Flashes of Panic

Ski wax has two big classes: glide wax and kick wax. Skate skiers only use glide wax, which is meant to help the ski, well, glide on the snow. Classical skiers also use kick wax on the center of their skis, to grab the snow when they push down and back. Both kinds come in a spectrum of colors and hardnesses for different temperatures and conditions. Glide wax is forgiving; since it doesn’t have the dual role of both sliding and grabbing, if you pick the wrong glide wax you can usually get by. Kick wax is murder, because you need to hit the sweet spot where it slides forward and grips backward; too far in either direction, and you either have no traction or no glide. This is a gross oversimplification; I believe there are PhDs in waxology who claim they are still learning.

Klister is a specific kind of kick wax, less like wax than like glue that never dries. It is gooey, sticky, and more contagious than plague. It comes out for warm weather and/or icy snow, and today I saw a klister box in the wax-room trash can. I’m surprised I didn’t also see a matching pair of klister-fouled mittens.

I had my softest, warmest wax on as well, and even with that I was all over the skating trails. I was gliding wonderfully off each push, but the fast, hard snow also made it hard to get an edge; sometimes the ski would go sideways, or snag in someone else’s rut and send me sprawling. I felt like the tails weren’t always following the toes. Notchview is expecting snow tomorrow and next week, so today might not even have been my last skiing day.

On the trip up, I wished I had my camera to make a little slideshow of the trip for you. There were two sugar shacks steaming like teapots in Williamsburg, then another one cold in Goshen (improbably located in the Goshen Stone Co. yard.) A sign nailed to a telephone pole promised “Corn Ahead,” and in Cummington the bones of an old ski lift mark the bottom of a rank of masts up a mountainside. Any ski trails are long since overgrown. The roads are starting to show frost heaves as the ground under them melts unevenly, and the freezing and thawing of water makes the surrounding soil churn and bubble like a geologic stew. As I bounce over the road like a small powerboat, I imagine glacial-till boulders percolating up in the fields to annoy the local farmers.

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