All in Personal essay

LIKE A ROLLING STONE

Judith Fein
Life Lessons, Personal essay

by Judith Fein

Yeah, life is a trip all right. A potentially life-altering trip.

A few hours ago, the sun was smiling on Santa Fe. We’ve had winds more vicious than dogs, white snow when purple lilacs should be blooming, sun, no sun, and today, sun again. The kind of sun that makes you fling open your front door, slide your tootsies into your tennis shoes, and hit the streets. Which is exactly what I did. You’ll see I am not kidding.

My husband Paul and I were walking downtown, past the Plaza, babbling about this and that and also that and this when suddenly I tripped over some dumb nib sticking up out of the sidewalk cement—obviously placed there by a jinn when I wasn’t looking. I flew up into the air, hit the curb, careened against the curb and landed about 12 feet from where I had taken to the air, Superwoman fashion. Paul, who normally has faster reflexes than a sprinter at the start of a race, just stood there, his jaw slack. Then he ran to help me up.

“Yes!” I screamed, stretching my arms skyward. “Yes! Yes! Yes!”

I am sure Paul thought I had fallen on my head. He screwed up his face into a question mark.

Big Sky, Big Drama: It's Not Easy Being Dude

Jules Older
Personal essay, travel essay

by Jules Older

It was — as skiing trouble so often is — intended to be the last run of the day. But hey, the sun was still shining, the snow was still soft and our legs still felt strong. Dick and Bud and me, we were dudes. Eastern dudes, old dudes, groomer-hugging dudes, but dudes.

We were also a wee bit lost. But everything on Big Sky’s Andesite Mountain had been so mellow, why worry? Why even consult the trail map? Real dudes don’t read maps.

 

Trails Named after Distressed Animals

We started down something called Crazy Raven. Which led to Mad Wolf.

Here's some free advice. Don’t ski trails named after distressed animals. You wouldn’t ski Hydrophobic Raccoon, would you? Or a route named Cow with Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease? The same applies to Crazy Ravens and Mad Wolves.

What led us astray — apart from the inherent stupidity of dudehood — was the approach.

Crazy Raven lures you in with a broad and gentle approach that — once turning back is no longer an option — suddenly and sadistically narrows, steepens and bumps up.

Which, at the end of the day means big, mean, rutted moguls frozen harder than Dick Cheney’s heart. By the fourth or fifth awkward stem turn, we were feeling considerably less dudical.

Halfway down, when the moguls were dwarfed by jagged rocks, we decided to bail. The only option was crossing through a narrow stretch of woods to Mad Wolf, which despite its unpromising name, had to be better than the bloody Raven.

Uh, no.