I once survived an attempted murder. It was the snow who tried to kill me.
I was driving my family’s red 2004 Subaru Outback on highway I-80 in the state of Utah in November 2020. I had come all the way from my home in New York City and was headed to Northstar California Resort, a ski mountain in the north Lake Tahoe area, where I would be working full time as a ski instructor for the 2020-2021 season. I felt as if the mountains had been calling me to the ski bum lifestyle for years now. Each winter, when my family would take ski vacations, I would pause for just a moment on the last day and consider, “What if I just didn’t leave?” Now, the COVID-19 pandemic and my subsequent decision to take a year off from school provided the perfect opportunity for me to pursue my snow-filled dreams.
As I cruised down the highway, snowflakes began to trickle down the from the sky in a delightful surprise. They glistened like tiny flakes of glitter in the sun. I beamed, noting that this
was the first time I was seeing the snow this season, marking the official beginning of a winter I would dedicate to worshipping her.
Suddenly, the sun disappeared behind a cloud and instead of shimmering individually, the snowflakes began to clump together and descend more rapidly. I turned on the defog of my car, but the encroaching haziness only thickened before my eyes as an invading cloud descended on me from the outside. It became impossible to see more than 5 feet in front of me. I urgently flicked on my hazards, hoping to make my little red vehicle visible to the cars behind me. My speed crept down--30mph, 20mph--and soon I was crawling forward at barely over a walking pace. I turned off the podcast playing on my car speakers in order to direct my full attention to the road ahead. In the silence, I tried to focus on breathing evenly, loosening my shoulders, and relaxing my tight grip on the steering wheel. The snow blanketed the road, building upon herself until she was a couple of inches thick. She fought for domination of my windshield. With a squeak and a groan, my flimsy wipers would dispel the white power for a brief second, before the snow would pounce back, quickly resuming her invasion the moment the wipers paused. She thickened the air with her presence, darkening the sky and the mood on the road as grizzled truck drivers gripped their wheels and I steeled myself for the road ahead.
Then, I was weightless. My awareness floated above the highway, seemingly watching a
scene in a movie.
The red Subaru slides silently off the road. It spins, spins again, elegant, like an ice skater swooshing around a rink in delicate yet powerful motions. The car is slicing quickly through the median towards the oncoming traffic. The driver appears unmoving, paralyzed. She does not move her hands on the steering wheel. She does not press her toes on the brakes.
It was luck that pulled my car back, just a foot before it would have entered the flow of oncoming traffic. The snow tried to push me over the edge, but luck caught me, a life-saving
hand grasping mine when I hadn’t even been able to reach out and save myself. I had never felt more vulnerable in my own humanity.
One of my mom’s favorite stories to tell about me as a baby is the rush to get me potty trained. My birthday is in October, just a couple of months before my family’s annual ski trip to Colorado. When I was born, my parents didn’t stop their ski trips, but would take turns sitting with me playing in the snow by the lodge at the base of the mountain while the other parent did a few runs. Finally, when I turned three years old, I was old enough to be put in ski school, meaning that my parents could enjoy full ski days without having to babysit me. The one requirement to enter ski school was that I must be fully potty trained. As my third birthday passed and December quickly approached, my parents hustled to teach me how to speak up when I needed to use the bathroom, pull down my own pants, wipe, and flush. By the time we boarded a plane to Snowmass, Colorado, I was out of diapers.
I don’t remember the first time I went to ski school, but I remember some of our later trips and it was always the same. I would wake up early to the smell of a fresh pot of oatmeal brewing on the stove in our condo. My mom would play a CD I have only ever known as “Morning Music”, an album filled with folky tunes sung by a jolly man with a hearty voice. We would all get dressed for the day together, debating how cold it would be and whether today was a day for mittens or gloves, thick ski socks or thin ski socks, a fleece or a light sweatshirt. My mom was always diligent about layering: long underwear top tucked into long underwear bottoms, turtleneck tucked into snow pants, jacket tucked into gloves, hair tucked into buff, goggles on and not a sliver of skin showing anywhere.
Like little Michelin men, my brother and I would be shuttled out the door in our ski gear, so carefully wrapped in our warm weather packaging that the bite of the cold air would not affect us. Instead we jumped delightedly head first into snow banks, tossing snow into the air and opening our mouths wide to catch the falling flakes on our tongues.
My mom would walk with us all the way to ski school. She would insist on meeting our instructors and telling them exactly what level we were at, where we had skied on the mountain, what skills we needed to improve, and what she hoped we would get out of the lesson. As a teenager, I found this embarrassing, but now I appreciate that she cared so deeply and wanted to involve herself so thoroughly in our ski schooling. It was absolutely vital to her that my brother and I learn to ski well and learn to love it. We were going to be a ski family and my mom was going to make sure of it.
