ASSETS, INTEGRITY, AND DISASTER

I won't say it was the last run the other day that did it. But I carved turns gingerly, indeed, and condemned my lower back for its spasms.

Tom Telluride boogied more expertly and enthusiastically, shaking the assets, he bragged, that he¹d been righteously shaking since 1960 when we both picked up our first boards.

Of course, we're talking Tom Telluride. In the old days, long before heavy metal junkies humped on MTV, when we dated girls who did homework, Tom and I began our illustrious careers as ski bums.

We worked only half the year, banging nails, filling up people¹s water glasses for a living, or sanding down sailboats. Winter was reserved for skiing: everyday. Ours was a tonic of freedom distilled from equal parts control and abandon. Relaxed and breezy, making big swooping turns like an eagle in off-camber terrain, we lived for "nostalgie de la boue" - a longing to recapture the raw and elemental vitality of the lower orders.

Tom was your typical Sierra thrill seeker, about 6' 2" and built like a quarterback, dark-haired and good looking in a Hollywood version of Chief Joseph way, and so cool in fact that women actually enjoyed his routine, and all was well except for the fact he¹d make me tag along, always pushing us towards "the edge of the possible."

One time we were atop the Palisades at Squaw Valley, a formidable ridgeband of chutes and steeps, a place more unknown to the majority of mankind than a Bantu Village. All day we'd been going gonzo, letting em roll at full thrust, and storming through the chop like we'd just bounced in off the ionosphere. The light was turning bad, the shadows extending towards the horizon, and clouds from Sacramento swelling up from below like the tide in the Bay of Fundy. The world, all mountains, turned under the sun, and I thought this must be the greatest place on earth. Indeed, it was one of those quiet Sierra moments where the earth in the distance seemed like an immense chapel.

" This could be disaster," I said to Tom, studying the Main Chute. I might as well have tried to eat a coffee table as jump into vertigo.

"Pattycakes," he responded in a nasal drawl known as the Eastern boarding school honk. "Skiing is integrity, only romance is a disaster." With that he uncorked a beautiful golden run that fixed even my jaded mind into a timeless spotlight.

Standing once again atop the Palisades, atop the world as if it still mattered, years later, with Tom, I realized how fast things move. All of a sudden another year was over and they¹re playing Christmas music. All of a sudden you could receive a card in the mail announcing your 20th high school reunion. All of a sudden Vietnam was another old war fought by parents of kids who grew up playing Nintendo, and never heard of Walter Cronkite. The biggest howl was that the path to the top of the Palisades was so packed that it resembled the retreat from Moscow. All morning long I'd been watching younger skiers and boarders hurling into once tribal territory, resembling, at the same time, a Xerox of people I'd known. Ski bumming now encompassed a much wider fraternity ever thought possible.

And there was Tom. As I looked as grim as a graying commando, once again peeking into the Main Chute whose bellacanto of height now seemed to cover a World Trade Center's worth, Tom¹s eyes lit up like Stars of Bethlehem. He stood over his kingdom with that smile of his that might as well have been on the cover of Time , displaying a grin so wide and fixed that you¹d thought he was on acid.

"This is great, don't ya think? I don¹t get to do this as much anymore," he said in that same pigheaded voice of his.

Tom had dropped his kids off earlier in the day at the children's day care center. His wife didn't take time off from her marketing job down in Marin County. But Tom, he'd had to get out of the office. Tax law needed a rest for a few days.

Tax law? Tax law from the guy who spoke of romance as disaster, who always knew how to con a buddy¹s car, drove his turns to a higher level by "raising the vibes," and who once stuck his head under Martha Lee Fervent's skirt on the dance floor of the old Lone Star?

Some things age well like special memories, wine, petrified wood, and ski bumming. Tom might have become one of the growing number of baby boomers who started out as ski bums, but got "real" jobs eventually to begin families, but he still contained a bit of the terminal attitude of the ski bum: the commitment to the notion that whatever comes along, can be handled.

And that may be at the very core, not just why some of us remain all our lives on the slopes, but why we live in the mountains at all. Because lurking just outside our flimsy facade of control is some great wild and free thing wanting to consume us. Haruspex to some, illusory to others, but truth the skier¹s netherworld.

Now all this information about ski bumming is maybe something my friend Tom Telluride might understand, but to him it is not the issue. Telluride is not one to be lead astray. In fact, I hear in court, Tom Telluride can be pretty blunt.

In a sport such as skiing where defining the moment has to do with mortality and an I Want To Take You Higher promise, it's still a lot of fun to ski with an old Tomcat. It just goes to show that skiing is more than a sport. It's a subculture, a parlance worthy of reflection. Tom and I are still stunned by the way it all went. Maybe we¹re crazy. Maybe we¹re not.