Effortless - Kent Wright

It wasn’t until your author was twenty five that he encountered snow as something other than a cold, white complication in life’s flow. Something that took effort to move out of the way so that the flow wouldn’t back up. But it was different in the Arlberg valley of Austria. Men and women there put on skis and went high into the thin air of the Alps. From there they could sail back down the faces of those breath-taking mountains in effortless, unending arcs. I could see no muscles as I watched, only fluidity. It was a fluidity that allowed escape into an effortless white world that I wanted. I put on boots that were unrelenting in the unnatural shape they demanded of my foot, and I strapped on the skis. I went up the mountain and I set out on a journey on which eventually, after many bruising falls and some punishing of the snow in fits of frustration, I achieved the skills to ski comfortably among the “experts”. Someone else from a flat beginning now stares for the first time up the mountain and it is me they see, a small dot curving effortlessly down the steep, white face. Like me when I stood in their place, they imagine that in that world where I carve gravity relaxes, and that the bumps and surprises under the snow flash by unfelt, and that snow is always a dry powder that never freezes into hard hostility causing the skis to clatter and skid, and the heart to race dangerously near its limits.