A friend of mine called Mike Peyton had what he modestly describes in his memoirs as an ‘average war’. It included having his battalion of the Royal Northumberland Fusiliers overrun and wiped out in the Western Desert; nearly starving to death in an Italian POW camp; witnessing the bombing of Dresden; escaping from his camp to fight for several months with the Soviet army, personally killing many Germans. I asked him what it had felt like. He replied: ‘You know when you’re on a black ski run and you look down and you say: “Can I manage this?” Then you get down and you think: “How did I manage that?” That’s what it’s like. If you come through the other side, war is a fantastic experience. I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.’
So there’s something to think about next time you find yourself at the top of Tortin in Verbier, which is the black run I always think of when I think of black runs. It’s so frightening that really, the only possible reason to do it is to punish yourself for not having fought in a war. There’s no obvious pleasure involved, that’s for sure.
It starts with a traverse, after which it’s too late to pull out. You then find yourself on the lip of a near-vertical drop where you stay for some time, watching lots of other skiers go first. But it’s no help. Either they’re so good that they tackle it with an ease and verve you could never hope to emulate; or they make you more scared than you were already by coming a cropper and sliding a very long way or by colliding painfully with one of the über-moguls that litter the lower section.
Eventually you have to go. Not because you want to go but because gripping into the side of the slope with your skis is making your legs hurt and because you’ll soon be so frozen that you’ll be stuck there all day. So down you go — ulp! — and just when you’re starting to congratulate yourself on your courage, you realise, no, that first bit was the easy part. The mogul field is the real test.
I hate moguls. Yeah, yeah, I know that marks me out as a second-rate skier. Real skiers love moguls because they’re the challenge that separates the men from the boys and because if you get your rhythm right you can tackle them with a satisfying left/right swish.
But all I can think of when I go down mogul fields is just how much I hate the smug bastards who made them so big and nobbly with their show-off techniques. Why can’t they do what any normal person would do? Traverse as long as you can; then, when out of room, execute a desperate ugly turn and then traverse as far as you can to the other side of the slope, then repeat until it’s all over.
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And come to think of it, when I’ve got to the bottom of a black run like Tortin, I’m not sure that I ever have felt like Mike Peyton did about his war. I felt more like you do when you’ve had a premature ejaculation, or worse, with a hot date: you bit off more than you could chew; you didn’t rise to the occasion; you were frankly crap. Then next day, you go and do it all over again. Just to see whether you can do it differently next time.
All this, by the way, is from very long memory. It has been such a long time since I’ve been skiing — and I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to afford it again. But of all the sports I’ve tried, only fox-hunting can beat it for sheer visceral excitement and that glorious sense of escape from quotidian cares which comes when you’re living totally in the moment.
It’s possible that in actuarial terms, scuba diving is more dangerous. (Fox-hunting too, probably.) And with an average annual death rate of just under 40 (with about the same in serious injuries), skiing kills a lot fewer people than, say, swimming (3,800 drownings per year) or bicycling (1,100 accidents). But the point about it is that it feels dangerous — and that’s the important thing.
Like a lot of Englishmen who don’t ski very often, I’ve always been more of a schuss man than a slalom merchant. This is partly to do with the influence in childhood of Ski Sunday: the Men’s Downhill was always fantastic; the slalom, frankly, dull as ditchwater. And partly because to schuss you really don’t need any skill. Just balls. Or a total lack of imagination.
I remember as a child that brief shuddery frisson you used to get whenever you saw someone being brought down the mountain in a bloodwagon. But — as soldiers always say when talking about their war — you never thought it was going to happen to you. Not till you passed your teens, anyway. One of the many awful things about heading deeper into adulthood is that death or injury seems less like a risibly remote, kind of glamorous prospect, and much more like something that is surely going to come sooner or later.
When I schuss, I feel the fear in a way I never did as a boy. Each unexpected bump (the worst accidents always happen in the evening, not just because you’re exhausted but because you can’t see the undulations) and involuntary shock through your so-much-more-stiff-than-they-used-to-be knees offers a momentary intimation of the horror and tedium of the casualty ward. And of the achingly long recovery process that follows a broken limb. But it only lasts a split second. Then on you go, face burning, nose running, eyes streaming, the hiss of your racing skis beneath your feet. ‘This is it! This is how it ought to be, always,’ you’re thinking. Or rather you’re not thinking. Because that’s the joy of a really good schuss: when it’s going well, you’re in a realm quite beyond the burden of consciousness.