This commentary by Ron Powers was written for Vermont Public Radio and first aired on October 1st, 1999

Industrialized Skiing

Long before I ever suspected that I would one day live in Vermont, I used to spin daydreams about what life must be like here. One of my favorites involved skiing.

Skiing, man. Now, there was a sport that was worth getting into. Sport? No, the delicious magazine covers made it seem more exalted than that-more like a kind of citizenship in this fantastical nation of endless winter glide: vertical pine forests that spilled down the sides of mountains as high and abrupt as a child's cry of delight; a white sun casting long blue shadows of the figures making braided patterns of motion along the trails; ruddy, fit men and women in great-looking sweaters, flashing smiles of healthy ecstasy as they sent up sprays of schuss on a hairpin turn; folks who would soon be taking hot cider beside a great fire in the lodge as they swapped comradely lies about their exploits and watched a winter twilight settle over the universe.

Well, was I a chump or what? It took a few years of actually living here before I finally started to get it: skiing in Vermont is not about sensuous pleasure or contact with nature or the delight of children-certainly not to the high-powered corporate types who own the Vermont slopes and control that whole package of ambience and whatever.

No: to these grim Overlords and Overladies of the Lift, these stern scanners of the gross receipts, skiing is just another industry. The slopes are mass-production lines. The pine trees and the long blue shadows are bankable assets. And as for those figures making braided patterns of motion along the trails-why, they are the clientele. The meat in the seats; the tushes in the Sugarbushes. Economic integers in a larger abstraction called "skier days," a handy index that helps the Overlords and Overladies compute the answer to the only question that matters: which ski resort is Number One in Ski Magazine's annual "Top 60 Resort Guide" issue.

You think I'm kidding? Did you happen to follow the Condition Red that swept through the Vermont Ski Area Association last week? Remember what caused it? The shocking revelation that Mount Tremblant in Quebec had overtaken Stowe and Killington as the top-ranked ski resort in the east this year.  You would have thought that Canada was mobilizing a snowmobile strike force on the border at Derby Line. Within hours, a Ski Association spokesman was on the radio bloviating about how Vermont "has fallen behind in the kinds of amenities and slopeside accommodations that destination travelers seem to prefer and demand in today's market." About how these customers  ``want their ski vacation to be simple, convenient, all-in-one, low-hassle." I quote directly.

Excuse me: "Destination travelers?" "Amenities"? "Slopeside accommodations"? "All-in-one, low-hassle"? "Market"? "Customers"? What's being described here? Skiing as simple human pleasure or skiing as a high-speed crawl through a mall that's tilted at a 70-degree angle? And what's next-a recreational arms race? Probably. With the result that Vermont's slopes will look and feel even less like Vermont and more like one more stop off the Great American Interstate of pre-digested fun.

Lots of luck with the slopeside amenities, fellas. As for me, I'll spin my skiing daydreams at the one slope in this state that understands how to market itself in human terms: the one that says, "Ski It If You Can." This is Ron Powers in Middlebury.