My Son, the Ski Jumper
Susana Field
October 2006
My fourteen-year-old son Cliff is Superman – he flies the distance of five school buses end-to-end at 50 mph, while simultaneously descending the equivalent of a twelve-story building. And yet he is still afraid of the dark.
Okay, he’s not Superman. But he is a ski jumper. And I’m his Mom.
Cliff started his love of jumping when he was five years old, and I swear I had nothing to do with it. Every wintry Saturday, in downtown Steamboat Springs, Colorado, while I was curled up at home by the fire with a good book, he was outside, grabbing the bright orange handle on the Carrot Lift at Howelsen Hill, to get pulled to the top of a small hill. Crouching low into a tuck he’d point himself straight downhill, zoom over a small, four-inch-high jump, and catch a teeny bit of air. He’d coast the rest of the way down the hill to the bottom of the lift, grab onto the handle again and head back up, over and over, throughout the whole winter of his being five and the whole winter of his being six. He told me about his day – that’s how I know.
Like many ski town kids, Cliff was also alpine skiing and playing ice hockey at the local rink. Then in 1999, when my husband John and I sat down with him to discuss his upcoming winter sport schedule – as most Steamboat parents do before the start of each winter – there was just one thing Cliff wanted to do that winter: ski jump as much as possible, and forget the rest. He had just started first grade, had just turned seven. How does a kid decide on a path at seven? I looked at him askance. Heck, I was in my mid-forties and I was still trying to decide what I wanted to be when I grew up.
To jump more than one day a week, we learned Cliff could join the local Steamboat Springs Winter Sports Club’s Nordic Combined Team, led by former Olympian Todd Wilson and to be coached by another former Olympian, Gary Crawford. The Nordic Combined team, we quickly learned, was a camaraderie of coaches, athletes and parents, all seemingly committed to the years of training, discipline, and single-mindedness, which leads to something rather odd and also oddly incredible – the ability of the human body, in the guise of a ski jumper, to fly through the air on skis.
Steamboat has gotten its name ‘Ski Town USA’ for all of the athletes it has sent to the Olympics through the Winter Sports Club, and most of those were in Nordic Combined. So far, so good, I guess, if that’s what he wanted.
That year Cliff was the team’s youngest member. From school he rode the ski bus to Howelsen Hill to train three days a week. We picked him up afterwards and we drove him there and back on Saturdays. In the locker room he had his own locker. There he’d stash his school backpack and his winter coat, with the mittens still attached on strings. He’d pull out his ski helmet, ski boots, and a funny one-piece, multi-colored, polyester jumpsuit. “Mom, this used to be Todd Lodwick’s suit,” Cliff beamed in awe, excited about wearing his U S Ski Team hero’s old jumpsuit. Sometimes the older kids stuffed him in a locker or in the trashcan, but he didn’t mind.
And so began his routine; week after winter week, year after year, and before we knew it, all year-round. The locker room and the ski hill became his second home, and the team his second family. Last year we sold our house above town and bought a condo across the street from Howelsen Hill, so he could walk back and forth as he pleased. I hated driving in the snow, you see.
If someone had told him at five, “Hey kid, you have to jump more times than any five-year-old can even count, and you’ll be a pimply-faced, long-haired, smart aleck teenager before you can even start to fly,” would he have begun? Probably he wouldn’t have known what the person was even talking about because, after all, at five, numbers are only for counting cookies, and years still don’t exist. “What do you mean?” he’d probably have replied, shaking his head as if they were idiots, “I’m flying right now!” The warning would have turned me, and like-minded, pain-averse adults, prone to seeking more immediate and socially-sanctioned gratification, away from ski jumping. But a five-year-old, a six-year-old, a seven-year-old, they don’t think twice. That’s the thing; they don’t think. They just do it and if its fun, they do it again, and again, and again, living fully in the moment. Wouldn’t that be nice?
Personally, between you and me, I also think the coaches were just tricking Cliff and his teammates, taking full advantage of both their youthful joie d’ vive and their short-term memories. “Hey kids, let’s go jump off a big hill,” I can just hear them say. And if the kids’ motivations started to waiver with a whine: “But the lifts aren’t working. I don’t wanna hike to the top, a million, godzillion (suddenly they can count) times,” Todd and Gary would bring forth the big guns, the golden lure of competition: “Hey kids, who do you think can jump the furthest?” “Me. Me. I can. I can.
