The Boy Who Invented Skiing: A Memoir

I guess he must have invented skiing after the main events of this book was over, but already by the time he was 21 Swain Wolfe had been through the kind of hell that Sybil did, a tragic explosion of child abuse and poverty on a TB sanitarium in long ago Colorado, where the beauty of the mountains acted as a continual reproach to the abusive families who lived on its slope. His father, Dr. Wolfe, was some piece of work all right. He was afraid of giving himself to his wife, because his heart was sort of wonky, and so his wife, Swain's lovely mother, felt ignored and hardly real, like a ghost passing through life at the sanitarium. In one effective chapter he describes a visit from his mom's talented painter brother, Bud, who takes the time to paint a gorgeous portrait of his troubled sister. Little Swain, fascinated by Bud's detailed brushwork on a ruby brooch on his mother's costume, spontaneously reaches out for it while the paint is still wet, spoiling the jewelry's perfection, reducing this trompe d'oeil to a messy blur of red. Symbolic of the mother's dashed dreams, and his own often too hasty grabs for whatever is shiny in life. I expect that was one of the reasons he invented skiing, the sheer beauty of the sport. In the painting, "she had a forced regal look that only emphasized her self-doubt and anger." Wolfe has a natural style which makes you think, if he hadn't invented skiing he might well have become a writer much earlier in a long career. Even in childhood, his mother was so helpless that he often had to make decisions for his family, and as he says, "You devote considerable energy to thinking things through from every angle." He brings the same worried care to his writing, insuring his readers a memorable, if traumatic, reading experience. He's old enough to recall some memorable meetings with real cowboys, men, he says, who had only one desire in life, to be on a horse. His meeting with Lester, who invented self-release ski bindings, probably changed his life and pointed him in the direction that would make him famous. All in all, a searing portrait of a now vanished Western landscape, and a brave boy who put his hard-won skills to the test and survived, nay conquered.