On more than one occasion I’ve been asked if I am from “the industry” or if I’m just “some guy” who started a blog. The answer, in its simplest form, is the latter. But on this fine Labor Day, I figured I would share my story from the one very short winter I spent in something like “the industry.”

I went to college in the middle of Pennsylvania, and while that is certainly a strange place for a skier to attend school, the decision had partially been made due to this school’s proximity to what we’ll call a ski hill. It was and is a lovely little hill and I had the good fortune of showing up in the first year that they were hiring a dedicated park crew to tend to the approximate 200 linear yards of terrain park (newly renamed from “snowboard park”). I showed up at the job fair that any self-respecting regional ski hill has each October and applied for Park Crew. The man running the show was a short little fellow with a soul patch on his chin who had apparently been chosen due to family relations and the fact that his well-connected (in the very local sense) aunt had probably “seen him snowboard once.” He was a nice enough character who was “stoked to have a skier” on board and I got the job.

At this point I think I need to be clear that when I said 200 linear yards, I wasn’t under-selling the park space. What had in its previous life been a connector between the “black diamond” trail and a mellower path, had been refashioned into a one jump and approximately 5 feature affair. The job involved a small amount of shovel work, but the primary task was to sit in a hut that had plexiglass windows on four sides and watch. Just, watch. My vigilance served the dual purpose of being there to notify ski patrol if anyone got hurt, and to act as the doorman, but in this case I wasn’t keeping uglies out of a club, I was keeping rental skis out of the park. It was cold, lonely, and monotonous work. I can’t remember kicking anyone out for using rentals, and no one got hurt severely enough to require ski patrol (bummer). To my great benefit, the employment model of paying park crew while they’re physically shoveling and otherwise just cramming them into some hut at the base hadn’t made its way to central PA yet.

The job was boring, but as college part-time gigs go, it was pretty excellent. I logged lots of time on what were perfectly good rails for their time, and I got to know all the local heroes and regulars at my new shred hill. However, all good things must end, and my time at the fringes of “the industry” did not last long. My journey came to an end on one of those black-trash-bag-over-the-jacket sleety nights that happen so often during mid-Atlantic winters. The place was deserted as you might expect and I wasn’t too eager to venture out of the tiny hut where I was dry-ish. The rain was freezing up on the windows and forming that rippled pattern that looks like 1970’s coffee table glass. Out of what I would later try to explain as concern for my diminishing visibility of the park, but was really just crushing boredom, I pulled my hood over my head, grabbed a hammer that was in the hut and went outside. It seemed logical at the time that if I tapped the glass softly enough it would crack the ice and leave the window in tact. Perhaps hours of sitting alone in a hut had thrown off my judgment, but I could not have been more wrong. With one swing, the hammer went right through the corner of the window and smashed out a nice chunk of very cold plexiglass.

My first reaction was to look around to make sure no one saw me, and luckily the place remained deserted. I then tried to prop the largest shard back into the corner of the window frame. I got it to sit there, but I can’t exactly say that it made a very convincing unbroken window. I said nothing to no one and left at the end of my shift. As you might imagine, it wasn’t very difficult for them to realize that the window hadn’t been broken earlier in the day, and I had been the only one sitting in the hut for the last 8 hours of the night. I was confronted by the aforementioned “snowboarder” and as often happens to me, I failed to come up with a quick lie. I told something like the truth and tried to explain that I was just trying to increase my visibility but the window must have been weak from all the ice.

I was never given another shift and it was recommended to me that I apply for a spot in the rental shop at the next job fair. I did, and as it turns out, it is a lot warmer and drier in there. Happy Labor Day everybody!