Big Sky, Big Drama: It's Not Easy Being Dude

by Jules Older

It was — as skiing trouble so often is — intended to be the last run of the day. But hey, the sun was still shining, the snow was still soft and our legs still felt strong. Dick and Bud and me, we were dudes. Eastern dudes, old dudes, groomer-hugging dudes, but dudes.

We were also a wee bit lost. But everything on Big Sky’s Andesite Mountain had been so mellow, why worry? Why even consult the trail map? Real dudes don’t read maps.

Trails Named after Distressed Animals

We started down something called Crazy Raven. Which led to Mad Wolf.

Here's some free advice. Don’t ski trails named after distressed animals. You wouldn’t ski Hydrophobic Raccoon, would you? Or a route named Cow with Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease? The same applies to Crazy Ravens and Mad Wolves.

What led us astray — apart from the inherent stupidity of dudehood — was the approach.

Crazy Raven lures you in with a broad and gentle approach that — once turning back is no longer an option — suddenly and sadistically narrows, steepens and bumps up.

Which, at the end of the day means big, mean, rutted moguls frozen harder than Dick Cheney’s heart. By the fourth or fifth awkward stem turn, we were feeling considerably less dudical.

Halfway down, when the moguls were dwarfed by jagged rocks, we decided to bail. The only option was crossing through a narrow stretch of woods to Mad Wolf, which despite its unpromising name, had to be better than the bloody Raven.

Uh, no.

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Dead And Dragged Out On The Throughway: Is this really a better way to go than by air?

by Sallie Bingham

Santa Fe to Tucson in a one-day mad dash

Jack the Pup is riding shotgun on the roommate’s lap as we head west on I-40 at nine AM, planning to reach my sister’s house in Tucson in time for dinner. The first miles across the desert, numbingly familiar by now, yield as this time we’d planned a back roads excursion south, just across the Arizona border. The map shows one of those intriguing dotted lines, a scenic highway, just what we need after hours of rumbling 18-wheelers…

To ready ourselves for adventure, we stop in Gallup at what is now our favorite eatery: Earl’s Family Restaurant. Here in Navajo Country Earl’s is shopping center, family reunion, and good staple New Mexico food: guacamole, burritos and so forth. Outside, Navajo craftspeople jam the sidewalk with their tables; inside, they patrol the aisles, silently holding out pins, bracelets, necklaces, and, in a departure from the usual, a pair of weird lamps, the ceramic bases coated with sand and then painted with iconic motifs. I’m charmed, I must buy at twenty dollars each, then wonder, too late, where in the world I’m going to put them….

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The Nonfiction Novelist

by Nancy King

I was in the library, looking at the fourteen-day books, when I suddenly stared in amazement. There, on the shelf, was one of my novels, A Woman Walking. Stunned to see it in the section with well-known authors, I picked it up. My joy evaporated when I saw that it was with nonfiction books. Thinking it had been left on that shelf by mistake, I started to put it in its alphabetical order in the fiction section but then I noticed it had been classified as nonfiction. Who could find my novel hidden between how to improve your sex life and what to do about Iran?

A Walking Woman by Nancy King“Okay,” I said to myself, “take a deep breath. Do not be judgmental. Do not attack. Be friendly and nonchalant. It’s probably a mistake that can be easily rectified. In a calm, cool, dispassionate manner, simply tell the librarian that a mistake has been made, that the book has been erroneously classified.”

Feeling rather proud of myself for not getting upset or excited, I took my time, formulated a non-accusatory response, and ambled to the librarian’s desk, patiently waiting until she finished taking care of the woman in front of me.

“May I help you?” she inquired.

“I hope so,” I said, smiling pleasantly. “This book,” I told her, holding A Woman Walking, “is a novel but it’s been classified as nonfiction.”

She shrugged. “Then it’s nonfiction. The people who classify books know what they’re doing.” She turned away from me and picked up a pile of books from the desk.

