We took turns breaking trail, but Davey O’Brien pushed the route most of the time. It was his “easy” overnight tour, his idea to ski from Woods Lake over the divide and down to the hot-springs ghost town of Dunton.

It wasn’t his fault that the rookie in the group, the new doctor, hadn’t told anyone that he couldn’t really ski downhill, couldn’t effectively turn his telemark skis, and that time had slipped away from us on the steep descent from the ridge, time spent picking him up and dusting him off, talking him down, time we needed to get down the river course before dark.

Pretty soon it was dark. We got out the headlamps and kept slogging. I worried, when it was my turn to break trail, about falling through into the creek. The river meandered, mostly hidden, through its high, flat valley. There were impenetrable willow thickets and occasional glimpses over soft edges into black water – water windows in a concealing snow blanket.

Hearing the water, listening for it beyond the weak beams of our headlamps, became ultra important. I couldn’t help thinking of Jack London and the short story “To Build a Fire,” which I’d read aloud in a high school speech class. That poor schmuck had fallen through into a creek in Alaska when the temperature was 60 below. He knew that if he didn’t build a fire in a matter of minutes, his legs would freeze solid, and he would die right there.

It wasn’t that cold for us that night with the snow curtain all around. It was cold, but not that cold. More than once we stopped to discuss our options. Davey was sure Dunton was just around the next bend. Then again, it wasn’t, even though we’d been plowing ahead for hours. The night was sapping our batteries; the already tiny pools of light dimmed. We could keep going, or we could stop and bivouac until daylight. We hadn’t prepared for this. We were supposed to be drinking beer at the Dunton saloon. We had little food and no water. Only Davey had a bivy sack to protect his sleeping bag from the falling snow. Was it riskier to plunge blindly ahead, running on empty, but relatively warm with the effort? Or was it smarter to stop moving and hunker down until morning?

We felt ourselves getting stupid with fatigue. We decided to stop. We found a stand of young firs and dug in under their lower branches. The snow was too soft to build any kind of shelter, so we just burrowed down like inept bears and laid out our bags shoulder-to-shoulder, and crawled in fully dressed, boots and all.

Left to right, there was Davey snug in his yellow sack, snoring if I recall, as soon as the nylon rustling stopped. Then there was the doctor in his purple mummy, suffering – if he suffered – in silence. On the other side of me Jerry Greene started to shiver, an early sign of hypothermia.

Soon all of our bags had grown thick coats of white.

I could hear Jerry’s teeth chattering. The doctor’s diuretics lecture from the day before clanged around in my memory, but I had no water to give him. I did have some chocolate. And three or four times in the night I unzipped just enough to reach a square over toward Jerry’s breathing hole. He took it gratefully, and the shaking stopped almost immediately, smoothed by sugar and fat on the tongue. The calm would last an hour or so, and then the quaking would commence again. He told me he thought he was dying.

Between bouts, I felt a strange contentment, warmth even. I didn’t trust it; snow avalanched off my bag every time I moved. But I felt somehow insulated from worry, even though I had a wife and baby daughter, and I thought about them often, back home in Telluride.

My nose was the only thing sticking out of the bag’s hood, and it was numb with snow. I didn’t think I slept, but at one point I opened my eyes and saw that the darkness had acquired a new lighter shade.

I remember almost nothing of Dunton later that day. The car we had left, or the ride we had arranged, was there, obviously. We may even have shed our clothes and slipped into one of the hot pools. I have a vague recollection of disappointment that the water wasn’t hotter. I do remember quite clearly the day I heard that Davey O’Brien had died. As he had predicted, his jinxed heart gave out a few years later. The news sent a chill down my bones.

Davey was one of Olympic’s ski equipment gurus back when the shop was next door to the Floradora Saloon, back before the United States Olympic Committee, citing copyright infringement, made them change their name.

Davey had a heart condition. His grandfather and father had both died young. We were about the same age, 30 give or take. He didn’t talk about it much, but he felt even then he was living on borrowed time. He loved to ski. And he loved the latest ski gear and snow camping and pushing himself on new adventures.

So, he got a posse together, four of us, and planned a tour from Woods Lake, south of Fall Creek, up over the shoulder of Wilson Peak and down the West Dolores River from near its headwaters to Dunton, which in those days was closer to its mining ghost-town past than to the “rustic luxury” resort it has since become. It did have hot springs, and a bar, and it sounded like the perfect end point for a mildly strenuous two-day tour.

I was new to Telluride, having arrived in the summer of 1976. I’d never been to Dunton. Jerry Greene, who’d fired up Baked in Telluride a couple of years previous, was also along. (It was always good to have the bagel man along.) And the fourth was the new doctor in town, whose name escapes me, perhaps because he didn’t stick around very long.

