Chapter 1: The God of Skiing

The Sports Illustrated story was called, “In Search of Strau: What’s become of the daredevil king of collegiate skiing?” I was in high school when it ran. The photo on the page was the first time I ever saw him, standing on the stage at the NCAA Championships on the top podium.

He was golden and glowing like a statue in the sun. Like a movie star with his broad Swiss face, his white crooked smile and his wheat white hair blowing in the wind. His eyes were as blue as deep water and he stood out from the crowd like a sunflower he was so tall and tan.

He was the quarterback just come off the bench to win the game, except with something tattered and about to be broken. In the scar that cut from his right temple to his cheek. In the careless way he raised the silver trophy in his right hand. You wanted to be there to catch it for him. To tell him that his red speed suit was torn and his biceps showed through at the arm. To show him how his long black skis were both bent at the tips, and how the two other skiers on the stage, the posters, green, red and blue banners and people in the crowd were all falling out of focus in a swirl of color behind him.

The story counted up the long list of come-from-behind victories and heartbreaking wrecks in two columns right beside each other until they began to seem like the same thing: the stunning wins where he careened down the course and everybody forgot to breathe as he zipped by, or the quiet after the crash before the blood hits the snow and the skis are still sliding. From triumph to tragedy, one after another, they read like the made up rumors of some distant, crazy cousin.

His fluid, aggressive style in the downhill and Super G was described as ‘angry,’ ‘feral,’ and even ‘pathologically transcendent.’ It shocked collegiate racing. He skied so close to the gates that they would explode from their moorings. They were left flopping in his wake. Sometimes it seemed he skied right through them.

For two years at St. Lawrence University in upstate New York – where Bob Parker of the 10^th Mountain Division had gone to college, and where I would go too – he built his own East Coast legend. He won races from way back in the field when the spectators were starting home and the courses were rutted and rotten. He ran from the top of the mountain all the way to the bottom on icy blue pavement like tilted frozen lakes through the trees where it’s only glory or ruin; where only because of their balls, their fear or their fuck-it-all that skiers first see if they can survive, then win. And Tack won downhills by a whole second sometimes, which is good as a mile in skiing. Or he crashed so spectacularly that a hush ran up the hill.

“Is he dead?” “Will he ski again?”

They would rush back to the orange fencing when they heard his split-time come over the PA system. Those early East Coast drunks, leaving their beers on the bar as they ran outside for that glimpse of a shooting star – the vapor trail of snow as he was passing. Shouts erupted from the finish line as the adrenaline went through someone. Or there was a collective gasp as he sailed into the woods like a car off the road and everybody waited for the explosion; the blue and red fiberglass poles burst like fireworks, the horse breaking its stable and the raceworkers standing dumbstruck as it happened.

“Tack ‘Tornado’ Strau,” the announcer would say. “Let’s hope he’s not hurt too bad, ladies and gentlemen.”

But he never missed a race. No matter how badly hurt he was, he was always back the next weekend. He hid the bulk of tape around his fractured ribs with an extra turtleneck and told his coaches he was cold. His broken wrist with bigger gloves. He took off an eye patch on the lift and stayed off the drugs to pass the piss test, choosing alcohol over Percodan.

Between his ribs, his arms, his legs and hands he broke 17 bones. But it said you would have to look to see where it slowed him. It said, “He smiles like a joke he shouldn’t tell, with perfect white teeth and thick Swiss lips that are always burned and cracking. He laughs like coffee, like some party or fistfight about to happen.”

He drank after races with his growing legion of fans, the “Scarecrows,” who took to making phony casts, wrapping themselves like mummies in toilet paper and blacking their teeth with markers and charcoal to cheer him. At the NCAA championships in Lake Placid, he annihilated the field in both his disciplines. Then, almost as a joke, he entered and won the slalom. In the post-race interviews he revealed to a reporter that a week before he had torn the medial collateral ligament in his right knee during a training run. He said the doctor told him he needed surgery and at least four months off before he could ski again.

“Why risk it?”

“It’s like being pocket rich,” he said. “You spend it when you can.”

And then that immortal quote: “If it weren’t for gravity, I’d probably be in Nebraska building engines.”

The ECAC coaches couldn’t believe the U.S. Ski Team had never heard of him. The good ones are discovered by the time they’re 14, on the company dime, traveling and training. To make it onto the World Cup from college was like being born again. Tack Strau was discovered when most college racers are playing out their scholarships, deciding whether to take a job pimping skis or to go into investment banking. He was in talks with a ski manufacturer for a two-year contract, lining up his summer training schedule with the U.S. team at the glacier on Mount Hood, then Portillo and Europe in the fall, when he crashed at Whiteface during an early morning practice run. He lost an edge on blue ice and went into the trees. It was almost shtick with him. Except the ambulance came, and the other racers who saw the crash went to wait for news at the bottom.

