One day when I was five years old and up at Cannon by myself, I lost a mitten.  It was cold, my nose was snotty – I might have been crying.  I had a way of making my needs known.  John led me down to the lost and found, where we rescued an old mitten from the box and my hand from severe frostbite.  I was appreciative in a five-year-old’s way.  I said thanks, stopped sniffling, and headed back outside to chase down John’s team and show them how to ski.

John’s interest in me didn’t end there.  When I began racing a few years later, I saw him a lot – sometimes as a spectator, sometimes as a scout, sometimes as a judge.  He was always supportive, and suitably impressed by my velocity.  By the time I got to CVA, we hadn’t seen each other in a while, but we were more than casually acquainted.

This was around the time I’d been jettisoned from the Franconia ski team.  A friend of mine, Kate Bishop, was attending CVA, and John asked her one day what had happened to me.   He hadn’t seen my name in recent race results. 

John pictured me languishing without direction, but by that time I was plenty busy, and back on the ski team.  Still, John had it in his mind that to be noticed by the right people, I needed to hook up with something sanctioned and quantified.  He also remembered that I could ski like a house on fire before I was old enough to tie my shoes.

He asked Patty to call my mother and suggest that I come over to CVA for an interview.  Jo was dismissive at first, telling John that there was no way she could swing the tuition.  John reassured her that if I was accepted, he would find a way to help pay the freight. 

CVA is located in Carrabassett Valley, Maine, at the bottom of the access road to Sugarloaf/USA.  The school is actually closer to the mountain than my house was to Cannon.  Sugarloaf has a quad lift and more ski space than Cannon, as well as a dedicated competition run for CVA students, including a downhill and super-G course. 

My first semester at CVA, in the winter of 1991, I couldn’t swing the room, board and tuition, so John Ritzo got creative.  There was a day student named Sam Andersen; he and his brother, Woody, and mother, Paula, lived in a cabin a mile into the woods.  That’s a Formula One drag strip deeper into the forest than we were bivouacked back in Franconia.  Paula had told John that if ever there was a deserving student who needed a place to live, she’d be happy to take him in.  Since the Andersen’s homestead was rustic like Turtle Ridge, John put the problem and the solution together quickly, hooked me up, and I moved in.  And there was the synchronicity of names; his brother had the same name as my dad, Woody, and my real first name is Samuel.  So it seemed meant to be.

Paula didn’t charge me anything – she’s a generous person, a former teacher who cares deeply about kids, and she wanted to help.  She also worked me harder than Jo ever managed to.

In the woods with the Andersens, I lived the same bucolic life I was accustomed to, and I knew the drill well.  Getting to school meant snowmobiling the mile into Kingfield every morning in the winter (mountain biking in the warmer months), then catching a ride the rest of the way to school.  The Ritzos lived in town, so John often gave us a lift.  Some days we’d just hitchhike.

At the end of the day – after classes, after training, and after any additional academic work we had to do at the school, such as in the computer lab – we did the same thing in reverse.  Catch a lift to John’s, hop on a snowmobile, and head home through the forest. 

We always had a lot of homework to do, at least a couple hours’ worth a night – CVA is, after all, a college preparatory school.  After CVA, Sam went to Bates College in Lewiston, Maine; he’s now a stockbroker on Wall Street.  I understand that the school has ramped up its academics even more since I left, which is a good thing because there are only a handful of new spots on the U.S. Ski Team every year.

Once we were home at night – and home was every bit as beautiful as Tamarack – before we could hit the books, we had to hit the woodpile (some things never change), then help with dinner, and then help clean up (there are no automatic dishwashers a mile deep in to the woods, not to mention plumbing or electricity).  At about eight-thirty in the evening, we started our homework, reading and writing by kerosene lamps.

By now my race results weren’t so hot, so much to my surprise they wanted me to become a snowboarder.  Needless to say I wasn’t keen on this idea.  They tempted me with equipment deals (at the time, my best equipment hookup was a two-for-one deal with K2), but I wasn’t buying it.  I was a ski racer.

I’m not saying I’d never been on a snowboard; in fact, I was pretty hot.  That’s why they were on me to switch.  At the end of the season I decided to enter a snowboard race against the best specialists in the Northeast, and I came in second.  But despite the fact that Karl Schranz called me a snowboarder on skis, boarding just didn’t appeal to me.

