The Men We Became

by Robert T. Littell

  Eight

  HIGH ALTITUDE

  JOHN CALLED ME at work one slow February afternoon in 1988 and asked if I wanted to go helicopter skiing with him. He’d been offered two slots on a Canadian Mountain Holidays trip in early March. This was prime skiing time in the Canadian Rockies because the sky is clear and the glaciers are stable. The helicopters drop skiers high above the tree line for quadricep-crunching runs through waist-high virgin powder. It took me all of a split second to commit to the trip, despite the fact that I’d have to bust open my piggy bank to go. Skiing was what John and I did best, and the Cariboos, our destination, is one of the sport’s holy sites.

  Over the next few weeks we gathered the necessary equipment and went to the weight room at the Downtown Athletic Club every other day to get into shape. We took off from JFK on the first Friday evening in March, flying to Detroit and then on to Calgary. I was more excited than I’d ever been for a ski trip, and I get very excited about ski trips.

  The headquarters of Canadian Mountain Holidays, called CMH, is in Banff, Alberta, a long way from anywhere. There were forty-four people scheduled to go on the trip, and we all met Saturday morning in the lobby of a Calgary hotel, where we boarded a bus for a seven-hour drive to the mountains. We arrived at our destination, an unmarked lot in the middle of a forest, early in the afternoon. The bus looked strange out there in the middle of all that nature, a big gaudy chunk of metal in the pristine wilderness. Since neither John nor I was born to sit still, we were downright twitchy coming off the bus, leaping around like escaped pinballs. We began to throw a tennis ball around, trying to loosen up our stiff muscles. An older American man, who turned out to be an accountant from Tulsa, walked over and told us to stop tossing the ball in the air. He said, with a nerdy know-it-all air, that it could damage the helicopter’s rotor blades. This was the first of 2,347 bits of advice we would receive from Art Dion over the following week. We smirked a little, but we put away the ball.

  Less than thirty seconds later, a helicopter came whup-whup-whupping out of the mountains like a mutant locust. It was to carry us, in groups of eleven, to the Cariboo Lodge, which is accessible in winter only by copter. Being polite and instinctively eager to ingratiate ourselves with the old-timers, John and I let everyone else go up first. Bad idea: All the massage time slots were filled by the time we got there. Finally it was our turn and we climbed aboard with our load of gear. The Bell 212 twin-engine helicopter swooped up into the canyons and alighted on a helipad adjoining a multibuilding complex that was the Cariboo Lodge. We were at 3,600 feet above sea level, in a small clearing cut out of a landslide-protected swath of forest. The lodge, though not fancy, was a monument to physical comfort. A gym, a game room, a screening room, and more had been hauled up the mountains by truck in the summer months, mostly to languish unused during ski season because the skiing wipes you out like a hundred-foot wave.

  Hip-hopping in the Canadian Rockies. (Courtesy of Mark Chitty)

  Our fellow skiers were a colorful cast of international characters, almost all repeat visitors to the Cariboos. John and I were especially intrigued by a James Bond type named Michael Jack. An ex-mercenary herb farmer who’d left his carbine in Yemen and settled in Zimbabwe with his wife and four daughters, Michael told spellbinding tales of his days at Sandhurst, England’s military academy, and his nights on patrol in Yemen, working for the government’s Special Forces. If he was to be believed—and we did believe him—he’d been a killing machine of sorts before turning to herb farming. A fine skier, he was as cool as the breeze, witty, and a bit scary.

  Our mercenary/herb farming friend Michael Jack, with us up at the Cariboo Lodge in Canada. (Courtesy of Mark Chitty)

  The most playful members of the crew were a group of Iranian royalists out of Houston whom we dubbed the Persian World Party Tour (PWPT). Not surprisingly, we’d gone to school with a relative of a PWPT member, the lovely Ayshe Farman-Farmain, and they adopted us right off into their playgroup. The PWPT enjoyed life unabashedly, consuming a case of vintage Montrachet each night with dinner and a box of Cuban cigars with dessert. After-dinner activities included cerebral warfare over the backgammon table, with the PWPT hurling Farsi epithets at one another while conversing with the rest of us in perfect English. The power of history was confirmed when the French and Swiss skiers immediately squared off against the British guests. John and I ended up with the cricket-bat wielders, since they shared our sense of humor and had the Special Forces guy. There were several Germans, too, seemingly skiing on a different mountain, one that was dark and serious.

