Skiing Naked
By Ryan Gossen
Leaving my apartment under the full moon to ski naked in the woods seemed unreasonable. Unimaginable. I knew rationally that if I took certain steps it would occur, yet it didn't seem possible. I figured I would do A, B, and C, and I would either find myself gliding naked across the meadow under the moonlight or the universe would crack apart and the laws of reality would be revealed to be lies.
I was hoping for the latter. It had been a hard winter.
At the edge of the meadow, I took off my outer shell. I was merely peering around the corner of the experience, feeling the air on my neck and losing the feeling of enclosure from my jacket. After removing my sweater, I could feel the air on my arms, but it was still not unfamiliar. The biggest obstacle was my pants and underwear. I had to get out of my ski boots, and then where would I stand? I folded up my jacket and stood on that. For each little obstacle, there was a little solution and I soon found myself back on my skis wearing only boots and gloves.
I felt air everywhere, but it was not unpleasant. The air was still and dry, my capillaries dilated, and my skin seemed to solve the problem quickly, like it was simpler than the usual deal where part of me was exposed and part buried in insulation. There was nothing left to do but ski, so I set off across the meadow, into the woods, and across the next meadow, waiting for something, anything, to stop me.
Cleaning condos that winter freed me in some ways; to think my own thoughts, to ski every day if I wanted. There was nothing and no one in my environment that expected anything of me other than to clean four to six units a day. It was also a prison, a Siberia I had sent myself to, where I was imprisoned in a series of containers, deposited with a stack of clean linen by a white van.
I was a slow cleaner. It wasn’t that I was lazy or tired or hated cleaning, the reason I was slow was that I was easily distracted. Entering an uncleaned unit was, for me, like entering a crime scene. Crumbs in the bedroom. Why had they not eaten communally? Someone had needed space. The sofa-bed had been used. It had been crowded. A stray puzzle piece on the carpet. The stereo receiver still powered on. Beer left in the fridge and half a bottle of sugary liquor. Half empty boxes of Kleenex and used tissues in every room.
Beneath this story was the story of the owners.
Old decorations and living room bric-à-brac had been relocated from a primary residence, after new things had replaced them, or perhaps after a life had fallen apart. Some rentals were a storage space for items with sentimental value; tattered board games and puzzles, National Geographic magazines, interesting rocks and square nails found on a hike. Dull kitchen knives. I could see how old the kids were by the age of the toys.
It was easy to tell the difference between this kind of rental and one that was held as an asset, with only framed instructions on how to use the heater.
I felt more like an interloper than a maid.
When I was a child, I lived in a house with a garage that was full of things. My father, an engineer, often needed to escape his home life, so he adopted the hobby of repairing old radios, then other old electronic devices, then old clocks, which held some sort of romance for him.
A big wooden desk sat in the back of the garage, covered with parts of devices and one of those big magnifying glasses on an articulating arm. Around the desk and along the sides of the garage were stacks of cardboard boxes and wooden crates containing parts of things and tools. The light was always dim. When I entered the garage, it was like I was shot with a tranquilizer dart. My eyes would fix on a thing, and I would pick it up. I wouldn’t understand what it was or why it was here or how it worked or how it was broken, but I could see it had been sorted into a bin with other things of its kind. Palm-sized transistor radios, for example. None of them worked, but they all had an affordance. A knob made a little click when you rotated it off its' zero line. The tuner had a certain resistance that implied things about the elasticity of the belt that turned the magnetic coil. The clocks were another level down into the analog world, one could see everything there was to know about the function of each piece by looking at its shape, the teeth of gears, the tiny stabbing hammer that made the seconds out of whole time. I was lost in this place. I understood nothing here, but felt a connection to everything. If I went into the garage looking for something, I left without even the memory of what I had been looking for.
Entering one of these condos was a trap for me but I eventually stopped caring about the stories in these places. After cleaning the same unit two or three times, it became comfortable, and then invisible. That’s when I started stealing things.
