It’s not easy to write a feature story for a ski magazine that has relevance to and resonance in the mainstream, non-adventure world but Tom Bie has does it in the October 2008 issue of Powder magazine. At Ease takes us to the Edelweiss Lodge in Garmisch West Germany, one of five Armed Forces Recreation Centers that the U.S. Government maintains for inexpensive R&R use by active service men and women. There we meet soldiers who’ve been serving in scorching Iraq who are now rejuvenating on the slopes of the Bavarian Alps.
Early in the story there’s a dark anecdote about the death of a family man on the day before he was to come home for a birthday cruise with his wife. The Sergeant who Bie is interviewing wears a black bracelet on his wrist in memory of this man. This black reminder and other shades of darkness are expertly woven through story (Hitler even makes an appearance) in a way that heightens Bie’s first-person anecdotes of finding fine powder stashes in the dark trees of Bavaria’s Black Forest.
There’s a quote from the commander of a Blackhawk helicopter squadron in which he talks about the relief of being in the mountains and in the snow of the Alps after suffering 131-degree heat in Iraq. Reading it makes you feel how lucky we all are to be able to spend time doing something as magical as sliding down snow-covered hills. Life, we are reminded, is rarely this good.
For me the piece had a bit of extra juice as my dad has talked for 40 years about the leave he spent skiing in this very place while he was in the Air Force. If I had a dollar for every time I heard him tell stories of the Zugspitze, I could retire and bore the pants off my own kids full time. In fact I’d heard about it so much that in my mind Zugspitze had taken on a fairy tale reality, existing in some netherworld of your old man’s glory days. Bie’s story gave it a new, present-day reality for me, and yet within the piece I could see that from a soldier’s perspective Zugspitze might also seem too good to be true.
Bie’s piece closes with the commander looking from the ski lodge back toward his imminent redeployment in Iraq. His quote reminds me of the flip side of being so happy in the mountains, especially when you’re with family (he’s with his mom and brother): it’s hard to come back down to the flatlands.
Kudos to Powder for biting on this story and to Bie for doing executing it so well. One gripe, it doesn’t seem to be online anywhere. Or maybe I’m missing it. If you know where to find it, please comment here.
Tags: News by Bill Kerig
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