  John smiles when I choke on a Cuban “heater” in the Cariboo Lodge. (Courtesy of Mark Chitty)

  Although everyone wined and dined and ached together in the evenings, during the day there were some geopolitical skirmishes. On the first day of skiing, the top French skier, an instructor from the world-famous Val d’Isère resort, somehow fell behind. In a mad dash to rejoin his group, he ran his skis under a hidden branch, his bindings released, and he flew through the air like a tricolor human rocket. Just like a cartoon, he whistled thirty feet down the hill and disappeared into a snowbank. When he emerged, the Frenchman was redder than the rooster on his hat. He haughtily refused a British offer of help to find his skis. There were two minutes of dead, pained silence while he collected his belongings and huffed and puffed away. Then the Brits, and John and I with them, fell over in tears. Waterloo relived.

  Each day of the trip was the same: In the morning, in groups of eleven, we’d be taken by helicopter to an altitude of 10,000 feet or so and dropped, sometimes literally, on a glacier. The guides had some 575 square miles of skiing terrain to choose from, and we skied a different route every run. The four guides skied in front, on the lookout for avalanches and crevasses. We were warned not to ski off on our own, and in the trees everyone had to ski in pairs. We also wore transponders to help rescuers locate us under the snow, in the event that became necessary.

  The risks of jumping out of a helicopter and skiing down the face of a glacier are fairly obvious. Nothing is perfectly safe, and we trusted in our ability and in CMH’s expertise. The rewards of the adventure are harder to describe and of a different magnitude altogether. The physicist Fritjof Capra, in his book The Tao of Physics, suggests that alpine skiing is the closest we mortals can get to the higher peace attained by Zen masters through a lifetime of meditation. And this was the purest form of skiing, on mountains untouched by man. For us it was bliss, some kind of rare transcendence rooted in nature and our own physicality.

  Which isn’t to say there weren’t a few temporal issues. On my first run, I tumbled down the mountain like a sneaker in a dryer. I was a human Popsicle by noon. There was snow up me bum and no possibility of warming up until the end of the day. But discomfort is relative, and I was jolted out of my chill when our young German guide took off between two trees into the thickest, steepest forest I’d ever seen. These were not glades, mind you, but tightly packed trees, each circled by a deadly tree well, set on a steep incline. Tree wells are deep, wind-carved sinkholes of snow that spread out from the base of a tree. They’re a skier’s nightmare: If you fall into one and there’s no one to help you out, you can die. Then there’s the tree itself to consider. A minute or so after our guide disappeared, we heard him yodel happily far below. We looked at each other in disbelief, a group of expert and cocky skiers paralyzed by fear. John, who was wearing the team’s safety backpack at the time, waved everybody on. I took off just ahead of him, and we skied together down into the forest. The snow under the pine boughs was lighter and softer than I can describe. About a hundred yards into the woods we were letting out whoops of joy (though quietly, so as not to cause any avalanches).

  Suddenly a snow snake (an old ski legend not unlike the Loch Ness monster) got ahold of one of John’s skis. He lost the ski and continued on, barreling another thirty-five feet on one ski and barely avoiding several pine trees en route. A harrowing few seconds later, he came to a stop in
a whirlwind of fluff, laughing at his misadventure. He popped off his remaining ski in order to hunt for the missing one. We bellowed down the hill that we were delayed, but heard nothing back except our own echo. Still worried about avalanches, we stopped yelling and started rooting around in the four-foot-deep powder. The ski was nowhere to be found. The hunt was exhausting, our fatigue compounded by the altitude. Desperation arrived after five minutes, and tears flowed after ten. That was the only time I ever saw John cry. He wasn’t afraid, he was furious with himself and frustrated that he was holding up forty-three other people, at ten thousand feet, frozen, with no energy and only one ski. Seconds before both our nervous systems blew out, I found the ski about ten feet below us, a yard beneath the surface. John trudged down to get it, snatching it out of my grasp as though I’d been hiding it. He was embarrassed, unnecessarily, so I slapped a hangdog look on my face and said, “My fault. Won’t happen again.” He smiled and refastened his ski.

