"Dreaming of a Colder Day" By Joshua Ceazan

But, like an adolescent boy clinging to the wettest of his pubescent dreams, a ski-freak always seems to remember those visions dealing with his most sacred of passions. The truth be told, some real life ski experiences are most accurately described as an intermeshing of fantasy and reality. Highlights from these days tend to be replayed in the skier's psyche like a skipping record, reminding us over and over again what life is worth living for.

Back to real time-hypothetically it is nearing mid-day and you are in an office or campus library somewhere, surfing the computer's internet. Maybe the word "surfing" triggered it, but all of a sudden, your pulse quickens as you have just remembered last night's playground and are now pressing the replay button in your brain a couple hundred times. Surfing the pleasure memory banks of your head-that's escapism in its finest form-the type no megabyte storing, software running, e-mailing box of wires can ever replace.

Lunchtime arrives and, skipping out of wherever you earn a living or improve your brain, a crisp blast of autumn wind assaults your senses. Fallen leaves are swirling in circles from the force of a breeze which holds in its icy confines the promise of a new winter.

So go ahead, dream on, because it won't be long until that breeze holds more than a promise. Maybe when it returns, big white snow flakes will be part of the package. Individual parcels piling onto each other, layer upon layer, transforming the mountainside into one big communal bed where we can all play out our dreams, without being woken by an alarm clock.

The End

October is upon us, and with each passing day, winter inches closer on the heels of the fall. For powder-heads the world over, one symptom of the seasonal change is a proliferation of ski-centered dreams: nightly hallucinations in which we can fly over trees and creek beds while slowly rotating fluid 360-degree helicopters; all of us superhuman.

Everyone knows the scenario-you are descending a perfect pitch of knee-high powder stashed away in a hidden glade. A friend skis behind you, matching your turns in perfect synchronization. You spot your line: a steep log chute. Catching air off a little lump and, arching up like a kamikaze bomber getting ready to deliver his deadly message, you explode into a billowy cushion of whiteness right between two trees. The light at the end of the tunnel is just ahead and the gap is short enough to straightline, which you do with ease, picking up tremendous speed before emerging into a wide open meadow. The slope eases up in time for a few wide turns which send you submerging under a blanket of soft snow before launching off another little rock. Completely at ease in the air, you throw your skis up to the side and flash a fat tip-cross as your friend howls in the background. Screaming like two fiends you disappear into another thick grove, but watch out, the forest is too thick! With an abundance of force, you break through a thick tangle of dead branches. Crunch, crunch, crunch, snap, snap, snap.... beep, beep, beep, beep.

The flashing red digits on your alarm clock read 8:00 A.M. Time to get up for work, school, or some other thrilling activity. One thing the rude awakening does not signify is ski time: an event for which the alarm's blaring signal is welcomed. As the day begins it's not long before the wonderful snowy playground that your mind's movie theater transported you to, just hours earlier, is forgotten.