The Magic Christmas
Many of us remember the first time we put on skis. As a small boy I felt a mystique to every aspect of skiing: the skis and boots, the smell of wax, the associated words and their tone, the people and characters and of course above all, the mountains in winter. My older brother Daryl was the shaman for my first mystical adventure on skis. On a cold day in December of 1972, I knew I was entering into a magical world that would take me places I could only imagine to be beautiful, adventurous, and even something more. Something that was beyond my physical senses or the human ability to describe. Magic. It all happened for Christmas 1972.
Christmas in our family was an exciting, busy, hopeful and sometimes a disappointing experience for me as a kid. As the youngest of seven, there was love in broad brushstrokes but only rarely in direct strikes. My mother was brilliant in preparing ice cream bucket loads of treats and goodies for us to eat. This was her language of love which was beyond my 7 year old brain’s capacity to understand. Months beforehand she diligently made, fruitcake, perogies, cabbage rolls, and meatballs, freezing them all for the greatest feast of the year; Christmas Eve dinner. This dinner was a Ukrainian 12 course affair and the one meal of the year where we did not try to get food off of each other’s plates. With seven growing bodies at the table, the food on your plate was never really yours.
With all of the fare and celebration there was still something missing - a shortage of one commodity. Time. Focused one-on-one time. Amongst all of the abundance, and Christmas celebration we typically did not make real and important connections with each other that were based in acceptance, interest and the desire to understand. The epidemic of anonymity existed in our family of nine: all of us wanting attention but unskilled at being present with one another. However, the seeds of change happened for Daryl, Shauna and myself on Christmas 1972.
It was a bold move for my brother Daryl to offer an activity as a gift. It was a change to the normal pattern in our household of sitting around the house watching T.V. killing time. Thoreau wrote, “When we kill time we wound eternity.” Daryl brightened my eternity that Christmas. He was 17 and in high school. He switched on by the bold Canadian Rockies from a cross-country skiing experience with Mr. Hergott, one of his teachers at Bishop Carroll High School in Calgary. As a Christmas gift, Daryl decided to spread this new-found awakening to two of his siblings.
I awoke Christmas morning, like most children, much to early. There was a pair of wooden cross-country skis leaning against the wall next to the tinseled Christmas tree. Unwrapped. Used. Enticing. They were much too large for me, but they still caught my attention. I assumed they were for one of my older brothers or sisters. But the skis had a torn scrap of brown bag paper with a note in Daryl’s nearly illegible handwriting, “To Shauna and Kenny. . . love Daryl”.
I was baffled. How were Shauna and I to use these large skis? And there was only one pair. Daryl explained that they were his skis and they were by the tree to represent the day out we would have together and that he would rent us skis when we went. This hit home and would turn out to be the best Christmas gift ever.
Walking into the Norseman cross-country ski shop to rent skis is a carbide tipped memory for me. The distinct smell of pine tar, and the sticky feel of purple kick wax. Below the retail shop was a rental space down a narrow set of stairs. We sized skis with an extended arm above our heads, boots with extra woollen socks and bamboo poles to our arm pits. After paying four dollars each set and went clattering out the door. This was the first of what was to become a lifetime of trip logistics for me. The skis were not mere tools. . . they were a vehicle to my soul.
The drive west was my first trip to the mountains. The sky was blue with the hue lightening as it came to meet with the white and black mountain skyline. We were in Daryl’s first car. A Rambler sedan. And it was cold. Really cold, and the car strained through the thick -20˚ air. At Scott Lake hill we all lurched forward in our seats in an effort to help the car make it up the hill. Driving past Cammore I asked Daryl about the town and he said said, “Canmore is just a dirty old coal mining town.” A description Canmore has outgrown.
A decade later. . .at 17
Photo: Daryl Wylie
What I remember most about the drive was the Banff Park gate. For a boy of seven, with a natural draw to the outdoors, this was the equivalent to the gates of heaven. The heavy snows of 1972 created a magical winter wonderland. The log architecture of the booths at the gates laden with heavy snow fit with the landscape and grabbed my heart. They still do today. When we crossed the threshold I remembered feeling like I had come home for the first time in my short life. It was then that I realized that life could be magic. Really Magic. Though I could not articulate it in words at the time, I learned in that moment that natural places have great power to nourish.
Photo: Wikimedia Commons
We were going to Johnston Canyon. The Inkpots. I did not know what an inkpot was. Daryl reminded me of the ink well holes in our desks at school. I had seen the holes but had never seen an inkpot. I asked,
“Why are they called that?”
Daryl said, “because they are deep pools of water and because they are deep they are dark blue or black and look like ink”
We arrived at the parking lot with the car tires squeaking on the cold snow as we slowed down. Decreasing in pitch. Having been growing up in AlBUUURRRta Shauna and I needed no instruction from Daryl on how to dress to keep warm. Daryl did however explain about the equipment and waxing.
We took the temperature and selected the wax to match.
We applied green. And Daryl added a stroke of blue on the mid part of our ski.
This was first time I was required to observe nature and then take an action that enabled me to work in concert with it. Waxing is an art because it takes time to sense all of the conditions that nature is presenting, and it demands that we throw in a little bit of our intuition.
Shauna and I put our skis on and Daryl showed us how to test the grip of the wax. They seemed to both grip and glide, so we started up the Johnston Canyon trail. In those days the trail was above the canyon. Glimpses and overlooks into the canyon allowed some privacy for itself and the critters that live there.
Daryl showed us how to slap our skis against the snow lightly in order to get the wax to grip as we went uphill. This was my second coming home of the day. Human power. Moving uphill is as natural a communication with the mountain and ourselves as one can get. Secrets about the mountain, and ourselves, are only released with personal effort. The natural movement of cross-country skiing was “just like walking”. But so much more.
