I’ve been a ski patroller at Gore Mountain, in North Creek, for more than 20 years, and in that time I’ve seen a lot of change, more trails, more lifts and more skiers, so much so that Gore now ranks as one of the biggest in the East and is a blast to ski. But no matter how much more Gore I get, it will never be as fun as my first year there, when I was a Stooge who couldn’t ski, and Bean Dip gave me a job on top of the world.
In the spring of 2001, I escaped New York City for a small town in the Adirondacks. I’d been a paramedic for 12 years in the city, and I wanted to get as far from those streets as I could. Moving to North Creek was like moving to Fiji. But on the morning of September 11, I watched the planes hit the World Trade Center. I got that familiar feeling in my chest, the way I used to after a terrible ambulance call, squeezed with dread. The next day I joined the Johnsburg Emergency Squad.
I soon discovered that to be a paramedic in Johnsburg means frequent calls to Gore. Every weekend we’d back our ambulance to the doors of Base First Aid and load them in. The nurse at the Base was Ellen Eager, a former RN from Brooklyn who terrified the local paramedics. She was an excellent nurse and protected her patients ferociously. I understood Ellen—I grew up with Brooklyn nurses. What I did not understand was the man who was often standing next to Ellen—tall and thin, with a polo shirt and fiery bandanna, like a preppy pirate. He spoke theatrically about the most random things. We’d be setting someone’s ankle and he’d tell me about bodies in the Ganges, or the red light districts of Amsterdam. “Who is that guy?” I asked my driver, who knew everyone. “That’s Bean Dip,” my driver said, “he’s the patrol director.”
I’d skied only six times in my life, and never at Gore, but after taking care of enough injuries at the Base I decided it was time to see for myself what all the trauma was about. I got off the top of the lift and there was Bean Dip, aka Mark Anderson, leaning out the window of a small cabin with a sign that said Saddle Ski Patrol. He was shouting into a megaphone, words I couldn’t hear. Other patrollers sat outside in the sun, leaning back on crooked dining room chairs. Beanie saw me and waved me over, showing me what he was reading: Mao’s Little Red Book. This is all you need to know, he said, and then went back to shouting in the megaphone. I fell on nearly every trail that day and had so much fun that a week later I was in line at the ticket booth, waiting to buy a pass for my family. There was Bean Dip again, running up to me as if I was injured.
“What are you doing here?” he said. “You’re a paramedic, you don’t pay.”
“But I need passes for my kids too.”
He thought for a moment. “I tell you what,” he said. “We’ll put you on ski patrol.”
“But I can’t ski.”
“We’ll teach you,” he said.
The following Monday I signed a few forms and was given a red jacket with a white cross on the back and stains on the sleeves that might have been blood. Bean Dip told me I was to give first aid where needed, but never should I ski down with a sled. He put me on the gondola and told me to report to Bear Patrol and see Davey Dog. (Back then there were three patrol stations, each on different parts of the mountain.)
The Bear Mountain ski-patrol station was a dilapidated trailer with five men sitting around a table. When I told them Bean Dip had hired me, they grew suspicious, and when they found out I’d skied only seven times in my life they shook their heads in dismay. I felt bad for them. These were serious people, engineers and contractors. I tried to tell them what Beanie had told me, that he was hiring a team of medical experts, that it would be the best team in the country. Davey Dog told me to report to Saddle Patrol.
I quickly discovered that the ski patrol at Gore was divided into two factions. There was Davey Dog and those men I’d seen at Bear, men who loved to ski but believed in boundaries. And then there was Bean Dip’s group, who Davey Dog called The Stooges, who had no boundaries. I didn’t want to be a Stooge. It was bad enough that I couldn’t ski.
But Beanie was always requesting me to help him with his “special projects.” “Send me Connelly,” he would say, and I’d get up from my chair at Bear, put on my patrol jacket and first-aid pack and head out the door. “Good luck with that,” Davey Dog would say. These projects might begin as routine chores, like raising tower pads or marking hazards, but pretty soon we’d be skiing in areas where I wasn’t supposed to be, in pursuit of things we rarely attained. Typical missions might take hours, and when Bean Dip wasn’t spreading his merry mayhem to the public, he was regaling me with stories of growing up in foreign cities, the son of a CIA agent. His time in India, in particular, was the source of many adventures, with at least one international incident that required rescue by the Air Force.
At the end of our forays he’d burst into the patrol hut and send everyone out on chores. Then he’d lean back in the dispatcher’s chair and turn up the music. In my memory it’s always The Doors.
A month after I started working at Gore, I called Bear on the radio, asking them to send me a caution sign for Quicksilver Trail. What I got in reply was Davey Dog’s near perfect imitation of Curly Howard’s laugh, made famous on The Three Stooges shorts. I was officially a Stooge. Beanie said it was time for my graduation and he and his Stooge lieutenant Geoff Merrett led me to the summit. We took off our skis on the Upper Steilhang Trail and hiked through the snow to the fire tower. The final step of my patrol orientation was to climb to the top.
