Skiing with a Soldier Transformed My Views on Military Service

Published November 11, 2024 01:18PM

The peak of Mount Mackenzie was slammed that morning. A pane of blue sky lit up April powder all around as a conciliatory parting gift from a long, dry winter. A guy with a 360 GoPro was tee-ing up the east face. There was a group of teenaged German exchange students, one with skis clumsily hung in an X rather than an A-frame on his pack. I was there with my buddy Mark, a pair of middle-aged men vying for a piece of the caked mountainside that had framed our younger years. And amongst a gaggle of two or three others, there was one lone snowboarder in military green pants, a camo fleece, and a camo jersey pulled over it for good measure.

“Where are you guys going?” the guy in green asked me, his impressive duster of a mustache dancing over his lip.

It was a self-invitation I would normally protest. But something about his nature felt unimposing, and there was a highway of people hiking up— everyone was coming if we didn’t go now. “OK,” I said, and we shoved off while the peak piled up like an escalator was letting off.

The traverse to Spilled Milk, a sidecountry run, is exposed and intimidating, but the guy in green gripped the ridgetop sun crust unfazed and held strong. When we reached the north-facing zone we sought, it rolled over and out of sight, as always. I had assumed he knew the run, but he told me he didn’t. There was a time when I would have said something rude and left him in my tracks. But if middle age has taught me anything, it’s that being a dick has gotten me nowhere.

“Well, Mark’s going into a cliffy area,” I offered, “and I’m going to take the most straightforward line. So if you want to get rowdy follow Mark’s track, if you want to keep it simple follow mine.”

Mark went first, nailing his line, then I dropped in, poking through a small choke to emerge on a wide-open apron that was all for me. It was deliriously good. I fist-bumped Mark at the bottom and watched my new green friend trace his own smooth run down the same heavenly slope. He slid up next to us, out of breath and grinning.

We bumped fists, too, and he told me his name was Nick. I paused a moment before asking… “Are you in the army?”

Most Canadians don’t have much interaction with our military. It’s tiny, with under 100,000 troops—including reservists—for a country of 39 million. Compare that to the 2.8 million Americans serving in the United States Armed Forces. With the exception of going into Afghanistan after 9/11, the Canadian military has almost exclusively been a peacekeeping force for the last half-century, lending its minor might to the United Nations and other allies while tending to things like natural disasters at home.

I have never had much reverence for the military. Those from my high school who joined tended to be the same types of hockey jocks who tormented me in gym class. There was a willingness to violence and an attraction to authority in these people that always befuddled me. That resentment only entrenched deeper in college when I became decidedly anti-war and thus anti-soldier. We were well past the age of conscription, after all.

In Canada, at least where I grew up, there wasn’t such a big disparity between the rich and the poor. I hadn’t ever known anyone who enlisted because it was their best job option, but I did know some guys who signed up to pay for university.

I assumed Nick was stationed in Rogers Pass, 45 minutes west, where the army does avalanche control with Howitzer cannons to keep the Trans-Canada Highway safe (these guys call themselves “snow punchers”). But Nick is in the infantry, he told me. He is stationed in Edmonton, Alberta, about seven hours north. He was simply snowboarding in Revelstoke on some time off. It’s where the rest of the 20-somethings were, I guess, though he didn’t quite mesh with them.

He said he specialized in mountain operations. So had my grandfather. Two generations ago, he learned to ski in Norway as part of his training before eventually landing on Juneau beach for D-Day in a Sherman tank. I visited that site when I turned 30, about the same time I started to understand the world was more complicated than my ardent idealism. The Canadian flag is proudly hung outside many seaside French homes, and it has been waving there since 1945. I walked the Canadian graveyard to learn most were between the ages of 18 and 22 when they died. Then, when I shifted to the American graveyard, I saw tombstones consume the horizon with no visible end. Later that day, a French server wearing a scarf emblazoned with the stars and stripes at a restaurant on Omaha Beach asked me, “Are you American?”

Back in the free hills of Revelstoke, a universe away from any past or present conflict, Mark invited Nick to join us for another lap. I interrupted the carefree air to ask Nick if he’d been deployed. Yes, he said. He had spent a lot of time in Europe, training Ukrainians.

“Yeah, I try. But a lot of them die,” he said. “They’re running out of people over there, most of them are either dead or injured. All this stuff I’m wearing, they gave me.”

The landscape seemed to morph around me just then. I felt momentarily stuck in an inverse world. It was as if being confronted by the physical incarnation of the disembodied news—of the chaos at the bloody fringes of Western life, held back by some invisible force so that I could have a very different relationship with the mountains. For his part, Nick just stood there, still unfazed, ready to squeeze in one more run.

“Thank you for your service,” I said. It was the first time in my life I’d ever used the phrase.