”Thus began the age-old competition to stand on the podium – that magical, tiered place for only three winners, while everyone else just gawks from the crowd. A two-minute place, the podium is festooned with cheering crowds, flashing cameras, ribbons, medals, plaques, golden trophies, and high fives and hand shakes amongst podium-holders and their coaches. To be one of the celebrated is addictive, I am sure, although I wouldn’t know from personal experience.
So the early years went by for Cliff, podium after podium, medal after medal, and high five after high five, while the jumps silently kept getting bigger and bigger.
Meanwhile, our son remained oblivious to the fact that other kids in elementary school weren’t doing the same as he. To Cliff, training and competing was as normal and routine as brushing his teeth and having me turn on his nightlight before he went to bed. He didn’t notice that not all kids jumped when someone told them to jump.
But, much to our chagrin, as he approached adolescence, the blinders of his blissful youth fell down with a clatter. He realized other kids were playing video games after school while he had to train. He watched his schoolmates’ eyes glaze over at the mention of his ski jumping. As his frontal lobe began to develop, he started to wonder: What is this strange thing I’m doing which they are not?
“It’s the free riders and the ‘huckers’ (daredevils that like to catch lots of air over dangerous gaps),” Cliff informed me, eyes dancing wildly, “that my friends think are cool. Ski jumpers are just too weird.” His eyes dropped down.
“But the huckers,” I argued, when in sixth grade, for the first and only time, he talked about quitting, “they haven’t put in nine years of training day-in, day-out, like you have, in order to jump. They’re daredevils, while you’ve vigorously trained to execute one move (your take-off at the end of the inrun) so precisely, so exquisitely in fact, that you can perform the miracle of flying great distances through the air unaided.
”My diatribe was met with the proverbial, teenage rolling of the eyes and dismissive “Yeah, whatever,” before he slouched away.
Ski jumping is more akin to a Japanese tea ceremony (I continued, preaching silently to my own private choir), because of its sparse, precise movements, than it is to the free-for-all of hucking or, say, riding a rodeo bull. True, here in Steamboat you soar over Howelsen Hill’s rodeo grounds, and true, there’s not a Japanese tea house anywhere to be seen, but still. Ski jumping (I carried on, as if anyone was listening) is more like marksmanship, where years of repetition, practicing a focused, single motion, produces a consistently replicable, perfect shot.
Yet, unlike ski jumping, being an expert marksman can also have a utilitarian purpose. Ski jumping definitely does not have any “real world” utility in its own right. And, I’ve heard, it seems to not even impress the girls. Instead, ski jumping is but a grand, whimsical discipline in pursuit of the near-impossible.
Heck, after nine years of training to 1) combine balance + timing + explosive strength at the end of the inrun (at what’s called the take-off), and 2) once in mid-air, to form and hold a perfect airplane-wing posture with his body, while soaring a distance of over 200 feet, Cliff is just now experiencing the full weightlessness and lift of flight.
And he wants to throw all of that away to play video games and ‘huck’ with his buddies? Certainly the thrill of hucking cannot be so well earned! I shook my head to quiet the din of voices in my head, all of them raging like preachers, and prayed his adolescent desire to join the masses would die a quick death. Just like I didn’t understand his original dedication to ski jumping, I certainly didn’t understand his willingness to throw away all that training and consequent talent and fruits – the ability to fly! – just to be cool with a broken leg from hucking. “Whatever.”
Cliff forgot about quitting. And as subtly and as surely as his young bones grew without him noticing, so too his skills continued to be built: skills upon skills, discipline upon discipline confidence upon confidence, and courage upon courage,. Over the years, with his coaches’ guidance and discretion, Cliff and his teammates worked their way up Howelsen Hill’s numerous ski jump hills. They progressed from the little four-inch high jump at the top of the Carrot Lift, which had started it all for Cliff, up to the K18-meter jump, then the K25, K38, K68, K90 and eventually Howelsen’s largest jump: the K120. When both Cliff, and the jumps he was soaring off of, were relatively small (K18 thru 38 in the case of the jump hills,) it didn’t scare me at all to watch him jump. His bones, I figured, were still made of rubber, and besides, he had always been a cautious jumper; he’d never crashed. By the time they got up to the K68, the hill was big enough, the speed the athletes gained while going down the in-run was fast enough -at 50MPH- and their skill was precise enough, that Cliff and his teammates had begun flying. I heard this all as hearsay from John, who watched Cliff train every chance he got, because I could no longer watch. A possible crash felt too consequential, his bones had already grown too firm to bounce.