He was young and fit, and had all the best skis and boots and parkas and stuff, and he wanted to come, so Davey said sure. Davey said there was an abandoned cabin on the Woods Lake side of the divide where we’d spend the night. No need to bring a tent or anything; there’d be a roof over our heads. And sure enough, after an afternoon’s slog we found it right about treeline – grayed logs sagging back to the earth, and the whole thing missing enough teeth to allow the interior to fill with snow. That was OK. We tamped out flat spots for our pads and sleeping bags (Davey was the only one who brought a weatherproof bivouac sack in which to zip his bag) and spent a quiet, if cold, night watching the earth spin – stars appearing and then vanishing in the inky slits between roof boards.

Before dark, we had made a fire out in the snow and stood around its crackling warmth. Someone, maybe it was Davey, had brought a few cans of soda, Coke or Dr. Pepper, or something. They tasted really good after our long hike, until the doctor told us that all caffeine drinks were diuretics, that they ultimately cost you more fluid than you were taking in, and were therefore a contributor to dehydration, which was, we knew, a contributing factor in hypothermia.

(It turns out new research says this is not true, the diuretic part – unless you were to drink seven or eight cups of coffee, say. It was one of a few crucial things the good doctor got wrong.)

Next morning we snailed up the treeless col between the Wilson massif on our left and the Dolores Peaks on the right. At the top we stopped to scrape the climbing wax from our ski bases and cork in additional glide wax, for the long downhill run to Dunton.

The pitch ahead was south-facing, but it was early in the year, the sun was low in the sky, and there had been fresh snow recently, so the powder wasn’t bad – a little crusty maybe, but skiable, even with our big packs and skinny touring skis.

Skiable for three members of the group, that is. It turned out the doctor couldn’t buy a turn. His uphill technique hadn’t raised alarms; he’d gotten by on youth and strength. But on the descent his inexperience proved catastrophic. Every telemark attempt resulted in a head-over tumble. Then the exhausting recovery: snow-coated, limbs akimbo, skis buried, his pack like an angry orangutan on his back.

We tried traversing him back and forth across the slope, but that wasn’t much help; there were required turns at either end. The day dragged. Without our noticing, the wind picked up and the sky went milky with cloud cover. By the time we reached the creek, buried along with its beaver ponds, it was already late afternoon. At least we thought it was late afternoon. The sun had disappeared, and there were no shadows. The light had gone completely flat: snow and sky, up and down, near and far were the same blank slate.

Still, Davey thought we’d have enough light to make it to Dunton.

To be continued . . .

Oilman and miser J. Paul Getty said that. He was the richest man in America in 1957 but famously had a pay phone installed in his own home.

The sentiment is truer than ever. The rush to develop natural gas wells across the country has resulted in fracking-induced earthquakes in Ohio, in poisoned water wells in Wyoming and now, in the words of BLM Uncompahgre Field Manager Barb Sharrow, the “firestorm” in Paonia.

I was riding a chairlift with three Paonia friends last weekend when one of them, bandleader Mike Gwinn, burst out in song: (to a slow reggae beat) Gasman, gasman, leave our valley alone! Gwinn has been writing songs since he was a teenager, but he said, this was his first protest song.

Residents of the North Fork Valley got a rude awakening in December when they learned that 30,000 acres in 22 parcels in and around the towns of Paonia, Hotchkiss and Crawford had been nominated for oil and gas leasing. It’s happening all over. It happened to Ellen and me when the BLM auctioned off the mineral rights beneath our house, along with about 15,000 other acres of private and public surface in Montrose and Ouray counties, back in 2005. The North Fork folks were surprised in part, I think, because they live a kind of Edenic existence, a wine-making, cherry-growing, off-the-grid, back-to-the-land, public-radio, High Country News kind of progressive, alternative existence. Natural gas development was threatening all around – but not, for peaches sake, right here!

I know you have big corporate backing / our water can’t stand your chemical fracking / your safety standards are sorely lacking / leave our valley alone.

Some of the parcels come right up to the town limits of Paonia and Crawford and cover ground that feeds tributaries of the North Fork and irrigation and drinking water supplies. The community rallied en masse to three meetings in the last month sponsored by the North Fork River Improvement Association and the Western Slope Environmental Resource Council. Upward of 1,000 people came. They are asking the BLM to cancel the lease auction, which is scheduled for August. Sharrow said she received 800 emails on the subject over the holidays.

The letter writers did get a month-long extension of the public comment period to February 9. They want more. They want to call attention to the fact that the BLM’s Resource Management Plan is in need of revision (it was last updated in 1989). They want the Bureau to do a full Environmental Impact Statement rather than the much less-exhaustive Environmental Assessment. Basically, they want to spare their lovely valley the traumas that have befallen Silt and Rifle and Battlement Mesa and Pinedale and Rock Springs and Greeley. Namely, noise and dust and diesel spills and produced water and interminable truck traffic and air pollution and pipelines and compressor pumps and plummeting property values and the general destruction of the life they have known.

We don’t want no gas well drilling / the consequences are truly chilling / it’s your land too that you’d be killing / leave our valley alone.

The problem is, the system is stacked completely in favor of energy development. The BLM’s Sharrow admitted she doesn’t know who nominated the parcels in question. It’s a secret. Industry decides what lands it thinks might lead to Getty-like riches (he made his in Saudi Arabia). The BLM, the agency charged with managing the federally owned minerals, has very little leeway to say no. You’d better hope you have endangered Gunnison sage grouse on your parcel. Or critical elk winter ground. Or you’re butted right up next to a national park. (See Tim DeChristopher.)

