s snow-slayers—a hard rain and 40F degrees—were bound to occur eventually. After checking the charts, I made an executive decision not only to grant myself a day off but to mandate that I do so. If I were a few years younger, I would’ve donned rain gear, sloshed over to “Little Switzerland,” and skied up and down the groomed downhill slopes for the reward of another tally mark on the basement wall. Even in the mush, those slopes are plenty skiable.
Yet, though at this late hour the mercury remains well above freezing, ice still abounds everywhere. Under a thick overcast, lighting was flat today, and a harsh wind blew with increasing velocity as the day progressed. This morning I nearly went down backwards when 10 feet from our back door, I planted my foot on a patch of submerged ice.
Better safe than sorry, even if safety interrupted my march to 100 days of skiing this season, with 78 ski-days now behind me. Speaking of march, March is our heaviest snow month, and in 29 years of record-keeping, I’ve averaged 20 ski days in March and as many as 15 days in April, with an average of two. (For a day to count, I have to ski for at least 20 minutes, and there’s no “banking” time from one day to the next. If I were to ski 60 minutes on a given day, I’d be entitled to only one tally mark, not three, on the basement wall.)
Statistically, with 14 days left in February, based on averages, I expect to have 36 days total in which to log 28 to reach my goal of 100. This being an above-average year for snowfall, I’ve granted myself a cushion of five additional days.
Did you track the math? I understand, if you didn’t. All that anyone (starting and ending with me) needs to know is that I could afford to take the day off.
As I looked out the window periodically, however, I recognized the inevitable: eventually, all the ice and snow will melt away, and skis and poles will be laid to rest. Our existence is just as vulnerable and its end, equally inevitable. We can check the averages, attain 100, then shoot for 101, but we can’t change the tilt of our axis or the trajectory of our revolution around the sun. Just as the sun rises in the morning, it must set in the evening*.
*Except, of course, in latitudes above and below 66.6 degrees N and S.
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© 2023 by Eric Nilsson
