Learning to Ski Changed How I Experience Winter
A spontaneous decision to try skiing turned winter from something I mostly endured into something I could actually enter, while giving my wife and me something genuinely new to discover together.
Field Note I:
Entering Something You Once Avoided
I grew up in Michigan and somehow made it this far without ever seriously considering downhill skiing. Winter was just winter. Snow meant shoveling the driveway, scraping off the car, gray skies, and eventually reaching that point where everyone starts wondering how much longer this shit is going to last. I never thought of winter as something I could actually use. It was mostly a season to get through on the way back to everything else.
Cross-country skiing had crossed my mind before. Years ago, during one of Detroit’s bigger snowstorms, I remember seeing people on the news cross-country skiing through the city, bouncing between bars, cafés, restaurants, and shops. That seemed fucking badass. There was something about being able to leave the house on skis and move through a snow-covered version of a place I already knew that appealed to me. Cross-country seemed calm and methodical, almost like an extension of hiking, and I could imagine leaving out my back door and hitting the trails on a snowy day. I still want to try it.
Downhill was different. I hadn’t given it much thought until sometime over the last year, when the idea gradually became more attractive. After I stopped drinking, I eventually realized that some of the exhilaration that had been built into my life before was simply gone. That was obviously a good trade, but it was still a trade. There was less chaos, less intensity, fewer situations built around chasing some kind of high. I wasn’t consciously looking for an adrenaline replacement, but the speed and physicality of downhill skiing started sounding more interesting than they once had.
Still, it wasn’t interesting enough for me to actually do anything about it.
Then, at the beginning of the year, I threw the idea at my wife. I don’t remember exactly how I pitched it beyond some version of, Hey, want to try skiing? We were nine years into our marriage and hadn’t found something completely new to learn together in a while. It was my idea, but she was the one who basically said, Fuck yeah, let’s do it, booked the lesson, and turned it into an actual plan.
Our first day was with Dennis, an older, seasoned ski instructor who apparently had enough confidence in us to skip much of the traditional beginner process. Instead of spending the day pizza-slicing our way down the hill, he started teaching us parallel skiing. There were plenty of falls. A couple of close friends came along and snowboarded around us, witnessing the whole thing and occasionally helping pick us back up off the snow. We weren’t good, but somewhere in the middle of trying to make my body do what I wanted while gravity actively worked against me, I realized I was having a great time.
More than that, I felt completely awake. There isn’t much room to mentally wander when you’re moving downhill on two skis with very little idea what you’re doing. Stop paying attention and the hill provides fairly immediate feedback. By the time we left, Anna and I couldn’t stop talking about skiing.
Because I apparently have very little ability to casually enjoy a new interest, within days we were researching skis, boots, bindings, poles, technique, and whatever else the algorithm was willing to feed us. I tend to love anything that involves learning deeply, adjusting precisely, and geeking out over equipment, so the rabbit hole opened pretty quickly. The difference this time was that my wife was in there with me. We watched ski videos, sent each other clips on Instagram, talked about technique, and started learning enough about the gear to have opinions we probably hadn’t earned yet.
That part became unexpectedly special. Nine years into a marriage, you already know a lot about each other. You’ve accumulated routines, favorite places, foods, trips, responsibilities, kids, stories, and all the normal rhythms of building a life together. There is a lot of comfort in that, but there can also be monotony. It’s rare to suddenly stumble into something where you’re both complete beginners, equally inexperienced and equally excited about figuring it out. We got to suck at skiing together, and I think that made it more meaningful than it would have been if we’d simply met each other as skiers.
Around the same time, the Winter Olympics in Milan Cortina started. I’d never paid much attention to alpine skiing before, but suddenly we were watching downhill runs and understanding just enough to appreciate what we were seeing. It didn’t make me want to race. Mostly, it made me want to get back out there and take another run.
