"The ski bums were always better looking, they took bigger risks, they had more glamour, there was an air of adventure about them..."
- Romain Gary. The Ski Bum (1964)
We've been talking for five hours. It seems like five minutes. Really - it feels like I've just been on a whirlwind ski bum tour of the late 1950s. He's Kerouac's Neil Cassady with a pair of skis on his shoulder; Romain Gary's Lenny with a Norwegian accent.
There's simply no getting around it. With his straight-faced delivery, slightly-spicy speech and near-infallible memory, Ornulf Johnsen is a uniquely entertaining storyteller. His timing is excellent. His sense of humour razor sharp. And I pump him for all the ski tales he can marshal from his voluminous store of reminiscences...
Take the Spanish bordello story. No, let's put that one aside for a moment. Better to start off with something a little less steamy.
If you recall from last week, we left a 20-year-old Ornulf teaching wilderness survival courses to NATO personnel during the Cold War. But the young officer soon found himself questioning his career choice. "When I wake up in the morning - no matter where I am - I usually lie in bed and think of the day ahead for 10-15 minutes," Ornulf explains. "Well, this one morning I was lying in bed and I thought: Do I really want to stay here and devote my life to killing people? Hell no! So I decided to quit the military."
A week later, Ornulf ran into an old buddy who was studying to become a phys ed prof. "My friend Bjorn suggested I join him at the ski school he was working for in a town called Geilo. I thought that was a pretty good idea because I really didn't know what I wanted to do." The year was 1959; Ornulf had finally found what he was looking for.
"I really enjoyed my time in Geilo," he says. "The school director, Arne Palm, even became something of a mentor for me. That's when I decided: I like this work. How do I make it into a full-time job?" By the winter of 1963-64, Johnsen had launched his own school at a small Norwegian resort called Bergsjo. "It was a huge operation," he laughs. "One director, one chief instructor and one staff member - and I filled all three roles!"
Still, he was making a living from skiing. And meeting interesting people...
"At the end of that winter, a wealthy Swedish family invited everyone working at the Bergsjo Hotel to a farewell dinner," recounts Ornulf. Another booming laugh. "Well, there was a fair bit of alcohol consumed that evening. We were all in very high spirits." As things were winding down, the party's host asked Ornulf if he'd ever thought of travelling to Chile to ski the Andes Mountains. The ski school director's ears perked up. "I told him I couldn't afford such a trip," he says. "But I'd love to go. And he told me that he ran ships from Hamburg to Buenos Aires and would be happy to offer me a berth across the Atlantic. 'Just call me when you want to go,' he said."
Was the guy serious? Had he had too much to drink and was he just boasting? Ornulf decided to find out. Along with his friend Per (a ski instructor friend whom he'd convinced to come along) Johnsen arrived in Hamburg in the spring of 1964. Turned out his Swedish client wasn't bluffing; the 30-day trip to South America was definitely on. "What an adventure that was," says the 75 year old, his eyes shining with the excitement of those memories. "Whenever Per and I get together we always talk about that trip." Invariably the brothel escapade is revisited...
A story worthy of a whole column on its own, the ship's week-long repair stop in the coastal town of Aviles in the Bay of Biscay offered the two young Norwegians a glimpse into Spanish life that few northerners have ever experienced. "Per somehow managed to befriend the madam of a very fine beachside bordello on our first day ashore," recounts Ornulf with the kind of grin only seen on cats after the canary has disappeared. "Seeing as this was the off-season and clients were few, we were kind of adopted by the girls there. We spent a very pleasant week as their guests..."
I can only imagine. But where was I? Ah yes, Chile. "Things didn't quite work there as we had planned," admits Johnsen. "We tried to get instructor jobs in Portillo. No way. Tried in La Parva. No way. So Per and I are sitting in a Santiago restaurant reviewing our options. We're out of money, out of food and out of possibilities. It's probably the lowest point of the trip." Suddenly a young man comes up to their table. What language are they speaking he wants to know. What are they doing here? "So we tell him we're Norwegian ski instructors," says Ornulf. "Immediately he asks us to join his friends."