The steps were covered in an inch of glare ice, the railings too. On the top floor the roof was gone and I climbed onto the slick table and stood and raised my arms and head into the wind, higher than anything around me. Far below me I heard Beanie’s voice shouting up, “I gave you a job on top of the world.”
The men of Bear were serious about all aspects of patrol, but especially when it came to catching poachers—people skiing closed trails. They considered the Stooges to be very lazy in this area. One day in February, Beanie determined that we needed to make an example of someone. “We need justice,” he said, “but it must be fair.” He cleared out Saddle Patrol and announced the Gore court in session. He sat in his judge’s seat. “Bailiff,” he yelled, “bring in the accused.” Geoff Merrett led a trembling teenager into the room. He sat the boy on the stand and had him read the oath. I was the appointed defense attorney for the case, and I did my best with the evidence given. It didn’t matter. The verdict was guilty. In a long and meandering judgment, Beanie told the young man that once we start allowing skiers to duck ropes the next thing you know we’re no different than Hunter Mountain, where they have regular knife fights and shootouts. He finished by giving the teenager a stern warning never to visit this court again, and sent him back out to ski.
Beanie had made it seem like hiring patrollers who couldn’t ski was unusual. The truth was, it had been done once before, in 1976, when Beanie himself was hired. “I tell you what,” was how Beanie began every story, “just got out of college and was seeing this divorcée in North Creek who didn’t want me to take that job at the Singer Factory. She said I should join the patrol at Gore, that all I needed was a letter from a state official. Bob Kahn was the patrol director then, he didn’t want to hire me, I didn’t know how to ski, but his hands were tied: I had a letter from Patrick Moynihan, the US senator whose daughter I used to hang out with when I lived in New Delhi.”
Some patrollers tried to teach me to ski, others completely avoided me. Once, without thinking, Beanie asked Rick Beardsley to give me a lesson. Beardsley was a Stooge who only skied in the woods, usually on streambeds and off boulders. You’d see him walking along roadsides, skis in hand, beard jutted with branches. “Come inside,” Beardsley smiled, and vanished into the woods. Before I could follow, I heard Beanie yelling behind me, “Stop! Stop! You can’t go in there. You’ll be killed!”
One morning Beanie called for me to meet him on the Rumor Trail, arguably the steepest in the East. I found him waiting for me at the top. “It’s just been groomed,” he said. “You won’t have another chance like this. Let’s go.” He disappeared over the edge. I tried to follow his path and began falling almost immediately, pinwheeling for what must have been a hundred yards. Beanie skied up to me. “Spectacular,” he said. “Let’s try something else.”
Despite my skiing disabilities, I brought other skills to the job. I’d been a paramedic in midtown Manhattan for 12 years and I was used to taking care of people in strange places. To me the Sunway Trail on a busy Saturday was just a tilted and slippery 42nd Street. Even those patrollers who wouldn’t want to be seen skiing with me got used to calling me for the emergencies.
Beanie ran many of those accidents with me. He was the most chaotic person I’ve ever met, but in a crisis, he became the calmest person. It was as if all the craziness he brought into this crazy business—hoisting people up thousands of feet to send them hurtling down on thin sticks—was just a kind of practicing, preparing for when he had to take charge and make quick and vital decisions, which he did many times a day, and he was really good at it.
That year the patrol banquet, a fancy dinner for the patrollers and their families, was held at the Glens Falls Country Club. Awards were handed out, speeches were made. I was given the Faceplant of the Year award for my fall on Rumor. I thanked everyone for putting up with my terrible skiing. “I can’t ski,” I said, “but I can fall.”
The final day of the season took place on Easter Sunday. At Gore there’s a sunrise service and then an Easter Egg Hunt. Kids gather at the base of the mountain and await the Egg Man to ski down and start the hunt. I brought my two boys, then three and five years old. “We’re waiting for the Egg Man,” announced Gore’s marketing director, Emily Stanton, who wore a rabbit costume and skipped through the crowd. “And here he comes!” My boys and I looked up to see Bean Dip skiing toward us, the top half of his head shrouded in a sinister looking eggshell, cracked at the base, with two tiny holes dug out for eyes. He took off his skis and prowled through the mass of seated children. I looked at the faces of the parents, a mix of bewilderment and terror. The kids loved him.
Today the Egg Man is retired. He spends much of his time at his cabin in Blue Mountain Lake, a skull and crossbones marking the entrance. Davey Dog is long gone and so are the Stooges. No more kangaroo courts or fire-tower initiations. No more blasting “Light My Fire” or Faceplant of the Year awards. That winter, some 20 years ago, feels like it happened someplace else. These days Gore Mountain Ski Patrol is a respectable and professional group. I work beside lawyers and doctors, contractors and engineers, some of the best and most competent people I know.
I’m a much better skier now. I love being the first one to the summit. Some mornings there’s a layer of clouds below me, with just the islands of the surrounding peaks poking through. When the skiers come, they quickly ski off any fresh snow and the middles of the trails turn slick. But there’s usually some snow to be found on the sides, and that’s where I go, skiing right to the edge and back, to the edge and back.
Joe Connelly’s first novel Bringing out the Dead was made into a film starring Nicolas Cage, directed by Martin Scorsese.