Fortunately, jumpers are training on several different size hills at any given time. For competitions they only compete on one hill, which is typically the smallest of the hills they’re training on. So for several years, I could attend all of his competitions on the K18 thru 38, like a good mother should, and which I thoroughly enjoyed, without ever having to see him jump the bigger hills he trained on. I knew I was buying time, but there’s nothing wrong with that. By the time Cliff officially competed past the K38, and I had to go watch, jumping the big hills was old hat to him. I wedged both mittens in my mouth. I heard his name announced and narrowed my eyes to watch. He soared and landed, just as competently as ever. I let out my breath and sighed.
Is it the performance artist in Cliff that has drawn him to ski jumping? Could he just as happily (and surely more quickly) been trained to be shot out of a cannon at the circus? Is ski jumping merely exquisitely trained, daredevilry entertainment, in a slow-as-molasses form of danciful grace: “Poetry in Motion” as they say?
Whatever it is, I, his mother, afraid of snow, heights and speed, and loyally preferential to the tropical beaches upon which I was born, remain befuddled by Cliff’s chosen sport. Now, John, Cliff’s dad, has been a ski patroller for 24 years, and Cliff’s great-uncle Elling, had been an early-twentieth-century ski jumper from Wisconsin. So, surely, Cliff’s affinity for the sport came from his dad’s snow-loving, cold-enduring, Scandinavian side, not mine.
Is it his father’s family’s blood which drives my son to constantly grab his 8 lb., 8 foot-long skis, throw them across his narrow shoulder and hike them, sometimes 400 grueling feet, straight up to the top of the jump when the lifts aren’t working? Or could it be dog-like habit, ingrained so young (“What else does one do after school?”), or a continuation of the five-year-old’s play: “Dang, this jump hill has gotten harder to climb to the top of! But it still is fun zooming down! And our coach still wants to know who can jump the furthest!
”Whatever it is that lures him to the top of the jump, once there he carefully prepares for his sacred meeting with the gods. This I have seen and have been forever humbled by.
In late October, before the snow had settled in, I climbed to his lofty place, the top of the K68, while Cliff was training with his team. The jump had recently been permanently laid in plastic so that it can be jumped on, year-round. Its inrun track was laid in porcelain and the landing hill was covered with thick green, plastic sheets, that look like the bottom of brooms, overlapping each other. When saturated in water by a sprinkler system, the K68 can now be jumped on even when there isn’t any snow. At the start of winter, mesh is placed over the plastic to keep the snow from sliding off. Cliff’s five-day-a-week training schedule is now year round. And without the ski lifts operating, the jumpers have to walk. Straight up.
It is a long climb.
Along the left of the 275-ft-tall landing hill is a thin strip of concrete, adorned with horizontal wooden slats, serving not so much as stairs but as footholds. Separating this path from the jump hill itself is a tall wooden fence rising vertically with the ground. I clawed at the fence as the climb went from ‘do-able’ to ‘very steep’ about half way up. I pulled myself upright and balanced. Then I looked down between my feet, like on a ladder, and froze. Turning around and descending would be no easier than continuing up, I rapidly decided, and besides, jumpers were coming up right behind me. Already I was holding them up. Using the footholds like ladder rungs, I dropped to all fours and scrambled the rest of the way up to the top of the landing hill. There, gasping and embarrassed by my athletically-lacking performance, I tried to be invisible and cleared the way to let the jumpers pass.
Here is where the coaches hang out, at the top of the landing hill, across from the bottom of the inrun, where they have the best view of their athletes’ take-off and flight. The climb continues past them, on a trail that steeply switchbacks up through pine trees to the top of the 254 ft long inrun.