  “Which way is down?” John enjoys the view of the Rocky Mountains in Canada. (Courtesy of the author)

  We took our time catching up, having learned the dangers of rushing from the French rocket, and reached the chopper about twenty minutes late. Our guide, Bernhard Ehmann, ripped into John, implying that his mishap had endangered the team. This was totally unfair. Everyone took a spill now and then. And I was clearly the laissez-faire fellow in our group, while John and Bernard shared a quasi-military approach to safety and preparedness. John had been the most attentive listener at the avalanche training session, and he and I had volunteered to carry the safety pack for the group. We were also in charge of opening and closing the helicopter door on each sortie, a task we’d earned by virtue of our relative youth and size. It was like stepping into a two-hundred-mile-an-hour blizzard and wrestling an ice-cold manhole cover, twenty-eight times a day. In our group, John was clearly the biggest Boy Scout with the most badges, but he earned Bernhard’s wrath that day. Even more unfair, though I enjoyed it, was Bernhard’s decision to make me his model skier and best friend. After John and I got our skis fastened to the rack on the side of the helicopter, Bernhard stared down at John from his jump seat and yelled to the assembled crew, “If vee can elee-minate zee human factor and cover effry conteengensy, vee then have luck on owah side.” John being the human factor.

  That night, as we lay like big sourdough pretzels in bed, too sore to move, John mused for half an hour about how in the world Bernhard could like me and not him. I didn’t say anything, but it was clear that Bernhard liked John. Like so many others, he was just making John jump through some “Are you a real person?” hoops to prove his worth.

  Mornings began at seven A.M., when a cowbell rang to announce the start of stretching class. Reasoning that we weren’t cows, we always slept in, grabbing another three minutes of rest. The next ten minutes were spent slowly, slowly creaking out of bed. Though John and I were among the youngest in the group and were in good shape, we were skiing to the point of near paralysis each day thanks to several clever marketing ploys on the part of CMH. The first was its frequent-flyer program, which was a near obsession with many on the trip: For every million vertical feet skied, CMH would give you a sweet, one-piece ski suit with the CMH logo on it. Art Dion had four of them. There was a weekly incentive, too—to ski 200,000 vertical feet. For this milestone, rarely achieved, you received a gold pin and got your name on the wall. The conditions that week were stellar, and the hard-core heli-skiers were scrapping for every extra foot.

  In praise of Advil: John and I pretend to suffer muscle cramps for the camera after a hard day skiing on the glacier. In fact, we could barely move. (Courtesy of the author)

  Art Dion, the guy John and I originally nominated for head lame-o, became our savior. Each night before bed, he’d give us a little bag of vitamins and herbal anti-inflammatories. In the morning we’d query him like a prophet on ways to reduce muscle soreness. Art paid for a double room each time he visited, sleeping in one bed and laying out his remedies on the other. Bless him. As for the benefits of stretching, we found that the best “stretch” for tight muscles was the terror-induced adrenaline rush that accompanied the first jump out of the chopper in the morning. By the time you landed on the glacier, everything was working.

  Lunchtime without a fireplace? Canadian hospitality apparently stops at the tree line when heli-skiing! (Courtesy of Mark Chitty)

  We ate lunch at the top of whatever mountain we happened to be on at noon, above the friggin’ tree line, with no lodge, no fireplace, and definitely no hot cocoa. Rest room? A dream. John loved those lunches, reveling in the sparse ruggedness of it all. I, on the other hand, tried to conjure up Jacuzzis and burgers with my imagination. We skied an average of ten long, glorious runs a day, the conditions so unusually good that the 200,000-foot holy grail was within reach. In fact, twenty-two of the forty-four skiers made it, a CMH record. I missed the figure by thirty lousy feet, but they kindly rounded up, giving me a pin and a place adjacent to John on a plaque in the lodge. I’ll probably never see it again, Florida being so nice and toasty in the winter, but I love knowing it’s there.

  *

  My family has a house in Utah, the home of Wasatch powder, indisputably the best snow in the world and a great hook for getting friends to visit. Over the years, John and I had many an adventure on the slopes of Snowbird, Alta, Park City, and Deer Valley. As I mentioned, John was Olympic timber on the mountains. I know because we skied with an ex–Olympic team member at Deer Valley once. She, the stunning blond official Deer Valley ambassador of skiing, Heidi Voelker, was a friend of Kevin Ruff’s, a mate on that particular trip, and she told me on the chairlift that John could have been a pro skier. You can imagine how painful it was for me to hear that. I have to admit I never shared the compliment with him. I did prompt Heidi to say who she thought was the best skier in our group, and she took me down another notch by saying that the best skier was my sister. All in the family, at least.

