This Summer in Not Skiing

On working outdoors, routine, leashing the Pet Rectangle, being Bike Bro, migraines, a podcast update, and The Storm, The Book

I don’t know the best way to live, but for the past 15 years I’ve tried, every day, to do something for the body, something for the brain, something for the heart, something for the soul. The brain needs projects and puzzles and words. The body needs movement and food and water and medicine and rest. The heart and soul need these things too but also family and friends and animals and stories.

Routine is the only way to achieve all four and I do the same thing every day. Up at five or six. Whenever the cats say so. I feed them and eat cereal and then sit at the patio table and write until my brain stops working. Noon or one, usually. I guard mornings like a nuclear launch silo. I write and nothing else. No appointments, no calls, no email, no socials, no chores, no admin. The Pet Rectangle lies muzzled and caged. Like a prisoner it gets an hour of exercise in the afternoon and that’s all.

I quit social media this summer. Not on purpose. I just kept forgetting about it and at some point realized I don’t do that anymore. The quitting is not permanent but maybe it is. We all need better online manners but sometimes the best move is to just walk away from the table.

After writing, I do barre and lift weights or both nearly every day, but I try to ride my bike every day as well. Sometimes two miles sometimes 30. New York is a world-class bike city, laced with more than 1,500 miles of bike lanes. I don’t dress in a Spandex onsie or wear a helmet shaped like a wind gust or listen to music or podcasts. I just ride and think and it is the most amazing thing. The city is bottomless. Even after 23 years here, every ride is novel, surprising, slightly confusing, and thrilling. The bike glide mimics skiing. Along the waterfronts with a tailwind is like blasting a.m. groomers and rush-hour bus-dodging on Lex is a marvelous puzzle like glades. When the bike lanes clog like Okemo blues I ride off-piste, between cars, in bus lanes, zigzagging, weaving, too fast probably, joyous like a 10-year-old. In New York you can ride anywhere but the sidewalk. My bike is what I think is called a hybrid. The brand is Bianchi, a name I find impossible to remember. When I pick it up after a tune-up the shop guys ask me what kind of bike and I say “I think it’s gray” and they look at me like I’m trying to pull a fast one. But I’m not I just don’t know anything about bikes. But I don’t know anything about skis either so how much could that matter so long as I like them?

In the evenings I read. On paper, like a person from the past. I like long and deeply researched and artfully written magazine stories of the Atlantic and New York and New Yorker sort, but I’ve also been reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I’m writing a spiritual ski cousin that is part memoir and part American Skiing 101 and part defense of lift-served skiing as an enabling mechanism for mass immersion in the outdoors and part appeal to try skiing if you never have and to do it as much as possible if you already are because what else will you do in wintertime and how else can you move your body like that when you’re 80 and where else in vast and lonely America can you find such an assembly of joy and humans? I’ll have a draft probably by the end of this year. My ski audience is big and engaged and rabid and in our identity-first age they identify as skiers first so if you’re a literary agent or adjacent let’s talk.

Sometimes though this whole machine just stops. Migraines. Since I was 7 years old they’ve stalked me like an opportunistic and patient and insidious ninja. Unannounced and uninvited they kick the door down and stay as long as they like. Like a shitty house guest they leave their shoes on and scroll IG Reels without headphones. Medication sometimes helps but often it doesn’t. Crippled and defeated I cancel everything and retreat to bed with an icepack and am usually there until the next morning. This happens once or twice a month and sometimes more or less. As a dumb Michigan teenager a court-appointed mentor assigned to me for shenanigans related to being a dumb Michigan teenager told me he’d never in his 60-plus years gotten a headache and this strikes me now as some sort of X-Men-level mutant superpower and I’d choose it over flight or super-strength or the ability to breathe underwater.

Migraine reality is why routine is essential. Hit reset and back to it the next morning. Routine sounds stifling but it liberates, accounting for the necessary while leaving space for the novel. Yankees, Central Park, catch, games of Twenty-One and HORSE, collecting all 380 stars in Super Mario 3D World, a dozen donuts, pizza at Carmine’s, Sundays at the family pool in Westchester, rooftop fireworks on the Fourth of July. One afternoon my 8-year-old son and I watch city roadcrews tear the toplayer off our Brooklyn street. They arrive like an ordered apocalypse, swarming, dozens of them, at six o’ clock in the morning, and with an assortment of strange vehicles maneuvered with incredible skill and speed they close the street and tow all the cars and chew the asphalt down to atoms and deposit it into dump trucks that rumble off into the gigantic city.

This entire life is organized around making The Storm the best ski newsletter in the world. That is the ambition, anyway. But it can’t be everything, and it can’t be the same thing forever. That is why the news update had to die. I was trying to make one thing do too much. Since March I’ve focused on more frequent and deeper analysis, expanding on breaking news, building better source data, writing richer stories on the strange and scattered places I skied last winter, making sense of our evolving ski world, and streamlining the video podcast. That last has been a challenge, with nine episodes recorded and awaiting publication: HKD Snowmakers, Arapahoe Basin, National Ski Patrol, Treetops, Grand Geneva, Greek Peak, Killington, Corralco, and Hatley Pointe. The tradeoffs for those delays: enhanced audio, video that adds a substantial new dimension to the podcast, and more time to write since I no longer edit the conversations myself.

In summer I am never indoors unless I have to be: to sleep, exercise, shower, record a podcast. Or if it rains. I work at ground level, facing the street. I patched our small yard’s fence holes so the cats can come outside. Together through our straw fence we watch the city pass by. Wearing longpants in 90-degree mornings people walk south toward the train and their jobs in the city or opposite toward the construction sites and factories and industrial yards of north Brooklyn. I am glad to not be any of them, to have tried those lives and moved through them to this one.

The Storm’s corporate offices from May through October.

For 31 years I worked for other people. One year ago that ended. The Storm established as a small business, I was ready. I could put everything, finally, into one thing. I didn’t know if it would work, but it did. The Storm continues to grow as a business. This newsletter is my life’s work, and I am grateful every day that I get to author it. There is nothing that better fits my temperament and specific, limited skillset than writing about skiing all day long. This ski-writing life – self-determined, flexible, ordered but never repetitive, seasonally variable, fusing the mental and physical, alternating adventure and labor, accommodating of naps – fills every part of me, body, brain, heart, and soul. No life will ever be the perfect life, but this is the best version of it I’ve found so far.