I've been on skis once in my life. Snowboarded twice. My parents, who grew up in New England, were both pretty proficient skiers, but their careers on the snow effectively ended when my Dad wrecked his knee playing (*checks notes*) ping pong in the early 70s. Arthroscopy wasn't really a thing back then, so his surgery and the subsequent recovery rendered skiing low on the list of activities his doctors recommended.
My Uncle David, on the other hand, made a life on the mountain. He struggled in school as a kid, back in the 50s and early 60s when educators had a far more limited understanding of learning disabilities than they do now. He graduated from prep school and started working construction in the summers and teaching skiing in winters in Maine. He became a park ranger at Mount Washington, NH for a couple of years, and then went West with a buddy to ski for a week.
The rest, as they say, is history.
My uncle retired last month after 20 years as the head of the Alf Engen Ski School at Alta, where he led the team that teaches people to ski on that purist's hill. As he himself was quoted recently, ""Real skiers are drawn here sometime in their skiing life, because Alta is the Center of the Powder Skiing Universe. Some skiers stay for a while, some for a lifetime. I hope that when they do go, they take a little bit of Alta with them."All told, he spent nearly 40 years working at a place he loved.
He'll leave a little bit of himself at Alta, too. This article tells the story of my uncle and his friend Piney as they both prepared to retire after decades together.
If, unlike me, you're a skier and you've spent any time at Alta, you might've met Hoopa. That's what the Alta community calls my uncle. In the article linked above and the video below, he's fairly cryptic about the moniker's origins. I assume that's the New Englander in him deflecting attention. Like my Mom and her mother and my Aunt Carole, David has one of the world's most distinctive laughs. It's a huge yawping bray. My Mom's people laugh with their full bodies. And so "Hoopa" came from people trying to put words to the sound of David's guffaws. It's a decent honorarium as these things go.
You can tell by the article about Hoopa and Piney that my uncle loved his work, his time at Alta, and his people. May we all find something in life that fulfills us in the same way. When I asked my Mom earier this week about her brother, she told me, "He was good to his people and he loved what he did".
I'll take that as my legacy someday. Happy retirement, Uncle Hoopa.
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