It was mostly paperback novels. This is hard to explain to someone who grew up with an iPhone, but I had nothing to read. Twice I was able to catch a ride into Denver to visit The Tattered Cover, where I could buy something, but when I stole my first book, I had just finished my roommate's copy of Howard Stern’s autobiography, Private Parts, and was hating myself. I was cleaning a unit somewhere and I cracked open up a dusty, falling-apart Louis L'Amour paperback on a shelf in the living room. The story moved and didn't stop and I took the book home and finished it that night.
My standards were low but I drew the line at religious books and self-help, and I couldn't do Jackie Collins, who seemed to be everywhere. When I finally found Melville, I was shocked, having forgotten what words could do.
I figured I would return the books after I read them but I had no control over the units at which I was deposited. When I finished reading something, I simply placed it in the next unit I cleaned. Cycling used books across the mountain became part of my work. No one ever complained and I felt I was providing a beneficial service, like a bee, pollinating flowers.
I lived with three other guys in a two-bedroom apartment. After work, it felt like living on a submarine, surrounded on all sides by cold and dark. One day, an old stereo console was placed out on the curb of my complex. It was one of those old dresser drawer-shaped things where you slide the top across to reveal the state of the art at the time hi-fi rig. This one had a receiver and an 8-track cassette player. My roommate Russ and I thought it was a necessary addition to our space and dragged it up the stairs. The next day, next to some paperbacks, I found a stack of 8-track cassettes in a unit with no 8-track player. It seemed like fate, but it felt worse than stealing old paperbacks. What if these were precious talismans from someone’s past? Would they be missed? I don’t remember how I justified it. I wouldn't have done this at the beginning of the season.
They were good albums: Neil Young, After The Gold Rush. Steely Dan, Pretzel Logic. Elvis and Frank Sinatra. I remember the 8-tracks more vividly than any of the books. I determined that I would learn to ape Neil Young’s bizarre fingerpicking style that winter. It was the perfect combination of melody and thrash, containing so many contrasting elements at once. I decoded “Ambulance Blues” through regular practice and trial and error, stopping and backing the track up over and over on the old console. The song made no sense but the guitar part was addictive. It had inertia that I was willing to work to be able to climb onto.
I was nervous the first time I played it for someone, a few friends in someone’s apartment. No one had asked for a performance, I had just picked up this guy’s guitar and was noodling around while we talked. I felt they could sense my nervousness. Neil Young never seemed nervous, he could sound relaxed and angry at the same time. I went around the progression a few times, enough to feel I had gotten it, then stopped and put the guitar down.
No one said anything. This was not my concert.
We all had things we cultivated to keep our sense of self out here, but it was a rare trait among us to actively inquire after this need in each other. Perhaps this was a side effect of having so few women around.
I usually was not in the mood to do anything physical until after I had come home, had dinner, and rested, so the night was all I had. I was surprised to discover that the night, in winter, at 10,000 feet, could be a good time to go outside. I would be sitting there, crammed into the small living room with my housemates, and be overcome with disgust at the four of us, or filled with exuberance at the possibility of experiencing the mountain in the dark on my skis, or just with an inkling of the possibility that I could be free, for a few moments, of the endless series of confinements that had been my day which, in a way, had been my life up to that point.
The air was dry and still. After removing my clothes, I became comfortable so quickly it was anticlimactic. By the time I crossed the first meadow, I was a little bit warm.
If this was comfortable, skiing naked at night in the woods, what could make me uncomfortable? Was I going to be happy now?
I tried to keep a level head. There were still very serious things that could go wrong, but I felt in the zone, like I had passed over to some mode where I was impervious to physical and emotional pain.
I searched for a way to cement myself into this feeling, but all the conditions that produced it were clearly temporary. Being a child had been temporary. Being a student, a slacker, a maid. The condition of “having potential” still seemed to apply to me, but surely this was temporary too. Here, on the meadow, none of it applied.
Only white light and the sound of skis, sharp as my unadorned shadow on the snow.
Ryan Gossen is a writer living in Austin, Texas, where he also pursues dance, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, and climbing, and is an active member of Texas Search and Rescue. He has had many vocations, including user experience (UX) designer, experimental psychologist, construction worker, arborist, and ski bum. He writes mostly about man’s interaction with nature. More of his writing can be found on his website.