Coincidentally, I just read a story in The New Yorker about Steven Donziger, a lawyer who has spent the last 20 years suing Texaco, now Chevron, for the environmental and social catastrophe at Lago Agrio in Ecuador’s Oriente. Lago Agrio was named for Sour Lake, Texas, Texaco’s aptly named hometown.

Chevron makes more in profit every year than the entire GDP of Ecuador, so it’s been an uphill battle. A Chevron lobbyist in Washington, D.C. told Newsweek in 2008: “We can’t let little countries screw around with big companies like this.”

Trying to hold oil and gas companies accountable in Ecuador, Donziger said, “goes against the flow of the entire economy.” I would argue the same is true in the American West.

I know you can make a lot of money / you may not think my song is funny / but the trout are dying down in the Gunnison Zone / leave our valley alone.

The debate blows hot on the slopes and in the blogosphere. (Although we haven’t heard lately from American giant slalom specialist Ted Ligety, who protested early in the season that the FIS was attempting to “ruin” his sport.)

In an open letter to the FIS, another American, a mechanical engineer and former all-American ski racer from Vermont named David Dodge, wrote that he believes the attempt by skiing’s governing body to improve safety will actually have the reverse effect.

Dodge, who has developed and sells an all-carbon fiber ski boot, directly challenges the assumption that by making skis less turn-y, less “aggressive,” the sport will see fewer serious injuries, particularly knee injuries, which the FIS says it is targeting.

Dodge believes that GS racers will find a way to make the new 35-meter skis carve the same 27-meter turn they make now on curvier skis. They will tilt the skis up farther, increasing the edge angle and shortening the turn radius, but in so doing they will put their knees in far more vulnerable positions. Dodge writes in detail about the biomechanics of the knee and its ligaments, and how overangulation leads to all-too-common ACL injuries.

I couldn’t follow every medical nuance he invoked in that section, but I could relate to what former U.S. Team skier Warner Nickerson said on his web page. Nickerson quotes an FIS communiqué from August, which stated they would “only implement new rules that are scientifically proven to enhance athlete safety and reduce risk of injury.”

Nickerson asks: “Where is the proof? Where is the data? Who tested the new skis? Which companies made them? What was the [snow] surface? Where did it take place? What type of terrain was involved? Where is the peer review?” All good questions.

He also noted that Marc Girardelli, a five-time World Cup overall winner in the 1980s (when skis had about the same built-in radii as the new FIS shapes), suffered through 17 ski-related surgeries, five on one knee, six on the other. “So much for safe skiing in the 80s,” Nickerson wrote.

He also said that 41 of the top 50 men in the current GS rankings, including nine of the top 10, had signed a petition asking the FIS to rethink its retro directive.

I did finally find on-line the study on which the FIS bases its conclusions. And there were a few answers there to Nickerson’s questions.

The report didn’t say who made the prototype “less aggressive” skis, or where they were tested. But it did include a quote from Peter Struger, a retired Austrian racer and one of the testers: “Due to the geometrical changes, these prototype skis were clearly different to ski on and require changes to the ski technique. But they are definitely skiable.” Whoa! Could that be any more lukewarm?

The other testers named were also retired World Cup racers, two more from Austria and one from Lichtenstein. Four retired racers. Three from Austria. Hmmm.

There is no empirical data from the testers. The actual study on which the FIS is basing its decision was published in 2010. It is a work of sociology, a survey of 63 people within the ski racing community: 12 athletes, 19 coaches, 12 race officials/organizers, 10 equipment company reps, and 10 “experts.” The interviews were conducted in 2006-07 and “led by the Oslo Sports Trauma Research Center (and the University of Salzburg) and supported by dj Orthopedics, a global medical device company specializing in rehab and regenerative products.” It turns out dj is DonJoy Orthopedics Global, whose big seller is the Defiance knee brace. Hmmm.

The interviews were quite exhaustive, but as far as I could see, there is no biomechanical or statistical data, no actual numbers on injury rates and their causes. The study simply states: “The FIS has deemed injury rates unacceptable.”

After much crunching of survey answers, the sociologists came up with four major injury risk factors, in the order they were mentioned by respondents: the snow, the athlete, the equipment, and the course. Even though equipment came in at No. 3, the report stated, “The system ski/plate/binding/boot subcategory is a key risk factor with absolute high priority.” It went on to say that the current ski “system,” so beloved by Ligety and other racers for its carving precision, is “too direct in force transmission and too aggressive in the ski-snow interaction.” Too efficient, in other words – too good.

My guess is, the FIS realized there’s not much they can do to change the variability of snow (the No. 1 risk factor) and even less they could do to change the athletes (who just want to go fast). So, they’re picking on equipment, the only thing they can actually control.

