The First Time: Please Be Gentle With Me

Thrusting. Adrenaline. Muscles pumping. The thrill of perpetual motion. Then crying out as if there were no tomorrow.

And, suddenly, there I was. Flat on my ass. Spent. Staring into the sky. Pleasure and embarrassment at the same time.

On the side of a mountain. In the snow.

I'll never forget my first time.

A native New Englander, I'd never skied before last January, and my inexperience shamed me in my younger years. I envied the lift tickets that my friends and neighbors hung so nonchalantly from the zippers of their brightly colored parkas.

I meant to learn. At the first snowfall of every winter I told myself and I told others that I'd start skiing that year without fail.

It never happened. But then somebody gave me a ski jacket as a birthday gift a few years ago. Somebody else bought me ski pants. Finally, last Christmas, when my sister got me a pair of goggles and an electric red hat, I didn't have an excuse.

Yeah, yeah, I'll go, I said.

Mere days, then, after finishing my Slavic 101 final, I found myself alone aboard a chairlift on the side of a cheesy hill in central Massachusetts. Rented skis clung tenuously to the plastic-and-foam boots on my feet.

Your first go at anything new never turns out exactly as you expect it to. It's always a little sloppier, a little clumsier, a little sillier than you expect it to be.

So it was with skiing. My new sport treated me badly at first.

As I neared the top of the slope, it occurred to me that the instructor never told me how to get off the lift. So I flopped gracelessly off and fell on my side in the snow. My right ski came off.

No problem. Never mind that the lift operator didn't notice me on the ground and that two or three successive pairs of more experienced skiers nearly ran over my right leg. I righted myself, slapped on my ski and stood up. I stuck my poles into the ground and pushed forward.

My instructor reached the top of the hill two or three minutes after I did, and the group lesson began.

The main problem with group ski lessons is that you never know how good a skier you'll be before you try it. You may humiliate yourself, without having any reason to expect that you will. Given the stochastic element inherent in skiing, you risk failing miserably in full public view.

Not that I did. Not entirely. Okay, so I skied off the side of the trail a few times, but I never hit a tree. I fell down a few times, but everybody does. I kept my knees bent. I leaned into my turns. More mechanical than graceful, I didn't slice through the snow with the grace of Roger Moore in "The Spy Who Loved Me." But I didn't completely suck.

Halfway down the hill, though, I somehow began to. After zigzagging slowly down the top half of the slope, I picked up speed as my group slid closer and closer to the bottom of the hill. Again and again I jammed my poles in the snow and pushed off with every erg of energy my sunken pectorals and triceps could produce. My nose, exposed, throbbed, but I didn't care because I was in motion.

And then, as described above, I wasn't moving anymore. I was lying down three-quarters of the way to the bottom. My left ski--my faithful partner--stayed with me. The right one didn't. The treacherous slab finished the trail without me.

I'd enjoyed myself until I hit the snow, but the sight and the sound of my group-lesson buddies skiing by just pissed me off.

"I'm never doing this again," I fumed, ego deflated, to no one in particular as an eight-year old in a red jacket zipped past me.

I got over it. The instructor brought my ski back, and I mounted the evil chairlift once more--I conquered it the second time around. I made an unassisted run down the hill. Victory. And then once or twice more before lunch.

I skied, goddammit. I skied.