SEPTEMBER 05: Sunday School
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FINDING THE SECRET FROM HIGHER GROUND
When I was a kid the neighbors thought they could bribe my brother, sister, and I with candy bars so we’d come to church. We never bit, though. There were more important things to do on Sunday.
After a while, they stopped coming around with chocolate, and instead dispatched a very nice, handsome man with the world’s softest hands and demeanor. This man—whose every feature was silky smooth—would visit our home on the occasional Monday (“Family Home Evening”) in an attempt to teach us about the Latter Day Saints. Turning down chocolate was easy compared to these sessions, when we’d endure this kind man speaking smoothly about gospels while Monday Night Football sat unwatched in the other room.
My brother and I would squirm on the couch and try to behave for the sake of our mom, who—aside from being a good neighbor—probably let him in just to keep us away from the TV (and to “help us better understand our surroundings”).
From the candy offerings and Monday night visits, my siblings and I soon realized how dissimilar we were to most of the kids in the neighborhood. There was always “The Church,” as if there were only one. New kids we met would ask what “ward” we belonged to, which, when we didn’t know what a ward was, caused us to wrinkle our noses and ask its meaning. This usually made the inquisitor drop his jaw and stare in disbelief, like he’d just caught some ugly fish he’d never seen before and was afraid to touch.
But in the Wasatch Mountains it was different. That was our escape, and in the beginning we didn’t even know it. It was just there, a fun place to spend energy. The mountains didn’t care that our parents had beer in the fridge, or that we’d made different choices in life, and neither did the lifties, who’d play loud reggae or rock from their lift-shack stereos. Sometimes my dad would buy a mini-bottle to drink on the chair lift. “Warms you up,” he’d always say, licking his big mustache. We eventually met other kids who skied on Sundays. Kids like us whose parents didn’t go to church. Not that all kids who went to church didn’t ski, or weren’t our friends; some of my best Mormon friends could throw giant flips and drop Snowbird’s biggest cliffs. It didn’t matter to us if they were of the Latter Day variety; they just couldn’t be counted on every Sunday. Soon enough, they vanished on two-year missions, and we went deeper into the mountains.
The kids who didn’t go to church created a different bond through skiing, and it was every bit as meaningful as the ones formed in wards. Sharing a frigid lift ride through a whiteout, huddling together against flying pins and needles; learning to throw a heli, and dealing with the inevitable wipeouts; racing the tram back to the base and getting chased by the ski patrol; or learning that Snowbird fries actually taste really good with just mayonnaise. We developed a fanaticism—a phenomenon that occurs in people who feel they must push back against unwanted energy. Our outlet was the Wasatch, and we pushed hard. We lapped up the exhilaration that came with nailing our first steep lines, and shared the anticipation of following patrollers on their way to open a gate to neck-deep powder. Best of all, we were getting good at something that was freeform and without boundaries. We developed style in a place where uniqueness was considered rebellious and we created our own identities from something not shaped by human hands.
Then after the weekend, we would see each other in the hall at school and smile the smile of those who shared the secret.
Matt Hansen also vanished on a two-year mission. Only his was to Steamboat. He also shared the secret for five years in Jackson, Wyoming. He is now the managing editor at Powder.
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