I grabbed scraggly bushes and small trees, as my hiking boots slid out from under me on the slick ice and snow. How was I ever going to get back down? I’ll ask a jumper for tips on descending, I decided, but had to laugh at myself; this trail isn’t how they get down. Believe it or not, at that moment, their way looked easier. Dang!
Ahead, through the trees, I made out metal start platforms jutting out to the right of the inrun almost like wide stairs. These too were snow and ice-covered from a recent, early-season storm. I dropped to all fours again, and climbed up the lower platforms until I found a spot where I could sit safely out of the jumpers’ way, and looked around. There were twenty-two start platforms, where the jumpers stand before inching out onto the bar that hovers above the inrun itself.
Cliff climbed up behind me, a wry smile crossing his face, and climbed just above me. He swung his eight-foot long skis off his shoulder and placed them down carefully on the platform. One-by-one he set the toes of his jump boots into each ski’s front binding, and then attached the heel cords, from the back end of his bindings, to his boots. Since the boot heels are “free,” or not locked to the bindings, just like other nordic skis, namely telemark and cross-country skis, the heel cords keep the ski tips from coming up to hit the jumper mid-flight.
When it was Cliff’s turn, for there were other jumpers both above and below him, he reached out to drop the vertical bar, horizontally in front of him over the inrun. He moved forward, and then awkwardly lowered his upper body into a sitting position upon the metal bar’s dull, brown surface. Carefully, while his upper body was balanced above the precipice, he swung his lower legs, with skis attached, gently off of the platform and gingerly lowered them down to slightly hover above the inrun, which dropped like a well, below him.
Perched upon the platform, as if upon an aerie, I shared his view down the dizzying distance and steepness of the in-run, then out past the top of the jump (for the bulk of the jump’s landing hill is hidden from view here due to the steepness), across the end of the landing flats and out over the vastness of the entire valley and town. Cliff, seeing the “all clear” signal from his coach down below, lowered his goggles from his helmet’s brim, leaned forward, dropped his skis firmly into the track, muttered to his teammates “Have One” and then pushed himself off the bar.
Immediately he curled into a low, forward tuck, pinned his arms straight back as if they were duct-taped to the sides of his compressed body, letting gravity form him into a speeding bullet. Traveling at 50 MPH down the distance of a better part of a football field, on a 34-degree-steep track, he shot towards the bottom of the inrun, whose terminus meets thin air.
Explosively, his body uncoiled like a spring at the bottom of the inrun and, jumping forward out over his skis, his body’s shape transformed into a wing, as poof! the solid surface beneath his skis vanished and he was flying.
He soared out over the top of the landing hill, the ground rapidly falling away beneath him, until I, still clutching my icy seat below the platform where he once stood, could no longer see him. Seconds later, he shot back into view, the mere size of an ant, as he decelerated out on the grassy landing flats. Whole, and uninjured.
Had I been watching from alongside the landing hill, Cliff would have passed me in flight, body cocked parallel to his skis and face forward, leading the way. I would’ve heard a loud Whoosh! as his body parted the air, and seen him being lifted by the air as he passed by. Then, as gravity had asserted itself upon the being that had started in my womb, I’d have seen his body form into the shape of a seagull coming in to land; body opening vertically, arms extending out like a bird spreading its wings, legs dropping down into telemark position, one foot slightly forward of the other and knees bent for stability. A mother in awe, I would’ve watched my young son come in to land.
Will he, one day, suddenly realize, as he senses his body being lifted and weightless in mid-air, “Sh..t, I’m flying!” and hopefully not fold his wing too soon?
Back home, I look at my son, taller than me now, who complains about doing the dishes but not about the hikes to the top of the jump, who complains about having to do homework but not about training in temperatures below zero or in a blizzard. He makes me leave his turtle nightlight on, but can fly off the K90 now, apparently without his heart even skipping a single beat. I ask him what it feels like to fly, but he’s fourteen and plugged into his I-Pod; he doesn’t care to talk to his mother much. I wonder to myself if something magical hasn’t been fed to my son by his coaches all these years. I surreptitiously sniff the air around Cliff when he’s not looking, and it smells of profound confidence, of routine and repetition, of allowing oneself to be trained until one’s performance of magic, like a dancer’s or a musician’s, is so second nature and so jaw-droppingly amazing that, in his case, he can fly.
Maybe he is Superman after all. Dang!