It’s been several years since I was last out on cross-country skis, since before I got a partial knee replacement. I’m not as confident as before. Never having really learned how to scoot along properly, my motion is awkward until unexpectedly the skis fulfill their design and I begin to glide. The movement doesn’t seem practical until I think that having this much snow for half the year and few other means of transport would make it logical.
I live on a corner in Mott Park, across from the golf course. Whoever built this house must have been a skier. There is a rack of dowels in the basement from which to hang skis and poles. In winter when we have a foot or so of snow I can go out my front door, snap on some cross-country skis and be off. Usually I head down to the cul de sac, unhitch my skis, and walk down a hill too steep for my skills to a meadow alongside the Flint River. The days that I try this cannot be very cold; my baseline temperature is about 20 degrees and no wind. The exertion warms me up and in the meadow it is very quiet. Bending over to clamp down the baffles back onto my duckbilled ski shoes, I can see little web shaped indentations from animals and two long swathes cut by midnight skimobiles.
My skis are old---bought more than two decades ago. Åsnes tur-langrenn are among the last wooden skis produced before the switch to fiberglass. Wooden cross country skis were constructed from a composite of woods; mine seem to be hickory on the bottom. The poles are bamboo. Flexible and resilient materials. Wood has its devotees; people even make their own birch skis. On the internet dedicated craftsmen, woodworking offspring of Mother Earth News and Foxfire, plane away. Or see the process of treating the skis in six steps, three kinds of wax (including the enigmatic, never translated from the Norwegian, klister), and pine tar, the application of which requires a hot air gun or a propane torch with a fare tip. Easy. Once this is finished, you can carry different kinds of wax for changing temperatures with you in your back pack; gracefully pull up to a tree and re-wax your skis en route.
The skis date back to my marriage, from its closing era when we thought that doing some family activity together would improve our lives. After dinner we could ski under the lights of the nearby park---even take the dog with us; we would warm our hands around mugs of hot chocolate afterwards looking like the people in an Eddie Bauer winter catalog. We might still make it. What happened?
Endless fiddling with wax, debates about the temperature and which wax to fiddle with. The dog was not an eager to please golden retriever (catalogs must have entire kennels of goldens), but a beagle mix who shot out of the garage and disappeared for hours. The flatness of the park got boring. Snow soaked through our socks (it was in the days of low cut ski boots). We came back to the house mid-way to apply more wax and change socks. Second trip back to the house the project sank into disagreements and not very good hot chocolate in front of heaters festooned with wet socks and jeans. The skis dripped in the basement.
Plans for gaiters and more authentic (and presumably more comfortable) clothing faded, eventually subsumed by divorce. Somehow the skis made it from broken family to apartment storage, and finally to a house in Mott Park where as if by some omen (that I only now recognize) a basement ski rack was waiting. There my skis have hung, clapped together with a bungee cord but without, alas, the requisite block between them to maintain their camber---the arc beneath your boot that presses to the ground.
Endless fiddling with wax, debates about the temperature and which wax to fiddle with. The dog was not an eager to please golden retriever (catalogs must have entire kennels of goldens), but a beagle mix who shot out of the garage and disappeared for hours. The flatness of the park got boring. Snow soaked through our socks (it was in the days of low cut ski boots). We came back to the house mid-way to apply more wax and change socks. Second trip back to the house the project sank into disagreements and not very good hot chocolate in front of heaters festooned with wet socks and jeans. The skis dripped in the basement.
Plans for gaiters and more authentic (and presumably more comfortable) clothing faded, eventually subsumed by divorce. Somehow the skis made it from broken family to apartment storage, and finally to a house in Mott Park where as if by some omen (that I only now recognize) a basement ski rack was waiting. There my skis have hung, clapped together with a bungee cord but without, alas, the requisite block between them to maintain their camber---the arc beneath your boot that presses to the ground.
Last week, when we had fresh snow and the temperature was in the mid-twenties, I remembered my skis. With a quick waxing the skis slid along pretty well, or at least as well as I could manage. I still need to get my wax tins organized and find an old iron to melt in the klister. My son, a former snowboarder, says ironing is the trick. The pine tar base layer is another story---that propane torch deal.
If I can convince my partner Dennis, we might drive north to a cross country ski place and seek out a native to apply a new coating of pine tar. One of those bearded craftsmen from the internet.
If I can convince my partner Dennis, we might drive north to a cross country ski place and seek out a native to apply a new coating of pine tar. One of those bearded craftsmen from the internet.
Leaning in the corner next to the back door, the skis remind me to do a little scraping and waxing. I am less impatient with the care they require and more respectful of their nature. This week the house creaks and groans; the temperature has dropped and it is too cold to ski. I can wait. We have survived, these skis and I, from another era.