The rhythm of movement was a little awkward. My mistake on this trip was to stare at my skis. They were called Gresshoppa Finse. I remember the name because I looked at them all day.
Mine were brown and they had a snowflake like pattern on the tip. Shauna’s were blue. I would watch as each ski overtook the other in a rolling rhythm of momentum. Uphill. I was trying to put a little hop in my step like Daryl did in order to get some glide but it did not really work. I am sure I looked like a dancing bear. With a downward gaze my balance was poor. That is what the poles were for I thought. Eventually, after enough striding, I would stop and look around and allow myself to be enveloped by the place.
The magic of the soft blue light cast on the trees dressed in snow, with long winter shadows. The trail with two sinuous tracks impressed in the powder with countless ski pole holes, winding through the trees, taking the natural line that fits the terrain. Tracks of animals criss-crossing the winter canvas, showed a tale of another community of animals that lived in this enchanted place. The promise of sights ahead. The notion of adventure. The intent of discovery. The stillness that invited self-knowledge. I yielded, allowing the place to consume me.
We kept warm, for the most part. Our toes got a little cold from time to time. Numb in fact so we took sat on our packs, took our boots off and warmed our feet with our hands. We also had to be careful of our nose and ears. The cold does bite and warrants respect, but we learned that movement kept us warm and cozy. If cold, move faster.
Our path eventually brought us to several waterfalls. Anyone who has visited a mountain waterfall in summer knows that they are things of beauty. Waterfall ice is an order of magnitude greater in beauty to summer ones. Ice refracts the blue/green spectrum, which gives them more colour than in summer. As we drank in the view of these water Cathedrals, Daryl said another thing that was to change my life.
‘People climb these”
The wonder of that statement captured my imagination.
“How?” I asked
“With ice picks, ropes and screws”
I stood there trying to imagine what ice climbing must be like. I knew I would like to try it. Someday.
The immediacy of -20˚C pushed us onward and eventually to the Inkpots. There were white spots in a meadow, I thought. Big deal. We came all this way for this? This was my first lesson in discovery. You can’t plan to discover. It just has to happen unexpectedly. We found a spot in the meadow for lunch, took our skis off and immediately sank in the snow up to our waists. Cold inland air takes all of the snow’s strength so it can’t support the weight of a person. I learned right then how desperate winter travel would be without skis in the mountains. Discovery. Daryl taught us to keep out of the snow by stomping a hole for our feet and to sit on our skis so we did not sink. We made our spots and brushed the snow off to keep ourselves dry. We ate frozen sandwiches and Christmas sugar cookies with green and red sprinkles on them in the shapes of bells and Christmas trees.
We didn’t take long to eat lunch, the cold crept into our bodies and told us it was time to move again. We put our skis back on and started our slide back to the car. But there was much more to it than that.
I can still hear Shauna’s giggles today in my mind’s ear as she and I made our way down the slopes of the Johnston Canyon trail. Daryl was ahead just enough to hear our laughter but stay out of our way. Out of harm’s way. Rockies ski trails are really summer trails with snow on them. They are not designed for skiing. But that is what makes them fun. Narrow, fast, trees lining the edges, long steep sections with 90˚ curves at the bottom, bumps, roots, icy sections. The take-home message for me was. . . speed-is-good. I have lived it ever since. Whistling past the lodge-pole pines was exhilarating. Our only breaking mechanism was to fall. We did not know how to snow plough. Or stop. We fell, peeled out, crashed and bailed, sometimes narrowly missing the trees, or getting tangled in the Labrador tea bushes. Our red faces gleamed with delight as we picked ourselves up from fall after fall. We discovered another element to the landscape. Gravity. It seemed as though we were just becoming weary when the welcome sight of the parking-lot came into view and the frozen Rambler. The mountain had shown us all a great time. And I was hooked.
I don’t remember the trip home all that much. I do remember the frustration of trying to find words that captured the day when talking to others. Impossible. Adventure on the landscape is like subscribing to a secret language that can only be decoded through direct experience.
What was I hooked on? The priceless part of the day was making friends. I grew in admiration and closeness with Daryl because of his ability to be with us and also let us do our thing. He also mentored his connection to wild places, not by his words but by his reverent gaze at his surroundings. I grew in closeness with Shauna because of her ability to handle the struggles with good humour and delight. I became good friends with a portion of Banff National Park and the Rockies. A friendship that still exists to this day. I became a better friend with myself because I began to know what kinds of experiences fuel my spirit.
This was the first lesson in courage that the Rockies had to offer me in my life. Their bold nature had inspired Daryl to embrace all of the risks of taking his two young siblings out for a day in Banff in -20˚C temperatures. Lots could have gone wrong. We could have been frozen, hurt, killed or worse yet, we might have hated him for it. None of those things happened. We loved him for it. We loved him for the time he took. We loved him for being connected to us. We loved him for introducing us to skiing, the mountains, Banff Park, and each other. To this day I believe that the three of us have connection that is rooted in our day together.
Daryl was also inspired to be socially courageous. He broke the pattern of inactivity. He broke the pattern of valuing only work. He broke the pattern of the purchased expression of love. He expressed it directly with the gift of time . . .and adventure.
This lesson has helped me understand Christmas and what people need. We do not need more stuff. We need to be courageous. Courageous enough to take the time to make memories with family and friends. Courageous enough to be challenged so that we are presented a window to our character. Courageous enough to take physical risks. Courageous enough to embrace the landscape. Courageous enough to give meaningful gifts. Courageous enough to be who we are. Courageous enough to tell people not only that we love them but why.
Ski Guiding at Battle Abby thirty five years later in 2007
Photo: John Irvine
