Knee Replacement 18: Chickadee-ing Out?

I’m scared to ski down Chickadee.

As one might guess from the name, the Chickadee Run at Snowbird is not one that good skiers often find themselves on.

I know because I was once a good skier. LinkedIn says so. Pro skier is hidden in the details, but I know it’s there, because, of course, I put it there. “Skier” was once a top-five self-descriptor. Engrained in my DNA, proficiency on skis was once an essential part of my self-concept. I could usually get to it within the first three minutes of any introductory conversation. Just toss it off, humble brag style. It only took me 40 words to do it in this post!

I don’t do that in conversations anymore. Not that I’ve suddenly found humility; my rationale will become evident as we join a guy who looks a whole lot like me, gazing in fear down Snowbird’s flattest, least-pitched run.

Situated at the base of the resort, Chickadee’s gentle slope of a hundred yards or so is hemmed in on all sides to prevent little ski and snowboard toddlers from sliding away into oblivion. On one side is The Cliff Lodge, a massive cement structure that ascends a dozen floors above the slope, looming over it and casting a shadow in the morning hours. At the south end of the Chickadee Run is the Snowbird Center, the base terminus for the famous Snowbird Tram (it used to be called The Plaza until it was renamed to sound less urban, or something. Renaming things seems in vogue these days). It too is cement and pleasingly fortress-like. On the west side of the slope, a rope cordons off a strange snaking berm that in the summer months emerges as a double-tubed alpine slide. I feel hemmed in here. Hemmed in and observed like a hamster about to mount the wheel; overhead dangles the Chickadee Chairlift, filled with beginners and instructors, frequently dropping cell phones and mittens onto the run below.

Just up the hill from the lift shack and off-ramp of the chair is a parking lot and the road, down which I am walking with measured strides, wondering about the foreign feeling in my knees as they adjust to walking in ski boots. I say that they are my knees because they have been drilled into my bones, cemented in place, and enclosed in my skin by eight-inch seams of pink scar-tissue zippers. In a very literal sense, I am in possession of the titanium joints that now constitute knees, so it’s not incorrect to call them my knees. These joints, however, do not feel like the knees I own.

Have you ever walked in another man’s shoes? This is not a theological question. Maybe you borrowed footwear that belonged to someone else and had been broken in by feet that are other than your own? These shoes—someone else’s Pumas or Nikes or Sorels—may be perfectly functional, might well protect from the elements, and provide grip, but they will never rise to the level of becoming extensions of your own appendages, which is to say, yours.

This is how these knees feel. Borrowed and foreign. Not to be trusted.

I’ve sent my son on a breakfast mission for an egg and potato burrito at General Grits at the Snowbird Center so that I can deal with my fear and shame by myself (if you don’t count the fifty or so beginners who are riding up the chairlift above, eyeballing me, and because I am dressed like someone who knows how to ski, pining for my demise).

The odds are very high that I do not know any of those people—the pre-knee-replacement me skied on runs with significantly more mature-sounding names like Silver Fox, Great Scot, and Chamonix Chutes. Still, I feel the pressure of their anonymous, hexing stares.

Not daring to start my Chickdee descent from the top of the snowbank by the parking lot, I walk down the road until I find an easy carveout, snow-catted flat, opening onto the run with barely a slope. Lying my skis on the snow, my foot naturally scrapes the snow off the bottom of the boot by drawing it backward over the binding’s toe piece before nudging the Dynastar Pivot heel piece into place and stepping in. Although all of this is automatic, it takes considerable stomp to make the heel piece accept and lock the boot to the ski because, as I now realize, my bindings are still set for the old me, the one who could ski well enough and fast enough to require a high DIN setting.

The DIN setting is a measure of the force that it would take to release your boot from the ski in the event of a fall. A higher DIN means it will take more force to release the boot. A lower DIN makes it easier to release. A high DIN setting also requires more force to engage the binding when you step in.

For most, this measurement is calculated by the ski-shop kid who just tuned your skis. He will consider your height, weight, age, and skiing ability before setting them to a number that virtually guarantees that you will release too easily because, obviously, you are old. Anyone as old as the shop kid’s father or maybe grandfather can’t possibly ski well enough to warrant a high DIN. If you’ve been skiing as long as I have, you know your number, and as soon as you leave the shop, you lay the skis on the tailgate, slot a screwdriver into the DIN adjustment, and twirl it until the little indicator line aligns with it. I’ve always kept my DIN relatively high because a binding that doesn’t release in a fall may result in a broken leg or a blown knee, but one that releases too easily in the wrong place can result in far worse.