His helmet was cracked in two. There were more broken bones. Doctors worried his brain might start swelling. But by the time his parents drove up from Pennsylvania, search parties were forming to try and find him. No one saw him leave the hospital. No one saw him in town. It was as if he jumped off a bridge and kept falling.

His teammates drove along the frozen lakes and rivers in their Jeep Cherokees and wood-paneled station wagons, staring into the ice for a glimpse of his beat blue parka, or that blown white paper of hospital cotton. They stopped at the dark little North Country bars, drinking Cokes and Genny’s and pinning up pictures of him. The police interviewed the doctors and orderlies. They put out an All Points Bulletin. For two weeks in the bone-chilling cold, firemen, police and ski racers led search parties into the woods on snowshoes and cross-country skis, following the white-breath of the German Shepherds and Bloodhounds.

It was after Christmas when the reporter drove to Pennsylvania to piece together what might have happened. In the narrow winding roads and the unyielding cold he found the farm in an open field beneath a hill, cloaked in that emptiness of fast December: “January’s desolation.”

Romeo, “Rom,” was from Saas-Fe, in Switzerland. He was handsome, dark and serious as a young priest in his high-collared wool coat except for the gray at the temples, the blue-eyed worry and the places on his face where the sun had been. As a boy he and his brother took the train to Zurich to see Giant and East of Eden. They listened to Hank Williams. They sold the family hotel to move to America and buy a farm, but the brother moved home when the crops first failed. When the mountains didn’t live up to his expectations. “Can you blame him?”

There was a picture of the wooded hill behind the house, up into the trees where Rom built a tow with a cable and an old Ford engine. Each summer he cut and burned the thick brush and saplings. When Tack was born they would wrap him in blankets and pull him on a sled. He was on skis as soon as he could stand. Sometimes they would run the tow until it was out of gas and dinner was on the table. When there was a moon they would go hiking. His legs grew strong on the snow. He learned to be light on the ice and to wait in the trees until he saw the opening.

“Sometimes he would fall so hard, when the cold makes you so sick, and he would get up and be laughing,” his mother said. “You knew you were in trouble when he started laughing.”

Elsa was like the queen of a Norwegian fairy tale, “as blonde as a winter morning.” She was a Scandinavian model that came to America with a farm equipment convention. She was fondling black and orange handled chainsaws in a silver evening gown when a tall young man in a green wool jacket and worn black boots stepped from the crowd and asked in Italian where she was from. Romeo wanted to know if she would have dinner with him.

“I don’t know,” she said, when the reporter asked, writing on the wooden chair on the well-swept wooden floor in the room where all the red and blue ribbons were fluttering like curtains.

“He always said skiing in the summer ruined it for him.”

// photo by Graham Gephart

The God of Skiing: Introduction

Their stories are trapped like butterflies under ice. And their exploits and adventures disappear over the years in the wind. In the high mountain towns they gather the sun on their faces like poor playboys, drunk in the bars at night, never worrying about anything except when it will snow and when they might feel the warmth of someone else’s skin. They travel through blue air and black clouds across the cold peaks of Montana, Switzerland, the Himalayas and Patagonia, alone and unknown, up against the sky like lost angels looking for their broken wings. Read more

Holy Water: Surf & Soul on the Jersey Shore

Jersey, 4th of July (Shred White and Blue) — Fourth of July vacation could not come soon enough. The monotony of my low-paying summer job finally caught up with me, as did the two weeks of rain Boston lucked out with. I had to get out of the overcast city and into some radiant sunlight.

With a week and some change on my hands, I decided to take a trip down to the Jersey shore. I figured my grandparents could put me up for a couple of nights and maybe I might even get some home-cooked meals. I needed to get away and besides, my surfboard hadn’t seen light in weeks.

As I loaded a duffel bag into my worn Jeep outside of my building, a maintenance guy inquired about the longboard bungeed to the roof. He asked if I was headed to the Cape. When I replied no, I’m driving down to the Garden State, he scratched his head and retorted, “Who in their right mind would CHOOSE to go there?”

I would. Masshole.

On the ride south, I stopped in my suburban, Connecticut hometown to get some gas. While I watched the number of dollars coming out of my pocket triple the number of gallons going into my tank, an old leathery man pulled up alongside me on a scooter that didn’t appear much younger.

Looking up at my board, he spat a wad of Copenhagen juice on the pavement and nodded as if in approval.

After collecting his thoughts, he proceeded to mumble, “I used to ride somethin’ like that down in Wildwood” and off he went. As I climbed back into my car, I couldn’t help but think that I was just in the presence of a legend. He just seemed to possess that wise aura.

The rest of the drive I put on a playlist ranging from The Beach Boys and Dick Dale to Southside Johnny and The Boss in hopes of satisfying my seaside craving. After a straight shot over the Tappan Zee Bridge, I entered the parkway for the final stretch. I finished one of those short daydreams that you inevitably experience cruising on a highway to notice that I was only on Exit 129, and my exit was 10. However, my mood had been convalescing ever since I left Beantown and not even the condescending taunt of every exit sign could dampen my spirits.