When we first began going on our winter break ski vacations, my mom would book the condo and the plane tickets almost a year in advance. We always went to Aspen Snowmass and the trips were somewhat formulaic. We stayed in the same condo complex, rented equipment from the same ski shop, and had reservations at the same restaurants for Christmas and New Year’s dinners. She always planned our vacations like that, having every detail worked out and leaving nothing up to the last-minute. One year, that changed. My mom sat my brother and I down at the kitchen table one November evening.
“We’re not going back to Snowmass this year,” she confessed.
“What?! Where are we skiing this year then?”
“I haven’t booked anything yet,” my mom responded. I was baffled. Had some procrastinating, indecisive demon taken over my mother’s body? “The snow is too unpredictable,” she continued. “I’m waiting to see which mountain is going to have a good base by the time your winter break comes around, and then I’ll book the trip last minute. Snowmass just isn’t looking good and I want to go somewhere that will have the best conditions for all of us to enjoy.”
As the years passed, the bookings became more and more last minute. Sometimes my mom wouldn’t make our reservations until a week or two before, checking the weather at every major ski resort across the United States diligently each day to see how thick their bases were and whether any storms were expected. We ventured farther from home, exploring mountains in Utah, then Jackson Hole in Wyoming, and even Whistler-Blackcomb, in Vancouver, Canada. Looking back, I see our annual search for snow as my mom’s battle to keep climate change from upending our most sacred family tradition of the winter ski vacation.
I don’t remember when I first fell in love with skiing because all of my memories of flying through the snow are tinged with euphoria.
I remember the first double black diamond I ever skied. It was a steep, mogul run at Jackson Hole. My mom had scoped it out the day before and decided I was ready. I stood at the top of the run and gazed down. The pitch was so steep it seemed to drop away beneath me and I wondered aloud if my mom was sure it wasn’t a cliff. The moguls were deeply carved bumps, with slick and narrow grooves between them delineating the tracks I was supposed to follow. With each turn, I felt my body tossed around, like a small boat on a choppy ocean, each wave threatening to throw me off balance and onto my butt. My mom yelled tips at me: “Keep your shins pressed against the front of your boots!” “Don’t forget to pole plant!” “French fries!” I tuned her out, simply focusing on staying upright. My quads ached with the effort, but I made it all the way without falling before collapsing to the ground in triumph at the bottom of the run. “Look up at that!” my mom pointed up the hill. “You did that! Your first double black!” She smiled with pride and my heart swelled with the satisfaction of completing a feat it seemed my whole life had been leading to.
I remember my first time getting air on a halfpipe in the Pinball terrain park at Northstar. My heart pounded with adrenaline and fear in a way I had not experienced from skiing in a long time. This halfpipe was very different than the steep pitches, tight trees, or small cliff drops I had now become accustomed to. My skis slid along the icy walls of the pipe, nearly slipping out from under me as I focused on keeping my tips pointing down the hill. With my first turn, I began to load my legs, but my body simply refused to jump and I turned without getting any air. The risk-averse part of my brain begged me not to go on, but my pride and my exhilaration insisted that I continue, picking up more speed. I heard nothing but the rushing of wind in my ears as I sped down one side of the halfpipe, and the slowing of that wind as I headed up the other side, slowing down as I reached the apex. For a moment, at the top of my turn, it was silent and I summoned all the courage I had to jump. I felt like I was in the air for minutes, the ground falling away as I soared into the clouds. Friends would later tell me that I must have been a maximum of six inches in the air, but it seemed like miles. I landed with a thud and punched my fist into the air in jubilation.
I remember the deepest powder I have ever skied in, after a crazy winter storm on the run Challenger at Northstar in January 2020. The snow had come roaring in with the passion of a long lost lover, dumping and dumping on us as we stared at the sky and believed it really might be a gift from Santa Claus himself. If humans could fly, I imagine it would feel like the weightless rhythmic sensation of skiing after that storm, gliding down a mountain of infinite white surrounded by the sparkling endlessness of millions of unique, individual snowflakes glistening in the sun. Her untouched beauty was both so perfect it stopped me in my tracks and so alluring that before I realized, I was speeding down the hill, leaving two clean lines and a loud “Woohoo” behind me. The shrieks of glee that flew from my mouth were unconscious, some deep instinctual force gutturally releasing joy. The cold air slapped at the skin of my face, but it was not pain or discomfort I felt, but life. My body knew what to do, taking me down the mountain in big swooshing turns. Everything fell away but tiny, little me, two skis, two poles, the blue sky above, and the snow. As I reached the bottom of the run and slid to a halt, I reached my gloved hands down to the ground and threw a pile of snow into the sky, letting it flutter down around me. I looked up the sky and beamed, a smile of pure joy and thanks, to the snow for giving me this magical feeling of soaring, for her generosity to this mountain on this magical Christmas Day.
