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Feeding the ego and the industry

By G.D. Maxwell In the Before Time, when I lived in the Old Country – Ontario – February was the month of much moaning. The first sparkling rush of winter had long since given way to drab, dreary sameness of dirty piles of snow.

By G.D. Maxwell

In the Before Time, when I lived in the Old Country – Ontario – February was the month of much moaning. The first sparkling rush of winter had long since given way to drab, dreary sameness of dirty piles of snow. Everywhere the landscape was washed in the colour of gritty, filthy underwear, a colour never found in the big box of Crayolas.

It was dark when I went to work; it was dark when I came home. Both trips were made on the subway, often in cars so crowded with other winter-numbed commuters the simple act of entering them was a working definition of safe sex. Crowded subway cars, especially during the early evening rush hour, were the olfactory counterpoint to the visual bleakness of the world above – stale perfume, overcoats long overdue for a trip to the dry cleaners, bags of fast food headed home for dinner, deodorant in dire need of reapplication, the exhaled remnants of lunches rich with garlic, a million smothered farts.

From the time ice appeared in the gutters of Toronto’s streets sometime in mid-November, until it melted away again sometime in mid-March, the subway to work and the subway home was the bread in my sandwich of life. I hated it. And I didn’t care very much for the hours in between. I longed for ice-free gutters so I could begin, again, to commute on my bicycle.

The highlights of February were the annual Bike Show and Boat Show. The Boat Show was for dreamin’. It was impossible to walk among the acres of sailing yachts and not dream of lottery riches, Caribbean seas, tall rhum drinks, lingering technicolour sunsets and barely-there bikinis. Though I know it was impossible, I always felt as though I left the Boat Show a bit tanner than when I entered.

The Bike Show was about dreamin’ too. The bikes were people-powered, shiny, new, cutting-edge and, at the time, breathtakingly expensive. I imagine you could find most of them at the landfill in Whistler these days. They were mostly road bikes and touring bikes, some one-speed track racers and a handful of exotics: tandems, recumbents and those retro looking new mountain bikes. Aluminum tubing was pretty much the sexiest breakthrough in basic construction and the battlegrounds for most manufacturers seemed to be seeing who could cram the most sprockets on their bikes and who could build an eighteen pound bike that wouldn’t fall apart on the first ride.

I quickly learned the only way I could survive the Bike Show without buying a new bike was to leave my credit cards at home… or take my Perfect Partner with me. Without ever denying my jones for a new bike, she nevertheless embodied the concept of sober second thought. Why indeed would anyone want to buy a new bike in the middle of winter in Toronto?

Fact was, I didn’t. I just thought I did. The people who produced the Bike Show knew I thought I did. They also knew I couldn’t ride in February, knew I wanted to so badly I could taste it, knew I was at my most vulnerable, knew the days were getting teasingly longer… and knew they couldn’t sell a single bike at a show like this in, say, June.

I didn’t want a new bike. I just wanted to ride the one I had. The fever disappeared after my first March ride.

Ironically, I’m feeling the same way right now about new skis. Well, not exactly new skis, newer skis. It’s February and I’m still skiing on the skis I designated as rock skis this season. To answer why I’m still skiing on rock skis in February, you only have to look at their bases, scarred afresh each day I take them out in this striptease of a ski season.

I’d really like to start using the newer skis I expected to be using by now. It’s not an ego thing. The newer skis are still old and they are, in fact, exactly the same model as my rock skis; they just have about a hundred days less on them. They look the same from above and way smoother from below. But from the side, you can see why they’re the ones I’d like to be riding. They have camber. They have life. They promise responsiveness.

The old skis – Salomon Supermountains in a garish topsheet of McDonaldsesque red, orange and yellow – were wonderful skis, perfect for riding all conditions and all terrain on Whistler and Blackcomb and one of the last good skis the company made before fashion became more important to them than function.

But I feel like an abusive spouse whenever I take them out. They are so far beyond their best-before date, so limp, so worn out, they seem to have negative camber. Rocker? That they ski at all is probably more a testament to my lack of discrimination than their longevity.

Ski they do, though. They still take me everywhere I can go – everywhere there’s snow – on the mountains and I still thrill at the ride, even though they are developing a nasty habit of washing out at the apex of hard carved turns.

It makes me wonder about the desire for new equipment. I’ve heard it said there are only two kinds of people on the mountain who don’t want new equipment: those who have new stuff and those about to give up the sport. Everybody else wants a new ride.

Or do they? Is the rush to new just sublimation? Just part of the vortex of consumerism clogging our soon to be decommissioned landfill/brand new Olympic™ Village? Is it really a longing for something new and maybe better or a displaced longing to just get out and ski more, ski better, ski like the skier in our dreams?

The truth is, most of the people I see on the slopes have way better equipment than they have skill. The weakest link in their system is themselves. Like driving a turbocharged Porsche in a school zone – or up the Sea to Sky Highway for that matter – they’re using a scalpel where a meataxe will do.

I have no doubt they feel better about themselves because of their equipment, but I can’t escape thinking they’d feel even better if they could just get out and ski more. Kind of like the relics I still see occasionally on the mountain. You know the ones. Duct tape patches on faded, worn, first-generation Gore-Tex, skis that look like they might have been purchased at the Re-Use-It centre, boots with nothing to suggest them other than they fit and still snap into bindings.

Their numbers aren’t as great as they were even a decade ago and they are, at least in Whistler, a dying breed. But damned if they don’t seem to be having a great time on the mountain.