Season Pass
by Terry Brinkman

 

 

Two days ago five inches of snow fell in the valley. Two Feet at the ski resorts, today winds of seventy miles per hour, tonight eight inches of snow in the valley. A ton of power at Snow Basin tomorrow.  Surely the topic at the coffee shop with the other old farts turned to skiing.

Paul was telling us how at seventy-five you could get a free season pass at Snow Basin. As usual I interrupted before he was done, (in my mind only 7 more years and free skiing). After I shut up he finished his comments.

“No” he said, “that was how it was last month and forever past; now us old seventy-five year olds need to pay the same as everyone else. And that price went up twenty five percent!”

The pain in my knees at that moment seemed so real; I started talking about past skiing. I remembered when you could get a ninety-nine dollar season pass at Brighton ski resort. That was for night skiing.  We would take our beater skis to school and do our homework in the library (what homework we did was usually chewing the fat with our friends). There was no Ski Bus back then so we would try and catch a ride to the canyon at school; if not I and two friends would hike and thumb to the Ice-Berg burger hang-out and wait and beg for rides there (might also have a winner’s dinner greasy burger and fries).

The knee pain memories came one night skiing, I tried to make a jump; the jump was okay as usual of course, it was the landing - I hit a trash can on my landing (that year I missed three weeks of skiing).  

Back to coffee the stories changed from skiing, to knee replacements (oh the pain! Yea seventy-five might be too old for me to ski).

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