Taking the Serum to Nome

The push and the glide, the rhythmic hiss of displaced snow, the push of cold air against your cheeks, the near-supernatural brightness of sunlight on white snow, and the balanced beat of legs and arms, legs and arms. When it’s going well and the day is kind, cross-country skiing can be as uplifting as a Billy Graham Revival with cocktails.

Between the puffing and gasping.

No sport commonly practiced by homo suburbia demands as much sweat and toil, but few offer such gleaming rewards.

It had been a full twenty years since I’d skied on the skinny boards. I’d kept my form (I told myself) by occasionally working out on the NordicTrak, whoosh, whoosh. For years I’d lunged along on the Trak, picturing myself taking the critical serum to afflicted Nome, pursued by the evil Count Kamarov and his Hired Thugs. Whoosh, whoosh. I always made it.

Swan and I presented ourselves at the Tahoe Nordic Track Center, near the Lake. My cherished and carefully preserved cross-country skis and boots were, alas, laid aside at my daughter’s home in Florida. I must remember to pick them up on the way to my next X-country adventure. So the rental desk asked the usual questions: weight, height, age. Normal “senior” status is over sixty-five. For cross-country “senior” is over sixty, and there are murmurs of lowering it to forty. We get a price break. I was asked whether I wished to “stride” or “skate.” This went over my tonsured head.

Apparently there are X-C Jocks who sneer at the antique notion of kick-and-glide, favoring a wide-stance, out-angled skating stroke, like roller-skating with your shoes epoxyed to twin skateboards. This requires the energy normally necessary to push the Sausalito Ferry through the water. I saw some of these showboats pass. No envy.

With only a hint of sneer the bearded athlete-in-bondage at the rental racks gave me a pair of stride skis. Itty-bitty things. About as wide as a table knife and ridiculously short. Worse, they didn’t have the proper elfin turned-up end with the signature point, that baroque mark of the true Nordic skier. These were as blunt as a toenail and curved up about half an inch.

Good news: boot technology caught up with human feet. The lovely cross-country boots issued were snug but comfy, not at all like the tight leather dungeons that made my feet feel as if they had been renditioned to Dubai.

But once attached to the sweet boots, the stride skis looked like toys. It was obvious the ski tops – the decorative lamination with the logo – had lost the real ski bottoms. But I checked: fish-scales firmly on the bottom. Theoretically, they should work. To some extent.

Cross country skiing was the holdout of the traditionalist. It was a minimalist sport for low-tech jocks. Our skis were still made from wood – hickory and ash with harder “lignostone” or even metal edges. The glide and kick of cross-country is an exaggerated Groucho walk, with alternate heel lifting, so boots were flexibly bound to boards with ancient “bear trap” spring-and-cable bindings or with three-pin clamps that fit holes in the lengthened boot toes.

We were all engrossed in wax theory, because an arcane scale of colored waxes made the skis work. Wax made the skis slippery but it also responded to pressure and “gripped” the snow for the brief moment of our “kick,” the propelling lunge down and back that set us gliding on the snow. Different wax consistencies for different temperatures, some for special snow-types. A perfect cross-country day was a Blue Day; it blissfully required only blue wax. Bitter cold called for green, bitterer cold wanted special-green. Warm spring days brought out the hated klisters, unspeakably messy goo in tubes that got on everything. We carried thermometers and tried wax combinations like “blue with a red kicker” under the heel.

I learned to ski on antique wooden skis with a strange mark: each ski was burned with the letters "BAE." I asked my Yankee friend what the letters meant. "Oh, that. It means 'Byrd Antarctic Expedition.' One of my husband's great uncles was with him. They were way too wide for anything but slogging along so we ran them through the table saw to slim them down."

"But these are artifacts, museum pieces!"

"Well, they were just lying around. No one was using them."

That was part of cross-country. It was a practical sport. Scandahoovians and Yankees understood the heart of it.

Quite early, alternates to wax appeared: plastic fish scales and mohair. The back-angled scales and fibers were mechanical methods for gripping the snow. High-tech methods didn't seem right, then.

X-C wasn’t high-tech stuff but a counter-culture sport, shunning Bogner and Bally stretch-fabric downhill fashions, preferring wool and corduroy. We wore knickers with knee-socks. No, really, we did! Some wore Andean or Tibetan knitted caps with earflaps and dangly tassels. It was a fol-der-ri-fol-der-ra crowd for sure.

