On Finitiation
The April sun siphons the snow. The lifts at Breck still spin, but many fly empty. Mud creeps into the corners of the parking lot. Birdsong, everywhere. Ski school slogs on as families still trickle in—first-timers on late spring breaks, visiting from Georgia, from Mexico City. Every year, the rhythm of regional calendars repeats, signaling a familiar decrescendo.
A patroller with nothing to do chats with me about his rafting plans—his oar frame’s already strapped to the trailer, dry bags ready. Rock music blasts in the locker room—not just motivation, but the soundtrack of an ending, the anthem of a skeleton crew holding things together in the final days. When we clear out our lockers in a week, it’ll be for the last time.
“Soon, no one will ever park in this lot again,” reflects one of my colleagues. We’re not supposed to park up there; employees are relegated to the lot at the bottom of the gondola. But those who understand the ins and outs of this place know the gate code and when to take their chances. “Hard to believe this mud pit’s gonna be a five-star hotel.”
The bulldozers lie in wait with the mountain bikes, ready to roll in as soon as the signal is given.
“It’s for the best,” responds another. “I hear there’s asbestos in these walls.”
Ski school mirrors regular school more than you might expect—cyclical in nature, filled with hierarchies, assessments, and growth spurts. Maybe that says something about those who consign their lives to it. Peter Pans and Wendys hesitant to grow all the way up. Like school, it ends not with a bang, but with a soft, bittersweet fizzle. Closing day, etched in nostalgia’s glaze, arrives like it always does: a season gone by, never to return in quite the same way. Even if we all come back a little older and wiser next November, with sun-chapped cheeks and summer stories in our pockets, it won’t ever be exactly the same.
In its final approach, the end of ski season feels, in its own quiet way, like the end. All the people you’ve booted up alongside each morning, the shuffle up the back hill behind the admin building, the terrible dad jokes traded during line-up—these rituals dissolve with the melting snow. You hang up your gear, and your community scatters.
“What do instructors do in the off-season?” guests often ask me on the chairlift, and it reminds me of the old joke: “Q: Where do the moguls go in summertime? A: We take them inside, of course.”
But instructors are not fictitious moguls who simply melt or get put in storage til we’re needed again. Object permanence of human beings exists, so there’s no single answer. Some instructors stay, finding work as zipline guides or mini-golf overseers when the resort reboots in late June. Others return to their hometowns or vanish into new chapters entirely. Many feel the abrupt silence keenly—the hum of full-time work disappearing like a ski popping off mid-run. One moment you're flying; the next, you're flailing in slow-motion suspension, cartoon-like, just before the fall. Then you crash. No crowd around to laugh or lend a hand. Just you, alone, suddenly still.
At home, it’s quiet. That first week or two is entirely delicious. You swap the uniform for your own clothes. You do all the laundry for the first time in months, file your taxes, put on sandals, and your feet breathe. Then boredom creeps in.
That used to be me. My first few seasons, the sudden stillness jarred me. I’d go back to the Catskills, procrastinate cleaning the remnants of Airbnb guests from my house, vacuum the cobwebs from writing projects abandoned in October, binge-watch everything I’d missed, and walk my dog for longer and longer stretches, finding purpose in her focused pursuit of unseen scents. I slowed down. It felt like stepping out of one life and into another—disjointed, but doable.
And yet, each year, the transition wore on me more. It became harder, not easier, to inhabit two very different versions of myself. My outside career started to feel like a chairlift to nowhere—or worse, one that stops mid-air, no ski patrol en route to belay you to solid ground.
But last summer, something changed. I let go of the illusion that I could maintain two lives: the mountain and the city, ski school and copywriting. I realized I was no longer a tourist in this outside life—I wasn’t just a good ski instructor because I ski well. I was a good ski instructor because I’m an instructor.
I began teaching kayaking—first in playful whitewater, helping nervous beginners wet exit for the first time in the murk of the gravel pond at Chatfield State Park. When I picked up a paddle and peeled out into the river’s current with a group of nervous nellies bobbing along behind me, I was suddenly teaching again. The me I am on skis did not vanish with my employee discount; the roles weren’t separate after all. When June arrived, I was no longer wandering around without a compass through life’s peaks and valleys—I was deliberately moving in a continuous flow, coexisting with nature’s rhythm, not against it.
Ski season isn’t supposed to last forever. Feet need freedom. Bones need warmth. Bases need summer wax. While I’ve never chased winter to the Southern Hemisphere, I have learned to glide with it into the rivers. And now, onwards to the sea.
When the snow slushes thick on the lower mountain and that familiar ache of endings tugs at my heart, I remind myself: the snow doesn’t disappear. It transforms. Molecule by molecule, it loosens its grip on the slopes and makes its way to the clouds and streams. Eventually, those streams find rivers that join the sea.
This summer, I won’t be returning to the river. I’ll be eddying out beyond it—guiding sea kayaking trips along the Maine coast. The stout whitewater boat becomes a long, sleek sea kayak. I’ll take compass bearings to pine-fringed islands, unleash my dog on tidal flats, cook over driftwood fires, tow tired guests through fog, and pull panicked swimmers back into their boats. There will be spring tides, ticks galore, porpoises in the mist, lobstermen to dodge, and the haunting call of loons echoing across the morning bays. I’ll struggle. I’ll grow.
It’s tempting fall back on the cliché that every end is a beginning. But I prefer what one of my ski trainers calls the “finitiation”—that fluid part of the turn where the apex curls back on itself, and you can’t quite pinpoint where one turn phase ends and the next begins.
Snow, after all, is just water. And water, as every first grader knows, has three states. Whether frozen or flowing, my life makes the most sense when I let it lead me.
The end of the ski season is the beginning of the kayak season. Finitiation, then, is just the runoff to another rhythm. We launch. We land. We launch again. Not a stop. Not a start. Just one stroke, leading into the next.