Skiing Heritage Bookshelf

This first book by Bode Miller, America’s most important contribution to alpine racing in 20 years, should do much to fuel the excitement in American racing circles —higher today than at any other time in almost an entire generation. Nothing that Bode Miller does escapes attention, and his book should attract plenty of it. He chose, as he has chosen in competition, to do it differently. And here, to confuse the scribes of the sport, he has not so much produced a history as he has provided a document written inside his head, yet a document that is bound to be a part of skiing’s history.
Jack McEnany, the author of record, spent hours with Bode and a tape recorder acceding to Bode’s determination to record his coming of age (Bode is still under 30). McEnany, so it seems, simply got out of the way to let Bode dictate the book in his own voice—but there is a lot more art to it than that. Their collaboration proves that speaking out is another thing that Bode does well. He is as fast laying out his views as he is fast taking the best line down the hill. There seems hardly a topic imaginable that relates to his life he doesn’t touch as he swerves through his life, cleaving to the cleanest line. He has no time to wobble.
The book clears the fog the media has cast around Miller. The unvarnished facts are that Bode was born and grew up amid 400 family-owned acres of New Hampshire woods without the benefit of plumbing and with no more than a dirt track to the over-civilized world beyond.
As Bode tells it, his interview with TV’s Jay Leno was typical of his portrayals in the media. Leno was astounded to find that, as Bode says, “We lived in the woods, three-quarters of a mile from the nearest road, no electricity, no running water, and a frickin’ outhouse! As Leno enumerated these small tragedies in my short life, his voice trilled higher and higher, more incredulous with each item. And then he was congratulatory, as if to say, Good going, bud—after making it in the woods all those years, you went out and won an Olympic medal!
“We were having essentially the same thought, but reading from completely different teleprompters,” says Bode. “Anything that I have done is because of my upbringing, not in spite of it.”
As it was, Bode grew up immersed in close connection to the physical—the ground beneath his feet, the scent of the trees, the glint of the sky above, unalloyed by the heavy artificialities with which, in the outside world, the natural is buried. It is hard to imagine a life more suitable for sharpening the senses of an alpine racer whose job it is to travel at 70 miles an hour down a slippery track, dependent entirely on keen registration of physical sensations for mere survival.
So Bode muses, “Easton Valley was undisturbed by development, an old-growth forest full of deer runs and mouse hollows. Our gardens were terraced along the hillsides; fresh water flowed 10 feet from out backdoor; we had the sun, clean air, and the mountains. What more can you ask for?”
Bode finds this so obvious that it becomes mysterious to him that “This isn’t exactly the picture painted in the press. The reportage has a distinctly Dogpatch flavor.”
Bode’s grandfather, Jack Kenny, was a Dartmouth graduate, a lieutenant in naval intelligence during World War II who later taught in Berlin, New Hampshire, then bought 450 acres in Easton, where he and his wife built and ran Tamarack, a notably historic early ski lodge. Eventually, he reinvented Tamarack as a tennis camp, and his daughter Jo married one of his tennis instructors, Woody Miller.
Woody came from a family of doctors, but opted out of medical school. He and Jo built their own home on Turtle Ridge deep in the Kenny acres and became Bode’s parents. Woody deployed various stratagems to keep the family cupboard stocked. Everything that the family owned or consumed was “invented, grown, or carried in.”
From that platform, Bode catapulted to succeed in the world of international ski racing, where everything you take with you down the hill has to be invented, grown, or carried in. This book is not a narrative of Bode’s career. His accomplishments, past and future, can wait for another book. This one tells not so much about what Bode did to succeed as explain, engagingly, why. —Morten Lund

Bode: Go Fast, Be Good, Have Fun by Bode Miller with Jack McEnany, 215 pages, hardcover, illustrated. Villard Books (Random House), New York, $16.95 at amazon.com.

JOURNAL OF ISHA, THE INTERNATIONAL SKIING HISTORY ASSOCIATION
The International Skiing History Association is a not-for-profit corporation, whose mission is to preserve and advance the knowledge of ski history and to increase public awareness of the sport's heritage.

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