AFFINITY

This is a love story but it isn’t. It is more.

The coast was where he grew up. Sea level. He spent summers checking out the beach before going for the mid morning swim. He knew how to read the surf, find the rip. He knew to stay out of the sun during the middle of day, to find a book or a card game to fill in the noon hours. 

Without mercy he would round us up for a game of beach cricket. The dog ecstatic to fetch, or better still, catch him out. It would then be time for another late swim followed by an after dinner walk or a spotlight possum hunt. 

He was always the colour of dark honey, except for the where he drew smiley faces on his stomach with sun block out. He lived in board shorts and bare feet and an occasional tee shirt. For him to forgo summer was unthinkable.

At school he was into anything that was sport. Some had suspicions that the days off, representing the school, were the real attraction. There may have been something to that but his enthusiasm was genuine, his pleasure in physical exertion honest. 

Football was his choice of winter sport. Cricket was his summer sport. There was momentary pride, elation and satisfaction in the inevitable trophies and medallions gathered. It was almost too easy.

His introduction to skiing began when he was six years of age. He had a day of snow play and basic instruction. He complained of the cold. 

His next journey to the mountains was ten years later, a family holiday in New Zealand. He was the last one in for lunch, his beanie-less hair dripping as it unfroze, over the meal table. He had no real style but was on black runs by day three. He always had one more last run to do. He had left us more seasoned skiers well behind by the end of the week. Another sport conquered. No one thought anything more of it.

He ventured to Japan for a skiing holiday three years later, non-skiing girlfriend in tow. A break, before he started University and prepared for a real job, he professed. He was a single man not long after returning. 

As a poor starving student he saved his pennies for a return trip to New Zealand. A new girlfriend was meeting him over there. He came home girlfriendless but his only fretfulness was how he could afford new ski boots and skis. 

The next winter he stopped playing club footy, his affiliation appropriated by the University Ski Club. He still spent summer playing cricket. Any chance of getting to the beach he grabbed, relishing the sea and salt air.

He finished his University course, received his Masters degree. He fancied a three-month ski instructors school in France. I didn’t see it for what it was. A break I thought, before finding well-paid employment. Nothing more than a holiday, a chance to enjoy a sport more by being better trained. He had to sell most of his worldly possessions to fund the trip; his car, desk and bed. The surf board he kept.

He returned from France, the other side of the world, in time for our winter. He had a ski instructor’s ticket and he was going to use it. He had lined up a job for the snow season here. He was fixated on training for his next level of ski instructing. He wanted to give it a go, see how it went. Gone was another girlfriend who had waited for him to come home. She did not ski. He weathered our consternation. He went up the mountain.

By the time he finished that season here he had his higher qualification; and a ski-instructing contract for Japan. He would see little of our coming summer. He managed to play a couple of games of cricket with his club but then he was gone. Still, I thought, it was more the travel opportunity that appealed; the skiing was only a bonus.

That year was the first Christmas he missed. We had to put the cricket ball catching old dog down not long after he left. Summer wasn’t the same. I feared for him. I was yet to realise how lucky he was, how rare his fate was to be.

He came home from Japan with a new girlfriend. She too grew up by the seaside. She too is a ski instructor. The same bug has clearly bitten them both. Still, I think it is just an adventure, a thing you do before you grow up, not a real way of life. It will not last. But I was wrong. 

So now, some years later, this is the way of it. They ache for summer, but two winters a year is hardly enough for them. The only material possessions they own are several sets of skis, boots, phones, extensive winter wardrobes and passports.

They come home in early, or late, summer. Home is were they rest, physically. They both hunger for the beach, to get some sun and salt on the skin, but they are soon restless. It is unnerving to watch them mentally leave us as the days go on.

Already they smell the blizzard, anticipate the stinging cold and hear their ski edges bite. They have another family to go to, deposited amongst the ski peaks on both sides of the world. They count down the days until they can return, almost as soon as they leave.

I worry no more about him. He has a real job, although he hardly works a day. Truly, we are the worry now – left, as we are, to struggle with our envy.

So it is a love story but it isn’t. It is more. Between each other, with the mountains and the snow, this is not love. It is an affinity. An affinity few of us ever find, either with places or people. They have both.