They can change the way they set courses, and that has been happening for, well, forever, in an effort to slow skiers down. It doesn’t work. As I learned from former U.S. Ski Team head coach Paul Major, “Manufacturers can always build a ski to match changes in course design.”

Which is why this effort is so nuts, so contradictory. As one of the few English language comments in the report said (most were in German, Finnish, etc.): “If we’re trying to slow the athletes down, the equipment companies are going to keep trying to find ways to speed them up – they want to win.”

So, the answer is to force manufacturers to make skis longer, make them straighter? Hmmm.

Backwards, into the future!

To be continued . . .

It’s not always easy these days to believe the John Lennon of 1968. Is it going to be all right? I’m not sure he believed the lyric himself. Despite what the Maharishi was telling him.

But there are days when it seems ineluctably to be true. Like last Thursday at Powderhorn, when I watched a pack of racer kids, like a school of mismatched fish, a mile away from their hand-held devices, popping turns in the powder as if snow were the medium of their birth.

Or when we got a call on Christmas Day from daughter Cloe and her family, visiting in-laws in Maine. Cloe put number-one grandson Alex on the line, and his first words were: “Buppup skiin’?” Only three, and he already knows his grandpa.

It was cold in Maine, 2 degrees on Christmas morning, the first cold temps they’ve had. Adam said the woodstove felt good. Cloe described the sledding on the hill out front as “hazardous to your coccyx” due to piles of frozen horse manure.

Little Lily spoke nonsense into the phone, modulating and enunciating her made-up words with great seriousness, then finishing the sentence with a heart melting, “please.”

Cecily and Mike called from his family place in Alabama. They’d had a grueling travel day on Thursday. De-icing the plane in Grand Junction, then a long delay in Houston, they’d arrived in Huntsville seven hours late. But everybody came to meet them at the airport: a warm Southern welcome from mom, dad, sister, brother, nieces, nephews, cousins.

I didn’t get to talk to Boden on the phone, but I could see in my mind’s eye his four-tooth smile and the irresistible way he todders up to me at the office, stops beside my chair and buries his face in my thigh with his arms straight up in the air like a referee making the touchdown call. He wants to be picked up. Maybe a shoulder ride to go look out the windows. Maybe dance to the radio for a minute or two before Buppup has to get back to work.

Yes, the grandkids are going to be all right.

The kids, too, are doing all right. Beautiful Cloe has a new relief in her voice. Relief because five years of medical school followed by five years of residency followed by this year in Boston on a fellowship are coming, finally, to a resolution. Soon she’ll be working for herself, no longer a student, paying off her loans, making decisions on her own and carving out more time to be with Adam and the kids. She and Adam met on bicycles; now she’ll be able to get back on hers just as Alex is learning to pedal his.

Adam will survive his years as Mr. Mom. It hasn’t been easy. He’s a man’s man who has had to master diaper changes and backhand spoons full of applesauce and oatmeal. He’s the clothes washer, the supper maker, the vacuum cleaner, the catcher in the rye. But soon Alex and Lily will be going to school, and Adam can get back to building things out of wood, and skate skiing and riding his mountain bike like a possessed woodchuck.

Wildland firefighter son-in-law Mike moves a little closer to home each year. First he was stationed in Independence, Calif. Then Las Vegas. Then Dolores. Now there’s a possibility he’ll get work in Durango maybe, or even better, Montrose. It’s good when he’s close to home during fire season, because it makes Cecily smile.

Cecily is going to be all right because, with the power of 30-something youth and her natural grace, she somehow keeps happy juggling three jobs, an ancient dog and an irrepressible toddler – with no daycare to speak of in Ridgway. Come on Mrs. Montessori!

Ellen and I are going to be all right, too. We just keep chooglin’ along, to borrow that made-up word from John Fogerty (eight minutes worth of “chooglin’ on down to New Orleans” on Credence Clearwater Revival’s 1969 offering Bayou Country).

What the heck is chooglin’? One urban dictionary on the web said it’s “a debauched form of white-boy boogie.” I like that.

Another one said “it’s more rhythm than anything else: fluid, organic, undulatory . . . rooted in the blues, but it doesn’t live there.”

We are rooted in OccupyNPRridetheEurozonePrimarycaucusesKimkardashianTokimjongunTomBrady-to-WesWelkerWi-FiCopyPasteDeleteSave(thewhales)Planetarymadness. But we don’t live there.

Shoo-bee-doo-wah.

Boden is 14 months old; he’s been walking for a month. He won’t remember this Christmas, or this tree as being less than perfect. Nothing in his life is anything less than perfect (unless he’s overtired or has a diaper rash or something). Everything is new. The wonder is, there’s a tree in the house. It has lights and glass balls on it. And it smells of spruce forest.

I’m proud of Cecily and Mike for plucking the runt tree out of an overcrowded grouping. It wouldn’t likely have survived jammed up next to the other trees. And its removal will mean more light for its neighbors.

