Now ski towns, desperate to battle air pollution, are taking steps to limit — or even end — the use of wood as a fuel. Aspen, Crested Butte and Telluride are among those who have taken steps already. This winter, the Vail Town Council has been weighing a ban on wood-burning fireplaces or stoves in new construction.
These moves make me cheer. And cry. Simultaneously. I am all in favor of preserving our planet. I am heartily in favor of protecting skiers’ health, particularily my own. But I hate to see yet another bit of old-time charm disappear from the ski scene.
I know we can’t bring back the good Old Days. I wouldn’t want us to. I never did love outhouses or ropetows or ski runs that were season-long rivers of ice. And neither did anyone else — not anyone who is telling the truth. But I do miss the old camaraderie, the shared glamour of participating in a still exotic, somewhat heroic endeavor.
I have grown accustomed to the new face of skiing, the giant resorts, the towering condos, the malls lined with great shops, identical to the ones that line my shopping street back home. But I cannot reconcile myself to the loss of Ye Olde Mom and Pop Lodge, where skiers sat around the living room and traded lies about the number of runs they got in that day. Where they sat, of course, was in front of the sacred altar of skidom, the fireplace.
Non-skiers have trouble imagining what it is like to swoosh down a snowclad peak, but they have no trouble imagining what it is like to sit around that fireplace they have seen so often in beer and auto commercials.
Perhaps the ski industry should consider for 1991-92 a nationwide “Come gather ’round the fireplace” campaign instead of the “Ski It To Believe It” campaign.
Like most skiers, I consider myself a hardshell environmentalist. I can appreciate the pro-fireplace argument that wood, as a renewable resource, is more economical and kinder to our planet. Like most skiers, I also consider myself a romantic.
Can’t I have it both ways?
I guess not, at least not in the great number of snow country communities where geology, road dust and auto emissions conspire to produce a brown smog, unacceptable to the Environmental Protection Agency, to residents or to visitors.
There is one bright spot in the prospect of a ski world without real fireplaces (sorry, gas logs just don’t cut it, image-wise). Once the prospect becomes reality, non-skiing cartoonists will have to retire their favorite cliche, the guy sitting in front of the fireplace with crutches and a cast on his leg.
