Sugarloaf Stories
May 9, 2005
Many summers ago, Art and Cindy were waiters at the Rustler Lodge in Alta, Utah. On a June evening I climbed to the top of High Rustler and skied down the sun cupped snow to the delight of the supper crowd enjoying the spectacular view. When I got back to the lodge, Art offered me a job as a ski instructor. In wintertime, Art and Cindy ran the ski school at Sugarloaf, Maine.
Alta, Utah is one of the best ski areas in the world, notable for its exceptional snow quality. In contrast, Sugarloaf is a frozen outpost in Northern Maine. But my thinking at the time was that I would learn more by testing myself on Sugarloaf’s hardened slopes than by enjoying myself in Alta’s powder and sunshine. If I wanted to be a good ski coach, I had to serve a couple of years back East. The best coaches paid their dues skiing on ice.
Never having visited Maine, I didn’t realize that the closest town to Sugarloaf — Kingfield, Maine — was settled in the early 1700s. Isolated from railways and modern transportation, it remained a closed, tight-knit community for hundreds of years. (Its limited gene-pool manifested itself through birth defects, mental retardation and physical abnormalities. But more on this later.) My ski town experiences had been with relatively sophisticated places like Alta, Killington and Telluride. I was about to learn something.
When I showed up on a muddy, grey November day, it hadn’t snowed much yet, and you could smell the paper mill in Rumsford on the damp Atlantic wind. I picked up a night job as a ski mechanic. The tourist housing in Kingsfield was overpriced, so I rented a room in the logging hamlet of Eustis. On the first floor, the shop sold four foot long Husquavarna chainsaws. The entire building was heated with a wood stove made from scrap metal and a 55-gal oil drum.
By mid season I had made great strides as a ski instructor. I graduating from the pure baby-sitting assignments to taking intermediate skiers onto the upper mountain. But Sugarloaf was not without its challenges. The liftlines had mirrors so you could inspect your face for frostbite. A sign in the locker room advised us whether it was a “one-hat” or “two-hat” day. And I had to use a Bernzomatic torch to unfreeze my truck’s locks every evening.
During January, it never got above 0. We went 100 days straight with below freezing temperatures. I took to wearing my skin tight one piece downhill racing suit under my clothes (the suit was usually sufficient to wear all by itself in a ski race.) I learned to ski very well. My thighs became huge and strong like hydraulic pistons. I had to buy new pants and take in the waist so they’d fit over my quads.
Most mornings the mountain would open the lifts for employees 30 minutes before the public. My friend Karl Johnson and I would don our 223cm downhill skis and do three top to bottom downhill runs at only slightly less than full race speed — about 75 mph on the steepest headwall. We would sail off shallow risers, only a few inches off the ground but flying forward for hundreds of feet. The temperature and the airspeed burnt a permanent frostbite scar into my chin. Years later it’s there to remind me of Sugarloaf.
In ski racing, the fastest racers need to have a flat stance that keeps their ski edges from biting into the snow while gliding between turns. Edging their skis to turn requires a careful balance between jamming too hard or slipping sideways. Muscles have to stay loose to absorb shocks. Having a bit of extra mass — weight — helps keep your momentum high enough to overcome obstacles.
With the exception of mass, I have none of the qualities necessary for success in alpine ski racing. I’m a naturally clumsy athlete — the sort of kid who was picked last for baseball. But skiing is a sport that I could practice on my own, and I was able to log a disproportionate amount of ski time.
Despite my great improvement as a novice professional skier, one female instructor consistently outskied me. A local, I was wary of her at first. But amongst the fellow instructors, she appeared to be the only one who actually read books for pleasure — Darwin’s “Evolution of the Species” was her wintertime tome — and she like to drink beer. Inevitably, I fell for her.
As we got to know each other I learned that her parents were second cousins, legally married. That was good — many local couples were closer kin. Glancing through her High School yearbook was more disconcerting — it showed an array of pastey-white hunchbacks, jug-heads and Prince Charles-like ears. She was the single attractive — normal — person in her entire class. A state skiing champion, she had gone off to college, gotten homesick, and come back home to be a ski instructor. Her roots were set.
Once news of our budding romance spread through Kingfield the change was palpable and immediate. The locals started to nod their heads in quaint acknowledgement. Sometimes they’d even smile and ask me how she was. People learned to spell P-E-T-R-0-N-I-O without making a face. (Remember, this is a place where submarine sandwiches are referred to as “Italians” and tomatoes come in cans.)
I loved skiing with a woman that could whomp my ass. She was a much more talented skier than I was — only my greater weight and strength allowed me to keep up. But while I could ski fast enough, I wasn’t able to hang onto her. My immaturity, her independence? — We broke apart as quickly as we came together. I spent the entire season mooning for her, forced to share locker room proximity. None of the waitresses or tourist girls could compare. The townspeople began to shun me again.
Years later I returned to Sugarloaf and signed up for a private lesson. Her knees had long since blow out, so we skied slowly on some gentle runs. She had married the flamboyant French Canadian she starting going with towards the end of my tenure. She was up three kids and an old mini-van. But she didn’t have any regrets and, I guess, neither did I.
Back at the lodge we had a cup of coffee before she had to pick up her kids. She slipped off her boots. Her toes were still webbed. I hugged her goodbye. My hand brushed the nub of her vestigial tail. It was kind of sweet.
