Of soldiers and skiers.
We have a lot of going away parties around here. This is mostly due to our intern program, where we say goodbye to new friends every three months, but we also see many regular employees, from one magazine or another, move on with surprising frequency. I can't say for sure why this is, and in neither case is it all bad. We have a hall pass to hit the bars twice—once as a send-off, and again when the new face shows up at the office. Twice we get an excuse to exhibit bad karaoke singing and embarrassingly good back-up dancing, and to show up to work reeking of booze, with agonizing hangovers and strange haircuts we only sort of remember getting.
These days we often aren't the only going-away party at the bar. Our office is located just outside Camp Pendleton, one of the largest Marine bases in the country, and home to the 1st Marine Expeditionary Division—the troops handling the brunt of the dirty work in Iraq. It's a strange time to live in San Clemente, California, which most of the POWDER staff does. We've learned not to slap strangers on the back, lest we risk hitting a shrapnel wound, and we've come to the conclusion that going away parties are a lot different when the place you're going away to isn't a rustic, peaceful mountain town, but a hot desert where cars suddenly and unexpectedly explode, often in the immediate vicinity of Marines from San Clemente.
We Editor types at magazines like POWDER seem to be spending a lot of time justifying our jobs lately, declaring with conviction how important we are for the morale of young men and women stuck far away from home, far from snow. And if the letters we get from soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq are any indication there is certainly an element of truth to that. But let's face facts; we're not exactly Rosie the Riveter. We're not building tanks and we're not taking or returning hostile fire. This was made more than clear one night when a war-weary Marine, 12 hours off the troopship, glared across a bar table at one of the metrosexuals from our marketing department and asked, "Do you ever have to kill anyone to make magazines?"
As I said, it's a strange time to live in San Clemente.
In many respects, the job we do here at Powder actually is rather important, in the global scheme of things. As Minnie Dole, the founder of the National Ski Patrol, said while drumming up support for America's World War II ski troops, "I contend that it is more reasonable to make soldiers out of skiers than it is to make skiers out of soldiers." His point was simple, and quite accurate: it's easier to teach someone how to shoot than it is to teach them to ski, so if you're looking for someone who can do both, you have a pretty clear choice. Skiers, after all, have proven time and again that we have the grit to stand our ground when it comes down to a fight. Just look at the Finnish ski troops of World War II, who for almost four months kept at bay more than a million Soviet troops supported by tanks, air force, and naval units, destroying a few divisions in the process.
Despite this, and countless other heroic battle performances, skiers are inherently peaceful. In fact, we're beyond peaceful—we tend to bring calm to otherwise chaotic situations. Skiers seem to have an unspoken language, a bond that allows us to cross borders soldiers can't penetrate, even by force. We seem to have an ability to transcend cultures, brought on by a shared love of sliding on snow, a common connection to nature, and high respect for a mountain geography that can be as deadly as it is serene. It is this that Hannes Schneider, an Austrian World War I vet of the Dolomite avalanche artillary battles, undoubtedly had in mind when he declared, "If everyone skied, there would be no more war."
The problem is, there are a lot more people out there trying to make soldiers these days (whether it's the recruiter outside Wal-Mart or an Al-Qaeda training camp) than there are trying to make skiers. Add to that Time4 Media's recent decision to sink FREEZE, and there promises to be even less of us next year. Suddenly our job—to be the great tempter; to show you every day you decide not to go to the mountain exactly what it is you're missing; in essence, to create skiers—seems that much more crucial.
Most times, I prefer not to think of my job in those terms. In general, I'd prefer that people not take this sport—or life for that matter—overly serious. But it's gotten hard to do that lately, and it gets harder every time I find myself in a roadside tavern surrounded by Marines who are no longer conspicuous just by their haircuts, but by their wounds, their surly demeanor, or worst of all, their absence.
With winter storming into the mountains ahead of the holidays this year, I'm thankful that this is the lot I've drawn in life—that I don't ever have to kill anyone to do my job. That not thinking about war is still, most times, a luxury I can afford. That I can look forward with great anticipation to my first powder turns of the season, knowing that they are not far off. I also look forward to a time when everyone I know shares that eagerness. Or at least when all going away parties are once again happy events filled with excitement and promise.