Pleasure on skis.

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I DON'T know why, but it is unfailingly the case that there is always something to relate after an afternoon's ski. The ski tow stopped halfway up the hill. You were stranded for twenty minutes! An avalanche over on the left, where you usually ski, had hurtled down the night before, very nearly ambushing your former ski instructor! Skiing is always doing that kind of thing to you. As though nature begrudged any absolutely uninterrupted day of sheer joy sliding down the mountain at any speed you choose, treating the snow like hired gravity as it lets you glide over its softness, cooling your face and balming your spirit and reminding you day after day and year after year of the singular pleasure that issues from a mountain height, two simple planes of tough springy texture, and snow under your feet. One wonders what we would have had from Coleridge and Wordsworth and Keats if only they had been given what we take for granted.