Not that I regret my brief fling with snowboarders – they showed me the beauty of the parabolic cut and gave me the idea for the shaped racing ski.  Way back when we were kids, Noah and I tried to figure out how to ski on two snowboards.  It wasn’t until I pressed George Tormey, a K2 rep, for a shaped prototype that I actually skied on two skinny snowboards.  It was a revelation, like the difference between a $99 Kmart bike and an $8,000 handmade mountain rocket.

That next summer, between my freshman and sophomore years at CVA, my uncle Mike gave me more hours on the job on NetCo so I’d have more money for school, plus a dollar bonus for every hour I worked that summer.   It still wasn’t enough, so he lent me the difference.  And along with gifts from Peg, Mickey and Marge Libby, and others, I got there with five bucks in my pocket.  CVA managed to find me a room in the dorm in the spring of tenth grade, and life was sweet.  The sun was out, the crocuses were up, and I was number one on the tennis team.  Then I won the state tennis championships, which was sort of like being the best breakfast cook at a supper club, but it made me feel partially compensated for all the falling I’d done racing that winter. 

My sophomore year was smoother, less of a shock to the system than before.  I decided that CVA was where I wanted to be, and that I was going to do whatever was necessary to stay there.  But my skiing was still iffy.  Despite growing four inches that year, I was still skinny and small, no match for most of CVA’s skiers.  Some excellent racers were there then; Forest Carey, Josh Silver, and Josh Pike, to name a few – guys who were good.

Never mind stacking up against them; I wasn’t even good for my age group.  In terms of results, the skiers at CVA were way above my level.  These were serious kid’s who’d listened to their coaches and done what they were told for years.  As a result, they were technically excellent skiers, exemplars of a certain classic style.  I, on the other hand, was blazing my own trail and hadn’t gotten far yet.

I’d bulked up a bit over the summer before my junior year, and I’d gotten much stronger.  I was heavy into leg presses in those days.  But I was still under six feet, and only 165 pounds.  Six years later, I was six foot two, 215 pounds, which means my body mass increased by 30 percent during that time.  Those were my Wonder Bread years.

My gear was coming together then, too; I was starting to get better equipment from K2, my ski sponsor, and it showed in my results.  A guy I’d known from childhood, Todd Simones, and I skied some Eastern Cup races that year. He trained down in Waterville Valley.  I got a first and second that day at Loon, and Todd got a first and second too.  I’d never been so evenly matched with anyone in my life.  Years later, Todd showed up as a student at CVA. He and his brother Tyler were hot racers, big strong kids, good guys with nice gear.

That winter, I won the 1994 Maine Alpine Racing Association (MARA) slalom championship, which wasn’t like bagging an FIS race in Europe, but it wasn’t bad.

The same year, Paul Fremont-Smith, who’s a great benefactor to American ski racing in general and to me in particular, gave me some money to go to Europe for some FIS races.  Talk about an eye-opener.  I’d never been anyplace where ski racing was an A-list event.  In general, we got smoked so bad in Europe that it sent us back to school with renewed vigor to train to win.  It never occurred to us to say, Hey, these guys are killing us, maybe we ought to start studying for the SATs.  We were stoked by seeing how good you can get.  We wanted to be the best.

I played soccer at CVA, too.  We had a coach, but I was the de facto; out on the field, I ran the show.  Soccer is a fast sport and needs somebody on the pitch calling the shots.  I’d been apprenticing at Mike’s soccer camp since I was a ten year’s old, and playing in the men’s North Country league since I was a kid, too.  I knew plenty about how to get the ball down the field.

That was a good soccer team.  We also played hockey – serious hockey, not to mention world-class wally-ball.  Naturally, I continued to play tennis.  And intramural basketball.  I bet CVA was the only ski academy in the world with four guys who could stuff the ball.

I grew pretty attached to the people around me.  It was a tight group of friends.  I’d known Worm (my roommate) since we’d skied PeeWees against each other.   The rest of us, including Kirsten Clark, were like a ski posse in the Great White North, but we left competition on the mountain, and never let that be a wedge between us personally.  To lord your talent or success over anyone, especially a friend, is as lame as it gets.  We had respect for one another.

Chip Cochrane was a great coach, as well as my academic advisor; he ran a shuttle-diplomacy mission for me when I stepped on people’s toes one too many times.  When he first met me, I was a kid claiming a new technique that required a lot of falling and training, and a lot of DNFs in races.  Right, kid, whatever you say.  It was not the stuff that makes coaches happy.  But he could see that I was different, that I didn’t want to be Tomba or Stenmark, as everyone else  did – I wanted people to mention my name in the same breath with theirs someday.  I was an innovator and a pain in the......    These, in my mind, are inseparable traits.