I'm busy working on next year's feature-length ski film and, as I approach my fiftieth anniversary of film making in 1999, I have been looking back through some of the hundreds of thousands of feet of film I have been involved with creating during the last forty-nine years. It is surprising to me how many of the skiers who I knew so well are no longer alive. Some of them have met death riding in a hang glider or on a bicycle in heavy traffic, others in ski crashes, avalanches, or old age. The reasons that my friends are no longer around are as many and as varied as my friends that aren't.

What is surprising is some of the ways they have chosen to be remembered after they have gone. One of the men who skied in our films engraved names on tombstones; he worked in an area of Canada where the ground is frozen for almost six months out of the year. The grave diggers couldn't dig graves, so he always had the winter off to ski. His business card said, "Marble Engraver. Eventually Yours." Which, I think, says it all. Especially since he already has engraved his own tombstone. Except he hasn't filled in the final date yet. Someone else will have to do that for him.

One of my sailing friends always said that when he died he wanted to be buried at sea and come back as a seal. For his funeral, all of us went out in our various small boats and floated around while we listened to the preacher deliver his sermon. After that, his son held the carton containing his ashes out over the side of the boat and stuck a knife into the bottom of it so the ashes would flow out. Within a minute or so when the ashes landed in the water, a seal came up in the center of our ring of boats and barked loudly at us, as if to say, "I got my wish." Everyone watching that seal has never forgotten him because we all knew that we saw a smile on his face.

But getting back to some of my skiing friends and how they wanted to be remembered. A good friend who is getting along in years and was a real pioneer in the ski industry by developing a ski resort told me recently at dinner, "When it's my time to go, I want to be cremated and put in the snow-making machinery and get shot out onto the slope in the form of snowflakes."

Yesterday, while I was riding the ferryboat to the mainland, the same subject of death came up when a retired local person told this story. He said that he and half a dozen of his friends had skied together most of their lives. "You know, the old gang gets together every year for a week or two and goes somewhere. Just the guys, no wives." "Well, old Charlie died last winter and, when his Will was read, it sounded like a good idea to us." The Will read: "I want to be cremated and then I want you to mix my ashes with the best ski wax you can figure out for that day. Put it on the bottom of your skis and spend the day skiing all over our favorite runs at our favorite resort, thinking of me while you're doing it. That way, I know I will be where I want to be forever. All over some of the best ski slopes in the world." This sounded like a good idea, but his five friends discovered that no matter how they tried to mix ashes with ski wax, it didn't slide very well. They all did what he wanted them to, skiing all day with the worst wax in the history of skiing. It took almost a black diamond run before they could even go fast enough to make a turn. That wax and ashes are still there today, except where the spring runoff took it on down into the creek.

Which brings up an interesting point. Scientists say that, since the world began, no new water has ever been created. Water just evaporates from the ocean and eventually falls back to earth in the form of rain or snow. With that in mind, there is a mathematical chance that those snowflakes that covered your goggles the last time you had a good powder snow day could have fallen on Napoleon's shoulders during the battle of Waterloo or maybe onto Gengis Khan's shoulders as he rode into Manchuria. The water that snowflakes are made of that you are shoveling today could have fallen as a raindrop on the back of one of the two elephants as they were marching onto Noah's ark. What goes around definitely comes around when you are talking about water. Perhaps whatever snowflakes are made of does last forever.

Copyright 6/14/98