So there I stood outside the lodge on high-tech, blunt toy skis, holding day-glo poles, wearing my downhill bib-front pants and a baseball cap. Would the magic work?

Whoosh. A hesitant glide. Whoosh, a dare of balance. Whoosh, a kick. Then an unsuccessful slide-back kick, then a series of productive, snow-grabbing propulsions. The rhythm fell into place: left pole-hand and right foot-kick, glide, right pole and left kick, glide, kick-pole, glide, kick-pole, glide. A springy dip with each kick, a striving pause with the glide. Whoosh, whoosh. Now an unfamiliar burr, like the buzzing of a sweat-bee as the fish-scales chattered over the snow. But the rhythm held and I was on my way again, taking the serum to Nome.

It was a lovely feeling.

Until the first downhill path. With the wisdom of a wimp I angled my skis into a snow-plow V, guaranteed to slow the snow. Nope. The miraculously slippery synthetic, even with its fishscales, continued its headlong slide unabated. More aggressive snowplowing. Nope. Gravity prevailed, redwood trunks blurred past. I heard a silly “whoop, whoop” noise and it was me. The last refuge of a cowardly skier is the Italian brake: I sat down. My ass is not synthetic or hydrodynamic. I stopped. Don’t knock it; it works.

The new skis don’t have edges. I asked the athlete-in-bondage about it later. He shrugged and told me that good skis aren’t made to slow you down. I pointed out that tree trunks did that just fine. He only nodded in agreement. Yes, some skis still had edges; you could get them. “But they’re dog-slow compared to good skis.”

By and by I discovered a working “stop me, control me, save me” configuration: a radical knees-together pinch that angled the skis in both the short and the long axis. It wasn’t entirely comfortable as a steering or stopping method but, according to the ski-rental guy, these skis weren’t made to slow down or, presumably, turn aside. I’ll look into this.

No one would have mistaken me for a Norwegian. Knut Haukelid, the resistance leader who helped destroy the German heavy water plant in World War II, skied a hundred miles cross-country to reach his objective. One of his band was pursued for dozens of miles by German ski troops who dropped away, one after the other, as he continued to whoosh, whoosh. He outdistanced all of them but in the dark he skied over a cliff and broke his arm. Then whooshed another 40 miles to a warm room.

I'm not Knut. On her mother’s properly turned-up skis slim, fit Swan glided sedately on like her namesake, past me on my toy skis. I stood periodically immobile, leaning with my poles jammed in my armpits, puffing and wheezing until my heart rate returned to a sensible rhumba beat. Uphill climbs, when I concentrated on weighting my heels for grip and balance, were trials. At one point I realized that I’d left my nitroglycerine vial in my pants at the condo. The idea of mortality in the woods occurred to me. But even my gasping pauses were delights, offering rare interior views of fir and redwood forest in snow and total silence.

It’s not like downhill skiing. No snowboarders, no tumbling stream of adolescent hotshots, no lift-lines, no collisions or flurry wipeouts. No noise.

The following day we set out again, Swan carrying 17 week-old grandson Kent in a front-pack, his mother Jennifer skiing with us. The motion lulled Kent. I caught a glance at his face occasionally under the hood, serene and pleased, and later peacefully asleep. True, as Swan made downhill schusses shouting “Wheeee!” his face was less composed. Terrified, really. But he enjoyed the rhythm and the lilt of motion as much I did.

So Count Kamarov was foiled yet again, and Nome was delivered.

The test of any sport is whether it takes you to the right place at the right time. The cold air and the evergreen scent and the coordination of balance and beat was a tonic. Those pauses on the silent trail were worth the sweat. It was, even on fish scales, a Blue Day.


He recalls antediluvian days with more fondness than reality. He was never really in shape for real skiing, never excelled at it, and never truly enjoyed the cold. Which was sometimes bitter and painful. Moist breath made his mustache freeze, indistinguishable from simple snot. It's possible he's more adapted to it now than he was, and that the synthetic, improved skis work far better than his waxed hickory boards. Still, there are long-ago moments from individual runs, certain afternoons or mornings, that glisten like gems in memory. Perhaps now we can capture more of them. Anything that pushes us out of our deepening rut is commendable, and anything that lures us to the wilder places is a blessing.

Braxinoso