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Summer at Moon Palace

by Bethany Ball

Most people associate North Michigan with snow, ice and long difficult winters.  But for me, the area is associated with Moon Palace, the summer cottage of my parents' best friends, where we spent nearly every weekend of my childhood. We passed the four-hour Friday-night drive listening to music – show tunes, folk songs, and NPR– until I’d finally drop off to sleep.

To me, coming from the city, it was as remote as the moon itself. First and foremost there were no other children—most parents waiting until real summer when the pool opens—and I am an only child. I spent my days reading Frank Baum's Oz series, which I was obsessed with, or listening to Neil Diamond tapes on my Walkman. This tiny tape deck with black headphones was, to me, probably the greatest invention ever.

When the weather was warm, I would prowl around the dense virgin forests that surrounded the cottage;  I knew every inch of them. I dragged a large section of nailed-together two-by-fours  together into a thicket of bushes and ferns. This was my house. If it rained, I would hide under the overturned canoe that was dragged up from Moon Lake. Once underneath the canoe, I imagined I could live there, though the ground was icy, and I'd have to wear my winter snowmobile boots ( great big ugly boots that I wouldn't be caught dead in if I were in the city but which kept my feet warm and dry in the forest).  I caught frogs and named  them: Fred, Franny, Frank, and Fran. Even though it was summer, ice formed in the night and early morning, before the sun had time to melt it. I walked along the ice’s edge, my feet breaking through to the shallow water below, the snowmobile boots surprisingly effective at keeping my feet dry.

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Boycott Mexico? No, boycott American stupidity

by Eric Lucas

The market vendor handed me the sack of fresh-made potato chips she’d just hauled out of the fryer, and motioned that I should add a bit of salt and lime juice. I told her thanks in my serviceable Spanish (mil gracias, senora) and did as instructed. Then I gently lifted one chip from the sack and took an experimental bite. I’d never tasted made-on-the-spot potato chips until my wife and I wandered by this food cart in the market in Patzcuaro, Michoacan, Mexico.

It was the best potato chip ever.

Too bad that one potato chip had more mental acuity than some of our own countrymen. Don’t go to Mexico and spend your money, urge the Americans United to Halt Tourism in Mexico, on the novel theory that the way to discourage Mexican immigrants from coming here to earn money is for us to not go there and spend money.

“Do not give your tourist dollars to Mexico!” AUHTIM fliers growl.

Americans are infamous for witless ignorance (name another country that ever had a political party called the “Know-Nothings”), but this is a particularly egregious example of mush-for-brains activity. Campaigning to collapse one of the healthiest parts of the Mexican economy might not be the best way to discourage its citizens from seeking work elsewhere. Mexico gets 22 million visitors from the United States every year. Tourism is 8 percent of the country’s GDP. It amounts to more than $10 billion a year.

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French Camp Failure

by Jules Older

As Effin and I left Vermont for French Immersion Camp in Quebec, I felt scared.

I had reason for fear. I nearly flunked French in high school. I did flunk Latin, got a D in German, just squeaked by Spanish. I kept switching languages in the forlorn hope I'd find one I was good at. I never did.

So why was I voluntarily leaving for seven days of French immersion in La Belle Province? Two reasons.

The most pressing: I edit Canada’s biggest ski magazine, a Quebec-based venture, where every one of my colleagues is bilingual. And while they generously switch to English whenever I'm there, I'm tired of being the only single-language idiot in the room.

The second reason is a fond hope I've clung to since my less-than-stellar experience in high school French/Latin/German/ Spanish. I've always said that the problem wasn’t me; oh, no, the problem was the way language is taught. I claimed (and almost believed) that if I were thrown into an environment where, say, French is spoken—as opposed to parsed, declined, memorized and chopped into small bits—I'd soon be speaking it like a native.

So. Alors. It’s crunch time for my dignity and my theorizing. On to Quebec!

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