When it snows on winter evenings, I think quite a lot about friction: about how to harness it in ways that assist me, like if I’m fishtailing on an unplowed backroad or trying to get my skis to catch on an uphill skin track, and about how to eliminate it to achieve a path of least resistance, often with the application of ski wax or caffeine.
Left to its own devices, friction can work with us or against us. But with a bit of finesse and a basic understanding of physics, manipulating friction to align with our objectives is a kind of a superpower.
Just over three years ago, my superpower met its kryptonite.
In the back half of the 2019-2020 winter, when the threat of coronavirus closed schools, office buildings, bars, restaurants, libraries, chairlifts and nearly every other chamber of the public square, I wanted to exist almost entirely in a friction-less world.
Almost.
Already prone to ascetic solitude, my hermitic propensities grew compulsive. I never encountered a crowd I hadn’t already calibrated how to avoid, and I never entered a room without first plotting my exit. When I did venture outside my home, my internal dialogue, if expressed as an arbitrary function, would have resembled the mathematical shorthand for a theorem in differential calculus, the displacement of my moving body (x) with respect to time (y) on a tangent slope (f) away from the divergent vector (delta) …
You get the point.
As my neuroses crackled and the keen reek of ozone filled my nostrils, the public square became an endless game of Frogger — a 16-bit matrix of contact-less negotiations, aseptic transactions and precisely timed entries. I needed to move along my trajectory fast and focused and unimpeded or else it was game over. The rest of the world was merely in my way.
With one exception.
When Whitefish Mountain Resort made the decision in March 2020 to close its operations three weeks ahead of schedule, shuttering services and powering down chairlifts, it graciously left its uphill ski policy intact. Many skiers, including me, take advantage of the uphill policy throughout the winter, applying climbing skins, or adhesive strips of synthetic fibers, to the bottoms of our skis to ascend and descend designated routes, both for exercise and to access backcountry terrain.
But the early closure to lift-access skiing brought a surge in the number of uphill enthusiasts as legions of skiers and snowboarders (and snowshoers and sledders) converged on the ski area, each of them conductors in the alchemic arts of friction.
I remember pulling into a normally quiet Spruce parking lot late one afternoon anticipating a solo mission only to discover a saturnalia of skiers tapping poles and propping up hibachi stoves on open tailgates, reveling in a sense of community that had been gradually whittled down over the previous weeks.
As I squeezed into a parking space and greeted my neighbor, I was startled to realize that nobody was in my way. My dissonance eased to consonance as I clacked someone’s pole, and then another, and another, gliding past a murderer’s row of friends and neighbors, each one wishing me a safe journey.
I’ll see you on the skin track.