I returned to my job as a ski instructor at Northstar during my 2021-2022 winter break. I couldn’t stay away, the mountains and snow calling my name every day as the end of my fall quarter at Stanford ticked by, until finally I could jump in my car and race back to King’s Beach, where my family had rented a condo for the winter. I became obsessed with the snow. Each day, I began by opening the weather app on my phone, looking for any signs of a little snow emoji amongst the bright yellow suns and occasional clouds that dominated the Truckee forecast. Even a snow emoji with a 10% chance below it was worth a holler to my family: “My phone says there might be snow on Monday! Let’s goooooo!” I would follow my phone’s weather app with a look at the snow and weather report on the Northstar website to check base depth, snowfall, and daily temperatures. Horrifyingly, daily highs were often well above freezing, with low 40s the expected normal in a time of global warming. My final stop was always snow- forecast.com which predicted precipitation up to five days in advance as well as showed temperature forecasts by altitude. While snowfall has grown increasingly irregular everywhere, California has experienced particular unpredictability with the past decade featuring annual snowfalls ranging from seven feet to fifty feet. My craving for that white powder verged on addiction.
The last big snowstorm I experienced was on Christmas Day 2021. My brother Jason woke up the whole house with a roaring, “Everybody, look outside!!!” It had snowed at least three feet overnight and, with the snow blanketing every surface in sight, there were no sharp edges to the tops of buildings, cars in the parking lot, or steps leading off my front porch. Everything was one smooth undulating sea of white. Jason and I pulled on our snow gear and rushed out to our car, shovels in hand. It never fails to amaze me how the snow can feel as light as air in a mittened hand as you toss feathery flakes into the air, but heavy as rocks in your shovel as you try to dig her out of your driveway or from the hood of your car. We dug until our arms and backs ached and then we dug some more. We threw off hats and sweaters as our bodies quickly warmed from the sheer effort. The snow piles on either side of the car became so high that it was impossible to add more snow on top, so we had to shovel that snow farther away and then resume our clearing out of the driveway. We had hoped that by the time our car was clear and we were ready to go, the plows would have cleared the roads, but it quickly became obvious that would not be the case, not within hours and probably not within the day. The snow had thwarted our attempt to get to the mountain for a powder ski day, but my brother and I resolved to enjoy our snowday nonetheless.
We decided to trek out into the forest behind our house. It is rare in this world to stumble across a place it seems no one has been before. And yet, this place was utterly untouched. Not a footprint of even a breath disturbed the sea of white before us. From the sky, snow continued to fall in a curtain. Flakes clumped together into tiny cotton balls and we caught them on our tongues and in our eyelashes. Even the normal greens and browns of the forest could not penetrate the endless white extending from the tips of my toes to the top of the sky as far back as my head would tilt. Each tree seemed to have donned a layer of icing, the branches drooping under the weight of their new coats. It was silent in the forest, except for the heavy breathing of my brother and I. With each step, we sunk down to our waists in snow, and the effort of moving each foot just a few inches forward had me winded in seconds. After advancing about a hundred feet, I collapsed down in the snow. Sitting down, I sunk so low that someone looking straight across the surface of the snow would have had no idea I was there. Furthermore, as the snow continued to fall, my body was coated within minutes by a thin layer of white, which I imagined would soon engulf me completely. I imagined closing my eyes for a moment and waking up in a world of endless white, with no sense of up or down, no idea of which direction would lead me deeper into the woods and which would lead me home. The uniformity around me was terrifying and mesmerizing. I fully relaxed my body and let myself go, sinking lower and lower into the snow. We were miniscule in the vastness of this snowy wonderland, and in that insignificance I felt bliss and freedom.
My mom has always said that she will be happy with whoever I marry or choose to spend
the rest of my life with as long as they have one quality: they must love to ski or be willing to
learn. As the passage of time spreads my family out, with my brother and I going to college,
getting jobs, and starting families of our own, it is these snow vacations that will continue to
bring us all back together at least once a year. Nestled away in a cabin in the forest or on a
mountainside, tucked in by a blanket of snow, we will continue to find intimate moments to be
together as a family for the rest of our lives through our love of skiing and the power of the
snow.
Snow is a paradox. As a single flake, she is so miniscule, so fragile, so easily thawed into oblivion. As a storm or avalanche, she is an indominable, overwhelming force. As a weather feature of this great planet earth, she is being threatened and weakened by anthropogenic climate change. She is terrifying and life-threatening, yet peaceful, calming, and comforting. She can be moved and melted, groomed and plowed, and yet she is completely out of our control. She has made me feel vulnerable. She has made me feel free. We must not fear the things that are out of our control but respect them for the lessons they can teach us. Let us fight for the things that show us the weakness of humanity, that we may be humbled in the face of a planet far more fantastic than that which our imaginations could construct. Let us show the snow the respect she deserves. Let us give thanks for her.