When Presence Becomes Physical
Our second trip felt different. We had our own equipment by then, which still seemed slightly ridiculous considering how recently neither of us had skied, and we knew just enough to move with some intention instead of merely surviving our way downhill. We dropped the kids at Grandma’s and headed out in the afternoon without making a huge event of it.
At one point the hill shut down briefly for grooming, so we went into the lodge. A cover band was playing Eagles songs while we grabbed something to drink and warmed up. There wasn’t anything particularly remarkable about the scene, but I remember really liking it. We weren’t on vacation. We hadn’t traveled somewhere spectacular. We had dropped off the kids, driven to a Michigan ski hill, and somehow landed in this little pocket of winter that hadn’t existed in our lives a few weeks earlier. When the hill reopened, we put our gear back on and went outside.
Night skiing was when I really understood why this had gotten its hooks into me. Under the lights, the rest of the world seemed to disappear beyond the edges of the run. There was the snow in front of me, the next turn, my speed, where my weight was, and my wife somewhere nearby working through the same thing. Gravity has a useful way of eliminating bullshit. Emails could wait. Bills weren’t going anywhere. Whatever needed fixing at home would still be broken when we got back. For a few hours, the part of my brain responsible for managing everything else went quiet. The best comparison I can make is clearing the mental RAM.
As the night went on, the hill emptied and the lifts got quieter. Our turns started connecting instead of feeling like a series of emergency corrections. We worked on posture, speed, and timing. Sometimes we’d talk about what we were doing, and other times we’d just ride the lift back up and do it again. Hours passed without either of us needing much from the other beyond sharing the experience.
I think that’s part of why it connected so strongly for us. Adult relationships involve an incredible amount of logistics: kids, work, dinner, schedules, things that need to be bought, places somebody needs to be. Skiing gave us a few hours where we were together without needing to manage anything together. We were experiencing the same terrain, the same cold, the same learning curve, and the same little moments where something finally clicked. There was connection without needing to manufacture conversation around it.
That kind of shared presence feels increasingly rare to me. We weren’t talking about being present or trying to create some meaningful experience together. We were just busy trying not to eat shit on the side of a hill, and presence came with it.
Something to Do With Winter
What surprised me most wasn’t simply that I liked skiing. It was what skiing did to winter.
For most of my life, the season had been something happening to me. Cold weather arrived, outdoor life contracted, and eventually spring came back. Now I could look at the forecast and actually hope for snow. That’s a pretty significant reversal for someone who has lived in Michigan his entire life while mostly treating several months of the year as something to endure.
I used to wait for winter to end. Now it holds something for us.
We haven’t become people waking up at five every Saturday morning to chase first chair, and we’re not planning our lives around skiing. We have kids, jobs, obligations, and all the other things that determine whether we can actually go. We go when the opportunity becomes obvious and the logistics cooperate.
Our equipment lives downstairs now, partly because it makes sense and partly because, frankly, ski gear looks fucking cool. Most of the year it becomes part of the environment. Then winter returns and it’s sitting there ready to go.
At first I wondered whether skiing was filling some kind of void left behind. I don’t think that’s quite right. It isn’t replacing drinking so much as giving me some of what drinking once tried to imitate: exhilaration, anticipation, intensity, and a temporary break from the normal rhythm of the week.
The difference is that skiing doesn’t ask me to check out. It demands the opposite. When gravity is involved, presence isn’t something I have to remind myself to practice. The cold, the speed, the next turn, and the possibility of eating shit if I’m not paying attention pull me completely into what’s happening. The exhilaration comes from being more awake rather than less.
When the lifts stop and the boots come off, I’m usually tired, calm, and genuinely good with what just happened. There isn’t the old what’s next? hanging over the drive home or a need to keep the night going simply because ending it feels unsatisfying.
And my lady is sitting next to me having experienced the same thing.
We went looking for something new to try and ended up with a shared interest that gives us both something to look forward to in a season I used to wish away. We didn’t have to escape Michigan or reorganize our lives around some new identity. The snow and hills were already here. We just found a different way of entering them.
I didn’t expect skiing to matter. That’s probably why it does.
