The average temperature on the mountain was one degree above zero, not counting wind-chill. You could say participants in this year’s Sixth Annual All-Mountain Camp braved the cold, but bravery doesn’t grin, hoot, and holler this much. This kind of exuberance seems like the furthest thing from overcoming obstacles. But for 27 skiers and snowboarders on the slopes of Steamboat for this event, the bravery to overcome obstacles is a major part of who they are.

Over a third of the camp participants are wounded veterans. The rest are here with some form of disability, from paraplegia to visual impairments. There is a returning camper who lost his legs in an IED explosion in Iraq. There is one who nearly died in a car crash. And Craig Kennedy, one of the event’s organizers, suffered SCI (spinal cord injury) right here on his adopted home mountain.

It took Kennedy five years to regain the strength and skills to return to the site of his injury on a monoski (a single ski mounted to a “bucket” seat, navigated entirely with the upper body). Now he revisits every year on the anniversary of his injury. Celebrating such injuri-versaries is commonplace among these people: most talk openly about their accidents, degenerative conditions, birth anomalies, or whatever may have contributed to their respective disabilities. And while they all have some form of inconvenience that their able-bodied counterparts do not, they seem to see past the “dis” in disability.

Kennedy, who has joined the permanent staff of STARS (Steamboat’s non-profit adaptive ski program), explained that people aren’t going to remember all the pain and suffering that they went through early on. Once they’re over the hump, they just don’t look back. That rings true with what I saw up there: lots of people looking forward and enjoying the ride.

Want more from this camp?

• A four-minute video I shot and edited from that day’s skiing
• Event photos including cat skiing with Steamboat Powdercats
• Joel Reichenberger’s article in Steamboat Today
• Support local groups that do this kind of work every day all across the country – learn more at MakeAHero.org
  

Thanks for reading. Cheers,

Photos by SteamboatDigs, a.k.a. yours truly

Talking to Kurt one night, we hit all the major subjects: marriage, happiness, work, ambition, and flossing. Kurt has a long list of things he wants to accomplish in the next year, both personally and professionally. I recalled what a Senior VP at Coke once told me about it taking 6-9 months for someone to change just one or two habits. I thought Kurt’s list was too ambitious (particularly the flossing bit).

I said, in hindsight, I could identify one successful change, one piece of evidence of forward progress in my life for each of the last two years. I’m not sure I picked each of those things in advance as the one pivotal change-maker for each year; I’m pretty sure I had a dauntingly ambitious list like Kurt’s and that these just happened to be the things I actually stuck to that paid me back in return. The Golden Rule never promised that every thing you do unto others will actually be done back unto you, but it seems the more good you do, the more you get paid back.

I said I needed to lower my expectations without giving up on certain things. I said it was like flossing. For now I’ve given up learning to floss daily. But I am making progress. Not many years ago I would floss for a week or two before and after my semi-annual dentist appointment. Then for one year I flossed at least once a month. Now that I’ve managed to check out Alaska Dental Associates, I’m averaging twice or more a week. Maybe soon it will be nearly every night. That’s progress.

Kurt got all excited like people shouldn’t get about dental hygiene.

He said that’s one of the things on his list, too. I began to think this attempt to become better flossers is so much more visceral than the other ‘big’ stuff we work on— or intend to work on— every day. I suppose, in a way, dental hygiene is just as big. The psychology of flossing is important to health and life outlook. It means taking care of yourself, your physical body. It means doing something lame— something that is mere “maintenance” as Tom Robbins laments— that only pays off in the very long run. It means looking to your retirement years, not being the naive youth who says “it would be cool to have dentures when I’m old!” It’s the same as tending your 401K, taking out life insurance, or planning your kid’s college fund. It’s mature and adult. Blech.

What if I said flossing was staring your own mortality in the teeth and saying ‘I defy you, O Grim Reaper (and your minions of Plaque and Gum Decay)’? Tend to your latter years and you’re seeking to outlive life projections, discover a little taste of immortality, cheat death for just a few more years. That sounds a little more compelling, doesn’t it?

The second-to-last point of the Scout Law reads: “A scout is clean.” If you’ve ever seen 11- to 17-year-old boys at a summer camp, you understand that there must be some leeway in this definition of ‘clean.’ But you gotta hand it to the scouts for not preaching to the converted. If they can plant the seeds of hygiene in teenage boys, then they can clean just about anyone up. Hey, even I’m learning to floss just 20 years since my last summer camp.

Thanks for reading. Cheers,

The last blog in this series discussed the sometimes not-so-fine line between bravery and abject idiocy.

Photos by AirplaneMouse and Simon Blackley

My original Beer vs. Bread entry received this comment: “Just give me a big homemade cinnamon roll!!” It was from my mom and I see her point. To use notation you haven’t seen since you took the SAT, I believe she was saying:

bread : beer :: bran muffin : cinnamon roll

If the lingo of standardized tests never was your thing, that translates as “bread is to beer as that dry, crummy rock of a muffin is to a hot gooey cinnamon roll fresh out of the oven.” Mom’s cinnamon roll would be the equivalent of my beer: its sugar and fat providing the decadent departure that parallels the bubbly buzz of barley. On the other end of the spectrum lies the healthy but uninspiring fat-free bran muffin. Mmm, mmm.

If you ever did have a delicious bran muffin, it was probably not fat free. It was loaded with real butter, tons of sugar, and other rich indulgences. But at the Yin-Yang Cafe that is life, there are some mandatory side dishes that aren’t much fun. Tom Robbins, in the book Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates, called such daily nuisances “maintenance.” Toothbrushing, flossing, seeing the dentist (just about anything to do with your teeth) are good examples. Tending to your innards and the latter parts of your body’s consumption of fuel are also good examples of maintenance. Robbins’ globetrotting idealist, Switters, only barely tolerates these dull necessities. Ultimately he despises them.

So, just to carry the point right through to your lower intestine without delay, let’s make our hypothetical yin muffin a vegan, nondairy, gluten-free, wheat-free, naturally unsweetened, whole spelt muffin loaded with psyllium husk. Now as joyless as this hockey puck of a baked good may sound, for some folks with acute intestinal grumpiness, this may actually be their key to regular daily comfort. Or else they could swirl Metamucil in tepid water and gulp it down like a full eight ounces of slug slime twice a day. My prescription should you find yourself so afflicted? Skip the mucilaginous drink. Take two muffins, drop the kids off at the pool, and do the paperwork in the morning. [Editor’s note: Ah, toilet humor. Never lose your inner teenage boy.]

So, was there a point here or did we swirl into mucilaginy? [Ed.: not sure if I’m coining a phrase, but the world just seemed to need an official term for “a state of slug sliminess”] Ah yes, the importance of sustenance and simple survival-minded maintenance in our daily lives. Did you know that was where I was going? Bravo: that makes one of us.

Absolutely I’m a fan of homemade cinnamon rolls, Winchell’s doughnuts (the maple French cruller is brilliant), beer, and life’s other decadences. But they are decadences. Remember my mechanic’s warning that if you don’t work like a farmer, don’t eat like one? That doesn’t stop me from eating Little Debbie snack cakes, sugary cereals, and more than my share of high-fructose corn syrup— I interpret his advice as incentive to go out and spend those extra calories and preservatives on something exhausting and frivolous. There’s a reason a sugar high makes you want to bounce off the walls: you’ve got fuel to burn. So go ahead and bounce. And then get back to your maintenance.

Thanks for reading. Cheers,

Photo by izik