As we're on skiing, I thought I'd share a small excerpt of something I wrote 25 years ago about a night half-way up an Austrian mountain. Just an excerpt:
Then, as the lifts close, meet up with your buddies and figure out what’s for dinner and which club will be tonight’s hangout.
In our case, that night’s activities had already been decided for us.
“We’ve been invited to a party at the ‘Kessle Hutte’…the Kettle Hut!” my German friend Hans happily announced. Because Hans is often wrong, seldom in doubt but always looking for a party, I had learned the hard way over the years to view such claims of being ‘invited’ with skepticism. As it would later turn out, we were –once again—indeed crashing someone else’s party, but…no matter, and nobody really seemed to care.
Places like the Kessle Hutte are another one of those ski things uniquely European. In Europe, the land is usually owned by a farmer and the ski resort is just renting his grazing pastures during the winter. As a result, in addition to the usual ski obstacles, you can find yourself dodging things like a barn, the occasional stray cow, feed trough or farm machinery. In this case, the Kessel Hutte is a good sized tool shed situated in the middle of a wide ski slope half-way up the mountain. During ski season it is converted to—naturally –a small restaurant and bar.
So, here sits a hundred year old log cabin about the size of a two car garage with a five and a half foot ceiling and a dirt floor. Drafts are discouraged with a bear skin nailed in place to the hobbit sized entry door. Sprinkle two dozen candles here and there for lighting (no electricity).
Add seventy five or so drunken Germans, Austrians, Swiss and two Americans. Pass around an old ski with holes drilled in it to hold a dozen shot glasses of schnapps. Get everyone to sing Russian, German, French, Austrian and yes—even the US National Anthems. Follow that up with some apparently hysterically funny songs in German sprinkled with English swear words. Pass around plates of sausage, soup, sauerkraut. A little more schnapps, a few more songs…you get the picture.
Sometime past midnight, someone decides that it is time to close the Hutte. You suddenly remember that you are halfway up a mountain ski slope. The lifts have long closed. It is absolutely, completely pitch dark. The Hutte cook is handing out road flares…the kind used for highway emergencies and you’re seemingly expected to ski to the bottom using this flare for illumination, presumably yodeling all the way. Merrily, everyone else thinks this is just a fine idea. “It is normal” as they say.
Maybe it was me, but despite weekend-long assurances that ‘for an American you ski really well’, I just didn’t think that skiing the blackness, in unfamiliar and poorly groomed terrain, a bloodstream full of schnapps and an incendiary device in my right hand was going to result in a happy ending.
Hans of course, just lit his flare, snapped on his skis and disappeared down over a ridge with his new-found friends, bellowing some operetta without looking back. So did everyone else except me and another American which more or less confirmed that we really were the wimps everyone suspected us of being.
Instead, we ditched our skis –pick them up in the morning—and started to walk down. We quickly found that the snow conditions were just right, and, if we laid on our backs, gave a little shove, we could slide a few hundred yards at a time toward the bottom; it was like bobsledding without the sled. We were also in that nice, just right little space of drunkenness that made it all uncontrollably funny. In about a half hour, we were within sight of the parking lot where a small table had been set up, bottles of liquor set in a snow bank and a whacked out, German ‘one for the road’ party was forming with 20 or 30 people, Hans waiting for us, cocktail shaker in hand.
It was two AM.
