One of the dads who volunteers alongside me as a ski chaperone for my kids’ school refuses to wear a helmet. Whenever the kids ask him about it he says, “I grew up skiing without a helmet and I feel way more free this way!” I feel like it’s a really crappy move. Like, parents of students who don’t ski are trusting us to take them up and all over the mountain in the afternoons after morning lessons and to generally be leaders and role models for their kids. Even parents who do ski are all trusting each other – the kids branch off into level-appropriate groups and 1-2 parents ski with each group, so you’re often not with your own child. We’re all taking care of each other’s kids here. I also bristle because this guy always jumps in to take the “daredevil” group, doesn’t rotate into the volunteer slots like everyone else but just is like “oh well they’re going on the stuff I prefer skiing” (like, do I REALLY want to do 2 hours of laps on the same three green circles? Is that what I’d do if I were skiing alone? No! but I’m chaperoning some kids at their comfort level! This isn’t just about what I want to do!) and then, to top it off, kind of eggs the kids on with machismo crap. My son skies in that group a lot and he told me that one of the kids got to the top edge of a steep double black and then noped out and said, “this slope is not for me right now,” which I think is very responsible! It must have been very hard for that kid to break away from his peer group and decline to go on something he legitimately felt was too scary for him! And the dad responded, “You can’t judge a slope from the top. You don’t really know how it is until you try it.” I was livid when I heard that. Like that could be an appropriate thing to say in some situations but in a free-ski with a group of friends, it just does not feel like the right kind of comment.
I spent this whole season feeling like I want to say something to the school about this guy, with his bravado and his borderline-evangelical preference for skiing helmet-free. He just really gets on my nerves with that ####. You know what, I didn’t grow up skiing in a helmet either! No one wore a helmet when I was a kid! We also drove the six hours to Vermont with the back seats of the car folded down, literally laying in sleeping bags in the back of the car – not a seatbelt among us. We change things when there’s a good reason to. I don’t really care if he wears a helmet or not, just like I don’t really care if he wears a seatbelt, but I do care about him talking up his preference for helmet-free skiing to a bunch of kids.
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