I used to ski in places like that. Places that didn’t have names like Chickdee.

I really should unwind the DIN to allow for the version of myself that is newly addled by the aftermarket knees, but there’s a machismo component to a high DIN that I am unable to shrug off. New knees or not, there’s a limit to the level of maturity to which I am capable of achieving. With the DINs five clicks too high for Chickadee, I push off.

“In the back seat” is how skiers who descend the slope with their weight on the heels of their boots are described. This posture pressures the back of the ski and provides only skidded, poorly controlled turns. I am “in the trunk,” which is actually not a phrase that is commonplace in skiing vernacular, but does aptly describe how I feel. This is because I am scared and instinctively moving away from the thing I fear: the slope in front of me. Controlling your descent on skis is an exercise in paradox: you must move toward the thing that scares you in order to avoid it, and control your descent.

It makes more sense when you’re talking about an extreme skier on a fifty-five-degree slope in Chamonix, which is why no one has ever described the challenge of skiing down Chickadee in these terms—snippets of standard instruction heard on this hill are much more likely to contain “pizza” than “paradox”—but this is a day for firsts.

“Pressure the tongue of your boot” is a phrase that is also not likely to be heard on this twelve-degree slope, but it’s precisely what’s needed from Mister New Knees. This entails moving my weight forward, onto the balls of my feet, and squarely over the titanium knees.

Months of pain and patience, sleepless nights and endlessly anxious days, have led to this moment. Of course, there have been many other measurements of progress—the range of motion degrees and pressure-plate pounds per square inch—but success in this activity is the only one that matters to me. If I can’t ski, this will have been an abysmal, costly, and painful failure.

No pressure.

And then something happens over which I have no control: My body is moving, and my thoughts stop churning.

I feel the press of shin against the boot, and apparently, the ski feels it too because it is turning. Pole plant punctuating transition, I’m turning on the other side too. Several more and I’m at the base of the run, sliding through the maze and onto the chair, which hangs at the proper height to accommodate the average six-year-old, low enough to stretch my quads as I sink onto it painfully.

You’d be forgiven for concluding that I am exaggerating the drama of those first turns and the immense relief I feel as I ride up the Chickadee Chairlift—I’ve skied for fifty-plus years, after all—and for that reason, I won’t tell you about the bliss of just gazing up at Mount Superior and the slight mountain breeze with its clean taste of possibility. I will instead scrub forward on our timeline to my third run down an intermediate run from the more sportily named Gadzoom Chairlift. The run is icy, but a patch near the edge of the trail has some loose, granular snow. As I head toward that strip, I hand my phone to my son and ask him to film me.

He's easily able to keep pace—annoyingly effortless in a flying wedge—as he points the phone in my direction. I’m making turns now, but to say I feel as rusty as a Paul-Revere-era cemetery gate would be a disservice to cemetery gates, Paul Revere, and all the many dead laid beneath Bunker Hill. Odd that in moments of face-slapping mortality, my mind drifts back to the field trips of a Beantown youth, but fear and shame cultivate their own mischief.

Motivated by the camera and my kid’s curious gaze, I do my best to find rhythm. Envisioning my legs moving with the steady sweep of some iconic, pyramid-shaped metronome, I achieve only tick, tock, tock, slide, tick, eesh, tock, shit, tick, fuck, tock. I’m a grandfather clock with Alzheimer’s.

With my knees as uncomfortable as my own metaphors, we’ll fast-forward again, not to another slope, but to the tailgate of my pickup truck, overlooking the Chickadee run. Ski boots dangling, swinging a natural if not metronomic rhythm, the movement is notable not for the smooth sweep, but for the way they move without pain.

I hold a long-necked bottle up to my son’s.

I’m back, baby, is the thought that emerges in my head, but I do not grant it vocalization because I am really not back. I’m not the skier I was, and I do not want to claim, even for a moment, that I am. And so the toast goes unsaid, both of us content with the simple clink.

And yet, as I savor the celebratory libation, there is something in the thought that is accurate. It will come to me an hour later, courtesy of my friend Tom, who is also going through double knee replacement. We’re blabbing on the cell phone, sharing our pains and progress as we’ve done these last five months. I’ve listened to his woes and he’s heard mine. Today is different, however, as I’ve described the immense sense of satisfaction, the joy of the tailgate moment. I’ve also told him that I’ve just sent a thank-you text along with the first-day-back-on-skis video to my surgeon, Dr. Eric Heiden.

That’s the least you can do, says Tom. He only gave you your life back.

I am sure I had a response to this statement, but I cannot remember what it would’ve been. Whatever it was, I’m sure it failed to convey my very real gratitude.