A visual portrait of modern ski bummery, with a few notes from a reformed vagabond.
IS A ‘SKI BUM’ MORE ‘SKIER’ OR ‘BUM’?
I guess the individual answer would lie along a spectrum — there are serious skiers who really want nothing from life beyond the gift of powder, deep and steep, in which to float good turns — and there are serious bums in orderly retreat from whatever, who wander into places where there’s skiing, and do it, too.
I was more the latter than the former: a serious bum who came to the mountains in retreat, on advice from American poets like Robinson Jeffers: “…when the cities lie at the monster’s feet, there are left the mountains.”
I came like America’s most serious mendicant bum, Walt Whitman, looking for places to “loaf and invite my soul” when personal economics let me buy that kind of time; I was Vachel Lindsay or John Simon out looking for America, a pursuit that has nothing to do with seeing the USA in your Chevrolet. ‘Hallelujah! I’m a bum! Hallelujah, bum again! Hallelujah, pray for snow, it’ll revive us again.’
All bums, including ski bums, are a little crazy…
Crazed by the world’s conventional craziness, but most of us are just ‘walking crazy,’ able to function in civilized society more or less, as much as we have to to get by, finding work affording us enough for slops and a flop and something for the off-season.
But we just work to eat; we live to ski, or to just pause in the sun on a slope and invite our soul. We recognize each other; we form fast friendships today with people who were strangers yesterday, and find ourselves living with them in houses like hotels. We go beyond the ropes with them, people we’ve only known a week or a month, and we put our lives in each other’s hands. There we are, lost in the ephemeral e pluribus unum America that only exists in moments, mornings on the mountain, late evenings with the twelve-to-two riders of night, moments that pass far too quickly and drop us back into the ever-encroaching empire.
For the ski bum, however, it’s a different, and harder, experience today than it was when I found this place, or it found me, in 1966, with the ski area just coming out of a ‘financial reorganization.’ Three to four hundred dollars a month was regarded as a decent wage then, but I could rent a house for $75-100 a month, or if I wanted to really save for the off-season, a room in the Forest Queen Hotel for $30 a month (bathroom down the hall). The Grubstake Restaurant had a $1.29 dinner special for locals, and Coors was 35 cents a bottle. Today, the ski bum makes 5-6 times the wages, but has to pay 10-15 times the rent; the thought of ‘saving up enough to buy a house’ is laughable. Most ski bums who ski in Crested Butte have to live in ‘Almost’ or Gunnison now, which takes some of the edge off the experience; cumulatively, the whole adventure becomes psychologically and philosophically unsustainable.
There were other opportunities in the 1960s, too. I could buy a newspaper business (for a six-month printing contract and a dollar) from the printer who had inherited it for unpaid bills from a previous owner, and I didn’t have to know anything about newspapers or journalism.
Ignorance was almost requisite, in fact, for getting into any business that depended on a town of three or four hundred people and erratic seasonal visitors. Anyone who knew anything about the business in question would never have touched the ‘opportunity.’ Now, let’s just say it’s harder; the career people have taken over, and you can actually make a reasonable living if you know what you’re doing, but the adventure of self-taught, on-the-job training is gone.
If we were to stop to think about it, we would realize that we have located ourselves in one of the most remote, difficult, and often dangerous places on the continent — and are employed, as much as we have to be, in trying to help unsuspecting people have a good time in such a place. Ridiculous. We might laugh — but we do what we have to do to earn our own turns on the mountain.
We come mendicant for the experience of being here, and far from loafing, find ourselves doing some of the hardest work we will ever do: six or eight hours of sashaying through a crowded room with 25 pounds of dinners balanced on one hand on trays the size of a coffee table for grumpy Texicans. Or shoveling two feet of snow off a roof, roped up like a climber. Or spending the night driving a snowcat in the dark to smooth the slopes. Or sticky-hot from running several hundred sheets through washers and dryers you wouldn’t want to fall into (until you’re tired enough to think it might be restful). Et cetera; et cetera….
But then — there’s the morning we wake up to a foot of fresh and more coming down; in my day, you didn’t even bother calling in sick because you knew the boss, who wasn’t much older than you and slowly going broke, would have the “Powder Morning” sign on the door and be up there, too. Now, maybe you have to call in and get fired to earn your turns, but you know you can get that job back or something equally bad before the evening shift.
But it is still today the same as it was then up on the mountain — getting high or higher going up together, and then floating down through the swirling cloud of what’s coming down, segueing into what’s already down, skiing down alone together, you and these other serious bums you are with for a season or a life. Hallelujah, I’m a bum.
I’m off my skis now, due to some minor heart and balance issues, but my life was shaped by those years on the mountain and in its town. You can take the ski bum off his skis, but you can’t take away the mendicant bum the skiing just affirms. And I salute, hallelujah, those strong enough today to carry on living the life in harder times.