When I eventually passed a sign that read, “Now Entering Atlantic County,” a fresh breath of salty air rushed through the car, and I couldn’t help but smile. I was almost there. In that epiphanic instant, I was able to forget any and every responsibility I ever had, and damn did it feel good.

As if on cue, my playlist switched to “The Boys are Back in Town” when I pulled off to the boulevard and crossed the fishermen-littered bridge onto the little beach island. I found a parking spot right in front of the house, spent a little time catching up with my grandparents, then made the 30-second trek to the beach. I climbed the small hill over the dunes and picked out a small opening of sand amongst the thousands of pastel umbrellas.

It was not difficult to doze off as I marinated in the sun and let my exhaustion get the best of me. When I awoke, the beach was still fairly populated though it was apparent the afternoon was waning. Not much later, the lifeguards blew their final whistles and motioned for the swimmers to retreat back to land. This was the universal signal to surfers that the water was now theirs, so I pulled on my rash guard and leashed up.

The task of paddling out usually seems tedious, but that day it took no effort whatsoever. Every stroke brought me closer to ecstasy, and before long I was straddling my board waiting for the first wave. The serenity during this interval was priceless, but a crest beckoning a ride suddenly interrupted it. I dropped in and allowed the energy of the earth to push me for an invigorating ride all the way to the sandbar.

I jumped off prematurely to protect my fin from running aground, and as the ocean engulfed me, my existence seemed to enter slow motion. There I was, every inch of my body surrounded by water, completely deaf and free from gravity. For that single moment, I was somehow one with the world and yet one with myself. I felt as if I had reached the equilibrium of solidarity and solitude, and for the first time in my life I found the unity in metaphysical duality.

While this underwater contemplation seemed to last a lifetime, it was indeed only a moment long and before I knew it I surfaced for air. I continued to ride the short and choppy Atlantic swells the rest of the week. Everyday at 5 o’clock, my faithful board and I sprinted from land to our instinctual habitat.

That Saturday night, I enjoyed the company of some longtime buddies while sitting in the 80th Street field watching fireworks. We caught up on the past year and recounted the glory days, which I continue to pray are not over. Soon, we were swallowed up by the oohs and ahhs of the crowd while Pomp and Circumstance played somewhere in the background.

I looked down at my shirt, a first edition Shred White and Blue tee, and thought to myself, this is what it’s all about. I was proud to represent a company founded on the principles of brotherhood and patriotism. Even the yin yang design of the logo embodied the same duality I had conquered earlier in the week.

Surfing has allowed me to gain a greater appreciation for myself and my life in a context that only nature can reveal. I hope that through my efforts with Shred White and Blue, I can share this passionate discovery with the world.

In Praise of the Bikini (and Ursula Andress)

It’s hot as hell here today. And you can see flat water all the way out to the horizon line. The beach is shimmering with skin, sun and sand.

When I came inside for a peach it was so cool that I turned on the TV and that old James Bond movie, Dr. No, with Sean Connery (the best James Bond ever) was on. “The movie that started the ’60s spy craze is high-spirited fun and action all the way,” according to my Blockbuster Video movie guide. But what everybody remembers most is how great Ursula Andress looked in that little brown buckskin bikini when she first appeared on the screen.

“Now that’s a woman,” my girlfriend said when she walked in to the room. Then she went off on a little diatribe about all those anorexic little things walking on the beach today without any flesh or muscle tone.

Which, of course, is the beauty of a bikini – all the many different curvy, shapely, busty, bodacious, badass, babe-licious ways that woman’s bodies look in them. A bikini without a body is like a candy wrapper after the chocolate is gone.

Online I found out that French car engineer Louis Reard invented the bikini in 1946 (after taking over his mother’s lingerie company – get as Freudian as you want with that one). He named it after the Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands where we were conducting nuclear tests at the time.

With all the fireworks, fantasies and photographs that the swimsuit has inspired, it seems an appropriate marriage: French fashion and American bombs.

Wikipedia tells me that Parisian stripper Micheline Bernardini was the first to publicly model summer’s greatest accessory, at a poolside fashion show in Paris on July 5, 1946. And that the two hankies of cloth were banned from the Miss World contest until 1951 – the very Mecca of swimsuit competition!

The entry also says that “The bikini is perhaps the most popular female beachwear around the globe, according to French fashion historian Olivier Saillard, due to “the power of women, and not the power of fashion.” He adds, “The emancipation of swimwear has always been linked to the emancipation of women.”

Next, there are entries on “mankinis” (think Sacha Baron Cohen as Borat), string bikinis, thong bikinis and even sports bikinis.

At www.bikini.com I end up checking out “Karate Hotties” and “All Star Sizzlers” (somebody’s gotta do the research on this one).

Then it’s time to get back outside, to see real bikinis. And real women.