It’s good forestry practice. And Charlie Brown would approve. The “Peanuts” Christmas special had already been around for a dozen years by the time our girls were born, in 1977 and 1979. But Charlie Brown’s scraggly cartoon tree, both forlorn and, in the end, appropriately loved, had struck a chord with Ellen and me. We made a point every year of harvesting some malformed thing from the wild, both for the forest health and for the empathy factor: decorated with strings of lights, and ornaments from grandmothers on both coasts, even the most pitiable limb became splendid.

Once the girls were old enough to ski, we toured up into the evergreen zone to select and cut our tree. First we popped a bunch of popcorn and, with needle and thread, strung long popcorn strings. We strung raw cranberries too. We tried alternating cranberries and popcorn on the same string, but the cranberries crowded the fragile popcorns and smashed them. So the strings were pure cranberry and pure popcorn.

We packed them carefully in our backpacks and headed up a snow-covered county road. Through the oak zone and up into the aspen trees. Through aspen meadows and up to the place where young spruce and fir began infiltrating the ranks of creamy aspen trunks.

We’d choose our little tree then choose another nearby to decorate, draping the popcorn and cranberry strings as an offering to the forest spirits, or to the gray jays, whichever were hungriest. It reminded me of a time I was skiing in the San Francisco Peaks outside Flagstaff. The peaks are sacred to the Hopi, who believe their kachina spirits live beneath the mountain. Every spring, to ensure summer rains, the Hopi travel into the forest to consecrate mini shrines to the kachinas. As I traversed through the woods, I came across a half-buried fir with eagle feathers tied to a wispy branch and the remnants of sprinkled corn meal stuck in the needles.

When we’d finished our decorating, I’d take out the pruning saw and we’d take turns sawing the trunk of our tree. (Just as girls are not doomed to “throw like a girl,” girls also need to learn how to saw.)

The trip back down to the pickup was long but always easier with the gravity assist. Even dragging the tree, our strides were longer, the skis hissing with glide. Our twin-ribbon uphill track became something else on the way down: two half-obliterated grooves dusted, white-on-white, by a thousand-needle brush.

In the living room the little tree looked bigger, fuller, especially once the tinsel was lobbed on (from the back of the couch if need be to reach the higher branches) and the knitted angel placed on the topmost sprig. A rumpled sheet from the guest-bed collection did its best imitation of snow, and we were set for the lead-up to Christmas morning.

Most nights before bed the girls asked to turn off all the other lights in the house. The tree took on a reflected magnificence. Red and green and gold light bounced into the center and out beyond the edges. The tinsel moved even when we held our collective breath.

Something was alive there, and slowly dying. Something from the bigger world and, because we lived in the mountains, from our figurative back yard. Something stoic and beyond knowing.

It was a little sad. But it was OK. A little mysterious. But necessary. For Santa to come.

We had these few firecrackers left over from the packages we had bought passing through town on our way south to the beach. We were nervous. We were 13 years old and had never smuggled any contraband into the United States before.

I thought about this a couple of weeks ago with the news stories on that “sophisticated” tunnel under the border, from a warehouse in Tijuana to another warehouse in San Diego. Sophisticated, the authorities said, because it had electric rail cars and lights. And because they found 30 tons of marijuana in the tunnel.

Things have changed, obviously, in the intervening 50 years. Back then Tijuana was quaint. Poor, yes, and dirtier than the places we were used to in Southern California, but harmless in a cheap, colorful, Cantinflas sort of way. Pat’s parents knew some other gringos who owned a trailer on the bluff above the beach at La Salina, and they offered to take us there after school let out in June. I remember being thrilled with the exchange rate – the first time I’d experienced one – and equally thrilled with the explosives we could buy for just a few pesos.

We spent a lot of time in the dunes digging elaborate tunnel systems and blowing them up. I don’t know that we were necessarily re-enacting Iwo Jima. (Viet Nam was not yet on anybody’s radar.) We were just young boys who liked to light fuses and duck behind the dune grass and hold our ears and watch stuff blow up.

We thought it would be neat to bring a few cherry bombs back home to impress the other kids. They had this waxy red coating that let you light one and toss it into the ocean, where, like a mini version of a depth charge in the TV series Silent Service, it erupted in a vertical fountain.

At the border, the U.S. agent took one look at Pat’s Leave It To Beaver parents and waved us through.

A year or two later my dad bought a pickup truck and a used cab-over camper, and suggested we take the rig on a shakedown cruise into Baja California, the three of us men, with Pat. We took along two .22-caliber rifles. One was my dad’s, the other must have been Pat’s, and we planned to camp a couple of nights along the deserted road to Mexicali.

The Mexican guards at Tijuana never stopped anybody with U.S. plates. We sailed through. (Can you imagine getting caught sneaking guns into Mexico now, with the drug wars and the wholesale trafficking of weapons into Mexico? Not to mention the DEA and Operation Fast and Furious.)

Out in the desert we plinked away at tin cans. We shot at and invariably missed a few rabbits. When it came time to cross back, at Mexicali-Calexico, we suddenly got paranoid about the guns. I don’t know if my dad was genuinely worried or if he just felt a little chagrined that he hadn’t really thought through the whole deal. At any rate, we decided to hide the rifles under the mattress in the cab-over. And Pat and I were to lie up there on top of them, chins on our hands, peering innocently out the front window.

