For the mountains it disfigures, the species it endangers and the bruises it inflicts, Bernard Loughlin hates skiing. Ireland's love affair with the pastime must stop
I have always hated skiing, primarily on ideological grounds. I put it somewhere between strip mining and golf for the mountainsides it disfigures, the forests it levels, the soil it erodes, the species it jeopardises and the consumerist guff it engenders before, during and après. Could it be that I hate skiing so much because I always knew I would be no good at it? No, actually. Until I tried it I thought I would be good at it. I had been good at slides when I was a boy, those long, glossy slides from the little ice age of the late 1950s and early 1960s in Belfast, where I grew up.
It would first snow, then freeze hard overnight. From early morning, if it was a weekend, we would work tirelessly up and down the favoured hill, until, by evening, in the light of the gas lamps, the slide shone oily and deep, as if our magic feet had glassed over a crack in Earth's surface. You took a long run at it, then launched yourself sideways-on, arms waving, knees flexing, coat-tails or tied jumper flapping.
From my first try I could keep my balance, and with practice I acquired some speed and grace. Never, though, as much as Smicker, the biggest, fastest, most fearless slider of us all, built like an Olympic skater nourished on white bread, beef dripping and rice pudding, his lard arse stuck out behind him like a parachute brake.
Now, after the first big snowfall of the season in the Spanish Pyrenees, where I live, some friends have persuaded me to try Nordic skiing - esquí de fons, as it is called in Catalan, or ski of the bottom - the least environmentally noxious form of the sport, they assure me. We meet up in the bar of a hotel high in the Pyrenees, at the ski station of Port-Ainé, where hundreds of people are clumping around in the Day-Glo colours of their annual rebirth in puffed-up Babygros.
We go outside to put on our gear: long johns, thick socks, cord trousers, shirt, jumper, jacket and scarf for me - more or less my winter gardening outfit. I am being lent a pair of Nordic-skiing shoes. These turn out to be canvas-sided, rubber-soled bootees with hooks on the front. The hooks attach to flimsy catches on the skinny skis, so your foot and heel can rise up to impel you forward. It's easy-peasy, they assure me. You'll see.
We put on our skis at the beginning of the route. I saw people Nordic skiing in the Swiss Alps, years ago. Langlaufen, or long walking, they called it. I keep thinking of it as Langlaufen as I shuffle and luff-laff-lauf along, up a slight gradient, across the bottom of the downhill pistes. The chairlift is thrumming away above us, the loudspeakers on the pylons blaring Ramona, Te Quiero. My lauf is not elegant, exactly, but it is effective. I am covering ground. I am skiing. And it is nice, so far.
We come onto a forest track that follows the contours of a valley. For a while the path is fairly flat. But now it starts to drop, shallowly at first, then steeper and faster as the skis rush beneath me across week-old snow that has, in places, been polished to ice. As we speed up my friend in front is showing me a new trick - sticking a ski, crossways, onto the wide path outside the runnels, then doing a slowing-down paddle with it, the ski acting as a brake - and shouting back that I should try it, that I should not be afraid. I try it and go on my hoop for the first time, feeling a wrenching apart of the tendon that connects your right leg to your left that I haven't felt since the days on the slides in Belfast, nearly a half-century ago.
And dozens more times after that I fall, in every way possible. We are heading for a refugi at Sant Joan de l'Erm, where we will spend the night. The route is 16 kilometres long. It has bends, descents, curves, swoops and swerves, all of which I fall at, getting the hang of it less and less the more my mentors tell me not to be afraid and to just stick out my ski when I feel I am going too fast. I fall on my back, sides, elbows and knees. Finally, I go head over heels, skis flailing and my ankle twisting in the flimsy bootees.
After that I walk down the worst bits, carrying my skis. My feet are soon soaking wet and very cold. I think of the Aran islanders of old, who regularly plunged their leather pampooties into the Atlantic to keep them supple, and offer up my suffering for any of their souls still hanging out to dry in purgatory.
