The Life
A year or a lifetime—sometimes one makes
or breaks the other.
By KRISTOPHER KAIYALA

Step outside to quiet snowfall. My night of inhaling glue fumes and foam and plastic boot shavings, not to mention the ever-lovely musk of après ski foot odor, is almost over. With safety goggles and breathing mask still dangling around my neck, their red outlines fresh on my face, I venture out of the cramped back stockroom that doubles as the tool shop for a much needed breath of arctic-cold fresh air.

Clink-clink. A little metal bell chimes behind me as I close the door. The sky is haggard above the comfy confines of the warmly lit retail showroom. No one is outside save a few Village employees, milling inconspicuously in the darkness, too demonized by the weather to stay indoors. I amble down the wooden deck and stop beneath a halogen light shining from an overhang. Its radius illuminates a hornet’s nest of billowing flakes that buzz around my face and reluctantly settle at my feet. A soft, ambient murmur emanates from the Moose, a snowball’s throw away. Car doors slam just beyond the Hostel as a set of headlights peels off into a black hole horizon, what tonight feels like the edge of the earth.

I put my cold hands in the pockets of my work bib and perform a quick inventory: a box knife; three pens (two that don't work); a crumpled notepad; work-order sheets; a couple of rubber bands; a several-years-old-but-still-useable tram ticket; barely a buck and change; some used duct tape from an earlier boot fitting; notes I scribbled about a customer that called from New Jersey. I spy a dog in the darkness struggling to run in chest-deep fluff along a quickly disappearing boot tread that leads to the nearby tram dock. From my vantage I can barely make out the trio of tram cables that cuts an ascending arc from the neighboring structure into the swollen darkness. There are no permanent lights on the mountain, and tonight, in the fog of a mounting snowstorm, it is utterly dark up there. Savage. Bewitching. Primitive. A beautiful Darwinian mess.

Even with the modest din of activity there is an overwhelming and deafening silence. Discomforting to some, to me it is an indistinct joy. Tomorrow is going to go off, no doubt about it, but I have to work. Even though I moved here to log, scam, cheat, and beg my way into as many ski days as possible, somehow, right now, I don’t mind that others will get the goods while I deal with bone spurs, flat feet, corns, bruised insteps, and blackened toenails. Right now just being here feels like enough. For a brief moment, standing here alone, though I've contributed very little to this collection of ideas—this mass of wood, steel, and concrete called a resort—I feel that the whole area is mine.

Of course, moments are fleeting.

The steady and affordable diet of Top Ramen and spaghetti was a small price to pay for paradise. I had a car, a decent roof over my head, and a life-long partner with whom to share and enjoy it, which is much more than some guys get. I skied incredibly deep and light pow, proving the brochures right, and tested my limits on truly difficult steeps, sometimes hiking for miles to get to them. Friendships grew quickly. However, while one year is long enough to change your life, it is not long enough to truly belong. In only one year I sought intimacy with a town and its people, yet I never quite earned it. For in ski towns, belonging is not measured in accomplishments or even in sacrifice, but in longevity.

I will always wonder how different things would be today had I stayed longer to see where it all could have led, to see new friendships through. But I went there in the first place, and for me that is the key. Going at all is far better than the alternative. Living there, even for a short time, allowed me to feel on at least one night that the mountain—and all it had to offer—was mine. Wonderfully all mine.


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