THE REALITY OF IT ALL YOU. YOU THERE. COME HERE. Lean in close. I want to tell you a secret. These words that you are reading—they are real. And not just “dictionary” real. Sure, there are an abundance of words being generated at any given moment here in our planet’s rapid race. But more and more, those words don’t come from human hands attached to human arms with a direct feed to the human brain. Lean in closer. Do you smell that? That is the smell of print media. It smells good, doesn’t it? Now check to see if anyone watched you sniffing your ski magazine. This is your chance to make them feel awkward by staring uncomfortably or making a joke. “It’s a scratch and sniff magazine,” you might say. “This paper comes from trees. Some of them are recycled. And it’s printed with bio-based ink.” And you know what? That conversation, that awkwardness, that is real too. But just today I experienced something decidedly unreal. Today I slipped on my son’s virtual reality goggles. Holy crap. Have you done it yet? There’s definitely no fresh magazine smell in VR world. No smells at all, in fact, save for the dog farts that don’t jive well with their home screens, which in my son’s case features a palatial patio built atop a waterfall. Out the window to the left (West? East? Who knows…) there is a gloriously realistic, yet exaggerated mountain range. It is an ideal place to settle in and melt through the social cracks of the great digital sifter, letting the sounds of society disappear. Yet long before that advanced visual stimulation, in the fog of pre-VR, pre-AI, pre-digital analog youth unplugged, there was another piece to it all. We found excitement. Often it was the product of loneliness and boredom, of finding a way to entertain ourselves. Those poignant moments are only sweeter in recollection, while hard-earned lessons dull their sharp edges over time. They are all stored right here in my own cerebral Cloud, somewhere between my pre-fontal cortex and cerebellum. Wandering mental catalogs generated through actual experiences, I have untold bytes of data that call up memories born from the wistful surrender to gravity on a snowy mountainside. Sometimes, a snowy hillside. Even a snowy yard. These memories are shackled to a tactile feeling, a sensa-tion both wildly disparate and tremendously consistent for those who know it. Yes, the air is cold. The wind can be a son of a bitch. A distant cloud-capped summit can bring to mind One of the great things about Portillo, Chile is that there are numerous spots where a short hike can lead to fresh lines. Sven Brunso enjoys a few soft turns at the end of the rainbow. Photo: Liam Doran IZZYISM Words MICHAEL “IZZY” ISRAELSON feelings of isolation. Now—change your program. Your digital skin. Your playlist. Those same feelings of unease recall instead a front that brought three feet of snow to your favorite hill. The coldness on your cheek speaks to what my friend Chili Dog refers to as “the good, dry stuff.” And the wind means that there is a load of even more snow on the lee side of the hidden knoll, a spot whose secret access you know well. No cheat code here, just timing, experience and big lungs. How fast can VR duplicate your favorite day in the Little Cottonwood Canyon? The first movement of the chairs at Whitewater, each seat piled with a metric volume of snow? Technology may not be far off, but maybe there is still a place for real reality, the moments that demonstrate more perfectly what it means to be alive. Honestly, I can think of no better place. There is still nobody capturing your ski day on video. For most of us, anyway. You are exactly as good as your memo-ries tell you that you are. And that feeling, the indescribable surrender to gravity, flow and frozen water? Well, that is something that will never be recreated in binary. There’s no time like the present to throw this magazine aside and go. Grab your skis. It doesn’t even matter what you wear. Your memory won’t care. Just go and slide down a hillside. In real life. In real time. Now, before your time has run out. Are you ready? Are you ready, skier one? 034 The Ski Journal
The Ski Journal Volume 17, Issue 4: Page 34