A woman in our party, an English painter, tells me in a spunky, buck-yourself-up accent that if she feels she is going too fast she just sits down on her skis and goes with the flow. She whizzes ahead and waits for us at scenic spots. Somebody explains the geography to me at one of them. It is very restful to be looking out at mountains I recognise, the same ones whose other sides I see every day from our village, now they have stopped moving. I think how nice it would be to lie down here, on the pine-needle carpet of the forest floor, and smoke a cigarette, maybe sleep a little, and then walk to the refugi from there, after the spring thaw. No, you have to keep trying, they say. It's like riding a bicycle: once you learn you never forget.
After another 90 minutes of increasingly painful humiliations I walk the final two kilometres with the skis over my shoulder. With a few hundred metres to go, at the approach to the refugi - a group of cabins under trees, with people sitting on a terrace of plastic tables and chairs, a car park in the background, a children's piste off to one side - I decide I will have my very last try of Langlaufen. I put the hooks of my bootees into the catches on the skis, nice and slow, using the batons like crutches as I try to stop the skis slipping out from under me.
I get myself moving gingerly and stiffly downhill. I am doing fine, and I am even beginning to think that I might have been overly hasty in writing off skiing as a hobby for my late middle age. I am doing great, in fact, staying upright, moving briskly, crouched forward with the batons tucked under my oxters in racing mode, right until I curve out of the forest and into the full view of the terrace. I have my worst prang yet, smacking my forehead and the top of my nose with the side of a ski as I go over in a rolling heap, momentarily concussed but still conscious of the people in the distance, who don't seem to be looking my way as I trail off under the trees and lie down, panting.
I limp up to the refugi with my skis under one arm, their ends trailing behind me, dabbing the cut on my nose with a wet tissue. I go to join our party at the back of the terrace. They all sympathise, for getting me here at all has been a shared crusade, but laugh a lot, too.
My nose stops bleeding after I splash on much cold water in the tiny bathroom of the dormitory I am going to share with five others, three women and two men. I have not slept in a room with anyone who is not my wife for many years. It is the part of the ordeal I was most dreading, but now I have skied and almost died for Norway, a little light cohabitation holds no fear.
Over drinks in the bar, served by the refugi's cheerful and energetic warden, a number of our party arrange to have lessons from him in a style of Nordic skiing the Spanish call eskating. They go with the warden to the slope above the refugi, where he shows them the technique. Going uphill it is big hops from side to side, out of the grooves, rather as a determined bird might proceed if it had long sticks glued to its feet and was trying to shake them off.
After dinner the rest of them divide into those who want to play cards in the bar and those (including those who have spent 90 minutes at eskating lessons) who want to go skiing back up the mountain, so they can ski down again under the full moon. I go for a short, hobbling walk in the discreet darkness of the car park's trees, then head for my bunk.
At 3 a.m. I am woken from a deep sleep by my overoxygenated friends coming back from their moonlit ski. Everybody gets into bed in their clothes. I think I'll never get back to sleep with them breathing around me. Lying here, listening to them, I wonder if I should suggest a spot of bunk hopping, just to round off our active day.
At dawn the silence wakes me. Snow silence. Somebody opens the window. It has snowed and is still snowing. "We'll not get back in that," they say. Yippee, I go from my bunk at the back of the room.
After breakfast I stow my skis on one of the cars going home to our village, then walk back to Port-Ainé. As the snow continues to fall only the prints of my Nordic bootees are visible, in a weary, wavy line, beside the tracks that the ski station's machinery must have been out before dawn to renew.
An hour or so later, when the snowstorm relents, Nordicised Hispanics begin to pass by, moving sluggishly on the new snow, which makes the going sticky and slow, even downhill. It is a pace that might have suited me in my brief day as a skier, during which I discovered I am no use at skiing at all.
If I have any doubts I need only remember the bruising on the inside of my thighs, which look as if they have been flailed. They take a month to heal.