Turns out the kid and his cohorts are from the American embassy, they have a ski club cabin in nearby La Parva, and they're looking for a caretaker/instructor for the season. Does Ornulf want the job? "So I tell them that Per and I are travelling together. It's either both of us or nobody." He pauses for a beat. Barks out a laugh. "So we both got hired." Although they didn't know it at the time, the benefits that came with the job - US-dollar paycheques and access to the embassy store (where booze and fags were ridiculously cheap) - would provide the two ski bums with a highly enviable lifestyle.
"Life was good again," he says. Soon the word got around that the Norwegians duo really knew how to teach skiing. "Almost overnight," adds Ornulf, "we became the 'official' instructors for most of the embassies in Santiago. The local ski school directors were pissed off. But there was nothing they could do about it..."
Never one to let the grass grow under his feet, Ornulf had already wangled himself a job with the Norwegian Tourism Association by the time his summer idyll was over in South America. His new posting: Great Britain. His job: teach the English how to ski on a plastic ski slope built in an abandoned swimming pool. Challenging to say the least. But not in a way Ornulf had expected.
"It was a morning like any other," recounts Johnsen. "Nobody there, totally quiet, when this fumy little Englishmen shows up. 'I'm here just to brush up on my skiing,' he told me. So I introduced myself. He said: 'I'm Roy Ferris. And I need to get some ski practice in because I'm going back to Canada...' So I sold him a book of lessons."
Over the next few weeks, Ferris would work on his ski technique (which wasn't very good) and tell Ornulf stories about Vancouver and the surrounding Coast Mountains. "He kept talking about a ski resort being built there with 5,000 feet of vertical," says Johnsen. "And my eyes would go round every time he said it. I was sure he was lying but he insisted. 'The Norwegian guy building the resort says it will be the biggest ski area in North America,' Ferris assured me. 'You should come and teach skiing there.'" A long pause. "He insisted. But I really wasn't interested..."
Ferris left town soon after. But they stayed in touch. "One day I got a letter from Roy," recounts Ornulf. In it was the news that he and partner Alan White had applied for the GLC ski school concession. "Now Roy wanted me to become a partner in their enterprise," he continues. "But I still wasn't interested. At least not in the way they'd built up the proposal. If I'm going to be part of this, I wrote Roy, I want to make sure that we tell the mountain what we can do for them, not what the mountain can do for us."
The next letter finally pushed him over the edge. "We got the contract," wrote Ferris. "The only thing missing is your signature on the document. Tell you what - I'll pay for your trip to Vancouver. At least come and see what we have here..."
Ornulf arrived in Vancouver in September of 1965. "I land at the airport - no Roy to pick me up," he says with mock chagrin. "So I look in the phone book. No Roy there either." What to do? He knows he can't stay at the terminal forever. "There is, fortunately, one Franz Wilhelmsen in the phone book," he tells me. "So I decide to call him instead."
After three or four rings a gruff Norwegian-tinted voice answers. Ornulf can hear the unmistakable sounds of a raucous party in the background. "Where the hell are you?" the voice wants to know. "We're all here waiting for you. This is your welcome party, man."
"So how do I get there," asks Ornulf.
The voice answers, tight with barely suppressed impatience: "You found my name in the phone book, so you know my address. If you were able to find your way from Norway to Canada, I'm sure you can find your way to my house." And then he hangs up. "That was my intro to the great Franz Wilhelmsen," says Ornulf, after a good long chuckle. "It was also my intro to the Whistler community."
But the resort was far from finished yet. In the meantime, Ornulf had to figure out how to scare up new customers for the fledgling ski school. "It wasn't easy," he admits. "But it was a lot of fun. We really made things happen back then..."
Next week: how a young ski school director attracts one of the most creative skiers to have ever visited Whistler.
