From the Ski for Light Bulletin - Spring 2012
by Sonja Elmquist
Most of my favorite moments of Ski For Light have nothing to do with being a first-time guide: open mike at the townie bar, getting splashed by a hot-tub bellyflop from a wheelchair and the occasional freshman-dorm party atmosphere at the hotel were there for everyone. As was cheering at the finish line. And lunch. But a meaningful moment from my week was a new-kid type moment. Since SFL, I've thought of it often when trying to articulate to friends and co-workers what on earth could be so fun about being cooped up in a hotel for a week with a bunch of strangers -- half of them disabled -- in Utah.
It was the first day at Soldier Hollow, in guide training, my novice feet attached to skis and my eyes blindfolded. My training group had talked for hours about things to check on and be aware of and now there was nothing left to do but practice on ourselves before Bob Hart and Bob Civiak were ready to inflict us on our blameless skiers.
Feeling that it was in the spirit of the organization to leap before I looked, I was first to cover my eyes with Bob Hartt's purple fleece earband, while Bill Carr guided me around, telling me some things after I'd already figured them out myself, some things that I couldn't understand and many things that kept me on my feet and somehow unafraid of moving forward. With his guidance, I quickly became confident in putting my feet into unknown space and picking up my pace from a slow to a medium shuffle.
"Ok," I proclaimed, "I've got this, Bill. It's your turn for the blindfold. I'm bored." Bill, annoyingly (but smartly), said we should finish out the 2k lap. Wishing to be agreeable, at least at the beginning, I acquiesced.
Then something neat happened. I began to have fun. I guess I had assumed the skiers were having a particular, if limited, kind of fun - call it disabled fun. Something like fun, fun-ish, but less fun than real fun would have been. This near-fun I thought the skiers must be having meant that I must be doing a capital-G Good Thing; generous, charitable and noble but still somewhat short of showing them an able-bodied good time.
But as we skied along, I was startled to find myself having all-the-way fun. I was enjoying the feeling of my feet on the snow and the air moving on my skin, listening for what was going on around me, sorting out what things were in my capacity to figure out on my own and gratefully trusting my guide to tell me what I needed to be told.
That experience let me go ahead and do Ski for Light with my skiers and let go of doing Ski for Light for them. And I've come to think this is the secret handshake, part of the glue that makes the organization so sticky to some people. The "fun," and the "with," and the "for," get blended up into a sum that is more than its parts. like the last bite of Mexican chocolate cookie on the mountain, discovered somehow by Lauren Heine and shared because it's too good to keep to yourself.