In those days you didn’t need a passport; you didn’t need insurance. Mexico was like another state to the south of California, a tattered, somewhat disreputable (or unfortunate) state, for sure, but it didn’t represent the ideological divide it has come to symbolize. I don’t remember debates about “illegal” aliens. There were no armed volunteer border patrols. Braceros and their families came north to pick vegetables in the San Joaquin Valley. We had a twice-a-month gardener come to our house when I was in high school named Mr. Ogata. He was Japanese.

As I recall, the border at Mexicali was empty. We drove up to the U.S. agent, who asked a few questions of my dad at the wheel, and waved us through. My stomach didn’t settle until many miles later.

There is one more border story. Same Ford pickup and camper. Only this time I was driving. I was 19 and had borrowed Dad’s rig to take my two college roommates to Baja for the weekend. We were sophisticates by then, of course. Paul was already an expert on Scotch whiskeys, and Dane, a Canadian, knew all that could be known about Hiram Walker and Sons. We would spend a night in Ensenada, load up on no-questions-asked booze and return to campus with unimaginable riches.

(The dinner in Ensenada is famous still in family lore because of Dane’s negotiation with our waitress. The menu listed dozens of examples of the local catch: lobster, red snapper, yellowtail, rock bass, calico bass, black sea bass, and on and on. Dane asked for the black sea bass, and the waitress said, “Si, feeesh.” And Dane said, “No, you see, I want this particular fish, the black sea bass.” And she came back again: “Si, feeesh.”

That went on for a while before Dane gave up and ate the delicious mystery fish she eventually brought out.)

We hid the liquor in several places – there were a lot of bottles – underneath the floorboards in the bottom of a cabinet and beneath the dinette floor. We weren’t going to fool anybody who was really looking; we just hoped we would slide through with maybe a cursory glance in the camper door.

But this time the border agent at Tijuana glowered and ordered me to pull over under the lights beside a green florescent-lit building. Later in life I would see movie scenes of border crossings in sinister East-bloc countries that reminded me of that light. We were told to get out and enter the building, where another officer queried us about our trip.

I couldn’t stop looking out the window at the two agents tearing the camper apart. They looked under the mattress. They checked in all the cabinets. They pulled our backpacks and sleeping bags out on the ground and went through them all. I swear, one guy lifted up the floor under the dinette and looked right at a couple of bottles. I thought, oh great, here I am just an adult – well almost – and already I’m going to jail for underage smuggling. And they’re going to confiscate my father’s truck!

But the guy put the plywood floor back in place and moved on. Eventually, they let us go. We still had our stash, but the adrenaline had pumped for so long we were empty, drained even of relief.

Decades later, Ellen and I were driving north on Interstate 5, many miles from the border, when traffic slowed to a crawl. It was night. We were returning from a memorial for my uncle in San Diego and we had just passed through Encinitas, a once sleepy town known for its surf break and fields of commercially grown flowers.

For miles the freeway was stalled. When we finally got to the head of the line, we found it was a Border Patrol checkpoint, lights flashing, flashlights pointing in windows. Everyone was suspect. You never know who might have four or five desperate Mexicans in the trunk.

On Sunday I stood in the press corral at Beaver Creek with veteran reporter Hank McKee of Ski Racing magazine watching the World Cup men’s giant slalom. Bode, who won the downhill with a spectacularly risky run on Friday, skied wildly off-kilter in the first run of the GS and did not make the top 30. Ligety, the reigning GS World Champion, had the fastest first run, but ended up in second place, overtaken by the young Austrian Marcel Hirscher, who laid down a flawless, flowing second run.

These two and indeed most of the 63 starters skied the steep Birds of Prey course as if they were dancing: Fred Astaire with long, flexy knives for feet. They achieved a rare confluence: performing something that is so difficult as to defy comprehension by mere mortals, and, with the help of their hourglass-shaped sticks – Atomics, Heads, Rossignols – made it appear graceful, easy.

But all the while we were watching a dark cloud hovered in the form of the FIS, the Fédération Internationale de Ski, which is threatening to take away the skis that make such phenomenal skiing possible.

WTF?

Modern carving skiing is a result of a true revolution in ski design. I won’t go into the history here, Mom. Suffice it to say that in the last 20 years manufacturers and designers, including the racers and retired racers who test the new products, have discovered combinations of materials and shapes that have changed, utterly, the way top skiers ski. Now, instead of sliding sideways into a turn, good skiers can ride their edges like engravers tools around the gates, leaving in many instances two compass-drawn lines in the snow.

The so-called “shaped” skis that make this possible have filtered down to the amateur market, too. Now, even hackers with a modicum of imagination can slice precision turns, at slow speeds as well as fast, as no forebear ever did.

For 140 years, up until the 1990s, all skis were just slightly curved; they came with a natural turn radius of about 60 meters. That’s a long turn. If you just rode the edge you’d be screaming by the end of it – unless you broke the edge loose and skidded. Which is what you learned to do back in the day. Every turn required some skidding.

