Ski

  I might have shared this fact about me before, but I can't water ski.  It isn't that I don't know how so much, as it is that I can't.  There are a lot of reasons why I can't water ski.  First and foremost:  I can't swim.  My father tried to teach me how to swim early on.  He would be in a motel pool and get me to jump in.  He said he would catch me.  When I did, he would move away and expect me to save myself from drowning.  I almost drowned a lot.  It got to the point that I didn't trust him, so I gave up.  Later on, I took swimming lessons.  That didn't work either.  Instead, I almost drowned.  So, I gave up.  Another reason I never learned to water ski was that I was afraid that the jerk from the boat would dislocate my shoulders.  It might not have, but I had that worry.  My brother was a great water skier.  He could do tricks on skis.  One of his tricks was skiing while having his swim trunks go down to his ankles.  He said the others laughed and cheered.  He didn't know why until he let go of the rope.  That could have been me.

 However, there is a kind of skiing that I figured I could do.  Snow skiing.  I was in high school, and the youth from Kilbourne Park Baptist Church went on a trip to the Appalachian Ski Resort in North Carolina.  We were on a bus and went through a small country town on the way.  We waved at the folks on the street by saying, "Hi, Grits".  They waved back, because they couldn't hear what we were saying.  We laughed a lot at their expense.  

 When we got to the resort, there was snow on the ground and a lot of ice.  After we got our boots and skis, we headed over to the beginner's slope.  It was kind of small with a rope to carry you up to the top.  I was glad I had on gloves, because the rope was moving upward and would have given me blisters otherwise.  They told us how to slow down and stop by pointing the skis inward.  I couldn't do that, so I just fell down to stop.  I fell down a lot.  Then, I would get to the rope and go back up the hill.  The rope took off all the leather on my gloves by constant scraping.  Not fun.

 There were two other slopes at this resort.  The intermediate and the experienced.  You had to take a chairlift up to those.  Since I had managed to "ski" down the beginner's slope, it was onto more adventure.  The intermediate slope.  It was hard to time getting onto the chairlift.  It was moving at a pace which was a bit faster than normal.  Eventually, I found that jumping onto the seat would work.  Not the safest way, but I held on.  I looked down from the top of the slope and saw obstacles that I knew I couldn't ski around.  I saw people skiing from side to side, but my goal was to get down the slope without breaking a bone.  The quickest way was a straight line, so I proceeded to ski down the mountain and almost running into people along the way.  I sat down to stop and slid on my butt to the bottom of the slope.  With one run, I had "mastered" the intermediate slope.  A friend dared me to go to the slope for experienced skiers.  It was straight down with no obstacles.  Mostly ice.  I could see my life pass before my eyes, so I declined.  It was probably a wise move.  I might have been young and stupid, but I had to draw the line somewhere.

 I went inside to dry off next to the fireplace.  Another wise decision.  We got back on the bus and headed home.  We said goodbye to the "grits" on the town's sidewalk.  They waved back.  That was my foray into skiing.  I haven't done it since then, but at least I didn't drown.