The Shack-Country Skier

Opening Up For Winter

By Kurt Mullen

Originally Published in Powder Magazine

There were a bunch of shacks lurking just off the road in that part of northern New England. They belonged to a family of back-to-the-earth types, a family the locals knew as the Shack People.

They were from away, these people, and you'd see them only in the summer. Except for the one who always came late, the spindly one who rolled in when the leaves had changed, after the relatives had all gone home.

He was a long plank of a man with a willow branch bend in his back. He had a coppery moss of hair and an intelligent-looking face with eyes that narrowed at anything new. But at the local mountain, he was a downhiller on some imaginary ski team. He would be quiet for a moment at the top, and then he'd go slashing down the hill, pushing himself with an intensity

undertake his own that could almost pop a vein.

At the base, he'd throw his goggles up on his head, take off his mittens and rub the cold from his face, standing alone, before boarding the tram. As the regulars fogged the air around him with their usual conversation, he'd point his long-tipped nose into one of his small notebooks. German was his favorite subject, but there would be Spanish, French, even Norwegian. He'd gone to one of those colleges in Massachusetts that are really hard to get into, but he'd dropped out for reasons that he

called “intricate.” He moved to the mountains shortly after and never went back, but he never stopped studying, either.

He made his money as an elevator operator at the old hotel up the highway. It was a summer resort with a golf course and tennis courts and it closed its doors each fall. That's when it was time to move out of his employee dorm room and back to Shack Country. Not that it was any hardship. With foam board, he'd made his shack so snug he could warm it with the heat of a

single hot plate. He had his electric blanket, his books, a radio, and his great capacity for solitude. He was free during winter.

When the doors slid open at the top of the mountain, he scurried like a spider from a beam of light. He threw on his skis, poled and skated, and finally snapped his reedy body into the steepest part of the hardpack trail, launching himself into another one of his speed frenzies. If he skied fast enough, he'd get to the other car before it left the base, and he almost always skied fast enough. He went up and down this way—studying, skiing —closing the loop again and again. And at the end of the day,

like a spent arrow, he dove back into the shadowy woods. He'd make his dinner over the hot plate in his shack and listen to the weatherman on the radio. Like any other skier in the vast world beyond his winter nest, he'd want to know what the conditions would be like the next day. It was all the news he needed then, the one voice on the radio. It was all the company he kept.