These antiquated sticks are now referred to as “straight” skis. They weren’t exactly straight; they did have some sidecut, but nothing like the curvy, Betty-Boop shapes available now. The new skis have built-in turn radii as sharp as 8 meters. On the World Cup, fast-twitch slalom turns require the smallest arcs, say 12 meters, GS turns are in the 20-25meter range, Super G and downhill skis have the longest built-in turn, somewhere in the 33-40 meter range.

Carving has made racing, right down to the youngest J5 kids, exciting to do and thrilling to watch. It gives the carver a marvelous control. And it is fast, much faster than skidding. Carving also generates more force in a turn. In a skidded turn, the forces are dissipated, diffused. In a carved turn, in order to keep from being flung off the centrifugal merry-go-round, the skier must lean to the inside and resist the pull with bone and muscle and connective tissue.

This, apparently, is the problem as seen by the FIS. Skis have gotten too good. And, at times, and at the tremendous speeds the World Cup athletes are going, the human body, especially the knee, doesn’t hold up to the strain.

So, skiing’s governing body is imposing draconian new rules. Beginning next year GS skis must be straighter, with a minimum radius of 35 meters (or 40 meters; I’ve heard both numbers). The changes will affect slalom and downhill skis, too, but less dramatically.

Ligety, who owns the GS event right now (he’s won the season-long title three of the last four years) is livid. He said in Beaver Creek that the FIS will “ruin” giant slalom. He has accused them of attacking his livelihood.

Bode Miller, who is 34 and perhaps close to retirement anyway, said simply, “If it’s not fun for me, I’m not going to ski. I’ve skied on the new skis, and they’re not very fun to ski on. So, if it’s not fun, then there’s no reason for me to do it.”

Both Americans think the move will set skiing back decades. The required dimensions are, in fact, very close to what Phil and Steve Mahre skied (and skidded) on in the early 1980s.

At Beaver Creek I heard people say the new rules will not survive, that there’s too much opposition from the athletes. Others, like U.S. Ski Team Vice President of Communications Tom Kelly, told me the FIS is committed; the changes are set in stone. “Bode thinks the FIS shouldn’t regulate equipment. But tennis does it. Golf does it. NASCAR does it.”

Hank McKee, of Ski Racing, may have cut to the truth of the matter when he said, “It’s the only thing the FIS can do to show they’re concerned about safety.”

More to come . . .

This was a couple of years ago, very early in the ski season. He was talking about making the long drive across the divide to Loveland Basin for their opening day. It might have been the first day of lift-served skiing in Colorado that autumn, sometime around Halloween.

Scranton knew it was ridiculous to make the 275-mile one-way drive from Ridgway just to ski a lonely strip of man-made snow. But he couldn’t help himself; it was without question going to be worth it. Giving the ersatz ski experience a mock-terrifying sobriquet only made me like him more.

Scranton and I ran into each other last weekend in Telluride on its version of the white ribbon of death, aka Village Bypass. We didn’t actually physically run into each other, although that would have been quite possible as the morning wore on and more and more turn-starved sliders funneled, like migrating salmon, onto the human highway. The snow guns roared, making more. The ground on either side of the ribbon was nearly bare.

It made me think of other times, other strips of white that sufficed.

In the mid 1990s Ellen and I traveled to her grandmother’s home turf in southern Poland. The Iron Curtain hadn’t been parted for long. Cab drivers carried rolls of bills that included U.S. dollars, German marks, Polish zlotys and near-worthless Russian rubles.

It was February. Snow coated the High Tatras above Zakopane. But to get up there you had to ride the ancient tram (circa 1936), and not many Poles had the zlotys or the connections to get on board.

Never fear: local entrepreneurs had set up little ski strips on a meadow at the edge of town. Each one had its own draglift, its own lift tickets (a rubber-stamped scrap of paper) and its own boom box and fire pit at the bottom, where family members could sit and roast sausages.

We picked a T-bar with a sign in the lift shack window that said: Ski School. We didn’t see any lessons being given, but we did see two guys on foot balancing a woven basket full of snow on a wooden sled. They traversed it out to a bare spot in the piste, dumped the load and spread it around a little, then headed back into the trees.

We also watched as a kid of 10 or 12 skidded stylishly to a stop at the bottom, stepped out of his boots, which were still locked in their bindings, and walked in his socks to the fire pit. Whereupon his grandmother (we think) got up, walked over to the boot-ski setup and slipped her stockinged feet in, ready for her turn on the hill.

Another time, another year – 1976, the driest winter on record for Telluride – a friend and I went looking, rather desperately, for some backcountry sliding. (The ski area had closed after an abbreviated Christmas season.) The best we could find was the toe of an avalanche path on Vermilion Peak. This is a very active path, and that stutter-step winter it must have slid multiple times during the few measurable storms that came through, until it had built a teardrop-shaped mound of chalky, wind-sanded snow. Sharp-rock talus surrounded the mound on all sides. My friend and I climbed the patch three or four times, scratching out a dozen telemark turns on each ecstatic descent.