  My folks’ house is in the valley that makes up Salt Lake City, so each morning of every trip we’d pack up the car and head south to Little Cottonwood Canyon, to ski at Snowbird and Alta, or north to Park City and Deer Valley. On the first day of one all-guy trip, five of us stuffed ourselves into a rental car and headed up the serpentine access road to Snowbird and Alta. My foot was pressed hard to the accelerator when, about halfway up the canyon, we heard a loud pop. The car came to a halt. We piled out, flanked by a sheer rock wall on one side and a deep ravine on the other. Being the pack of Ivy League softies that we were, none of us knew any more about cars than how to open the hood. So we did that and noticed that the wire from the accelerator pedal had frayed and broken at the point where it was attached to the lever on the carburetor that allows gas to enter the engine. We waited for help. And waited some more. Finally, John chipped in with a one-word solution: “Sweetarts.”

  I happened to be standing in front of the car, its large hood open and puny engine exposed, popping Sweetarts in my mouth. They’re one of my favorite food groups, and I travel with them all the time. We looked at John, hoping his next words would be more informative than the first one. He just repeated, “Sweetarts.”

  The light dawned. It was pure MacGyver. I took a Sweetart and placed it under the lever, slightly opening the valve that supplied fuel to the engine. Paul Oberbeck suggested two might be better, as the hill was steep in places. Two it was. The car started with a roar. I threw it into gear and kept my foot hard on the brake. Four harrowing minutes later, we careened into the Snowbird valet parking zone, right up to the resort’s front door. A surprised-looking crew of attendants came rushing over, waving their arms and barking out the “You can’t park here” policy their jobs depended on. My passengers, except for John, leaped out of the car as if it were leaking fuel and made for the lodge. I wasn’t sure how to handle the parking issue, but John, using his best snowboardspeak, had already assembled the valets in front of the car to explain our situation. He motioned for me to pop the
hood and then waved his arm over the carburetor, saying, “Duuudes, check this out.”

  When they saw the candy, the valets rendered their collective opinion: “Sweet.”

  The head man added, “You can leave it right here. Cool.”

  We nodded our thanks, barely, in keeping with the no-shape, no-color, no-emotion minimalism of snowboarding, and walked inside, never to see the car again. The rental car company arranged for a replacement to be there by 4:15. Which was also cool.

  *

  The following year Frannie and I invited a bunch of Italian friends to Utah. John joined us midway through the ten-day trip. With him was his girlfriend at the time, Julie Baker, a sweet-natured, strikingly beautiful model. The next day, a March sparkler, we began our morning on the moguls at Alta, taking advantage of the nightly snow dump. The bumps had already been carved, and the fresh snow made them like big fluffy meringues covered in buttery vanilla frosting. I could slam my large frame down again and again without fear. I had the B-52’s’ “Bushfire” cranking on my Walkman and the sun at my back, so I could admire my shadow on the way down. I had my wife and friends, and Julie Baker, too—who’s easier on the eyes than a pile of hundred-dollar bills. I asked her to ski over and watch me, suggesting that I’d ski better knowing that Beauty itself was backing me up. And I was right. I ripped it—two hundred yards of sinew-busting, tight-turned mogul dusting. Sun, song, snow, and personal glory. I didn’t even turn around, skiing down to the lift on a cushion of bliss.

  Unbeknownst to me, I had awoken the ugly troll in John. Our group caught up and I could see right away that John was bristling a bit, avoiding eye contact with me. He’d taken my prowess in the bumps as a personal affront. Our next run was down steeper, untracked terrain, and the group merrily attacked the slope. Eventually John and I found ourselves alone on a ledge overlooking a particularly nasty bit of hill, with flat light. He gave me a grumpy nod and took off at high speed, determined to show me how the mountain should be skied. Several nice turns later, John entered an unseen gully, one that had been obscured by the terrain above it. He sped into it and then out. Unfortunately, he left his skis under a branch on the way out, much like the Frenchman had done years before. He flew through the air with the greatest of ease, landing in a clump. I skied down slowly to check him out. He got up, swaying like a newborn deer, his sunglasses missing a lens and sitting askew on his face. Physically, he seemed fine, though he’d hit his head hard on the snowpack. I asked if he was okay. He said something like “Wha…? Huh? Oh yeah, hold on.”