That’s the thing about white ribbons of death. They’re not about death. Unless it’s the death of dreams – the end, rather, of all that dreaming-about-skiing that leads up to the doing.

I wasn’t nervous that first day when later I ran into Brian Scranton. (It was already his ninth day of the season; he’d been savoring – and logging the highway miles to – Wolf Creek’s prodigious early snows for nearly a month.) I did, however, feel the gas bubble of anticipation, as months of imagined turns tilted toward that morning.

These visions – carved turns etched on the womanly flanks of curving terrain – are more than imaginary. They are swallows carving up the air; the lean of a particularly perfect bicycle arc; a vicarious video of a surfer’s wraparound cutback. Even something as pedestrian as a well-steered corner in the car can do it: all the forces of speed and radius and suspension coming together to produce a transcendent result, a moment of fluid balance.

So when the death came last weekend, and all those pent-up roundings were freed to find expression on actual snow, it couldn’t have been sweeter. For one day at least, the white ribbon is all you need.

“Wanna go get whatever it was you put in the rocks?” he had said, by way of introduction.

We played dumb. Dumb and incredulous, because there was no way he could have seen me carry our tiny wad of hash to the base of the cliff.

“Well, if you won’t, I will,” said The Squirrel. And he started forward, righting himself, like a drunk, as the sand gave way beneath his boots.

Ha, I thought to myself, he’s headed the wrong direction. No chance in Carl Sagan’s billions he’ll find it. Hell, even I might not be able to find Otto’s pipe, so complicated was the rock jumble back there.

But then The Squirrel stopped and looked up to the top of the cliff, and adjusted his course. He stopped again. Looked up. And there a hundred feet above us was another ranger holding a pair of field glasses.

We were screwed. Or rather, I was screwed, since I was the one who had been observed hiding the stash. The spy on the cliff directed The Squirrel right to it. It turned out they’d worked this ploy on a slew of unwary beachgoers that day. Busted at the beach. The whole thing was planned, rigged, like a speed trap, by The Squirrel and his cliff-top accomplice.

We were angry but not, in the end, surprised. Law enforcement of various stripes, from city police to Alameda County Sheriffs to National Guard troops, had done a brilliant job of radicalizing the population over the previous couple of years. There was People’s Park, during which 800 city and county police taped over their name badges and waded into a crowd of protesters with batons and shotguns. The cops insisted they were firing only birdshot at the “rioters,” until surgeons pulled “00” buckshot out of the dead body of a student who had been watching from a rooftop. A local carpenter, another bystander, was blinded, and 127 others were treated at area hospitals for head trauma, shotgun wounds (many shot in the back), and other serious injuries.

That viral video of a campus cop calmly applying pepper spray to the faces of students sitting together at UC Davis last week, during an Occupy demonstration for economic justice, was a horrible thing to watch. Chilling for a generation of young people that has not perhaps seen cops as a force to be feared. A force to be wielded by the powers that be, in defense of the status quo. Ditto Oakland. And Zuccotti Park. Hello, Syria.

We were there when the nation found out about President Nixon’s secret expansion of the war into Cambodia in the spring of 1970. We joined hundreds of thousands of people in a river of bobbing heads – hopeful by definition – marching in San Francisco. Four million students, including Otto and Debbie and me, at 450 colleges and high schools across the country, went on strike. Governor Reagan ordered Berkeley occupied by the National Guard. “No more appeasement,” said the Great Communicator. A couple of weeks later Ohio National Guard shot and killed four students at Kent State University.

My own crystalizing moment came when a bunch of Berkeley city cops herded a small group of peaceful demonstrators into a residential intersection and then blocked the escape routes, using eight police cars, two per street. The cops circled us, drew their batons and tightened the noose. One guy who tried to escape was thrown over a five-foot high cinder block wall.

I figured the only way to keep from being clubbed was to run right at the gap between two of them and try to hurdle their raised sticks. I leaped, but one of them got me – like swinging at a high fastball – across the shins. My legs went completely numb. I had to drag myself off the street.

Because Point Reyes was a national seashore, my drug trial was to be heard by a federal magistrate at the Alameda Naval Air Station. Otto and Debbie came with me; they felt bad that I was taking the rap.

The courtroom filled up with the 20 other people who had been busted on the beach that day. There was the magistrate. And there, at his table off to the side, was The Squirrel in his Park Service woolens. One by one the judge read the name and the charge, possession of marijuana, pronounced a uniform sentence of “$50, to be paid on the way out,” scribbled his signature, and picked up the next folder.

Except, that is, when he got to mine. (We were called in alphabetical order.) “You’re recommending a fine of $150 in this case,” the magistrate queried The Squirrel. “Why is that?”

“May I approach the bench, uh, Sir, Your Honor?” And then taking up my folder, “Uh, yes, the, uh, perpetrator, in this instance, was in possession of, uh, ha-sheesh, which we believe to be a more dangerous drug. Your Honor.”

The Squirrel. Our disdain knew no bounds. And apparently the magistrate felt a similar impatience. “That’ll be $50, to be paid on the way out. Next.”