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Sunday, February 26, 2006
Into the woods
Copyright © 2006 Blethen Maine Newspapers Inc. | ||||||||||||||
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NEW GLOUCESTER — Bob Morse finds shelter from an aggressive wind, climbs inside the "Grove" at Pineland Farms, and pulls out of a long bag wooden ski after wooden ski: hickory, ash and an assortment of multipaneled planks. Some have bits of metal edges, others are pure wood. They've all been skied by Morse at one time over the past 40 years. He pulls out a small can of pine tar and takes a whiff. It's smoky and inviting, a little nostalgic of the holidays, or your last camping trip. Morse, in fact, looks like he is about to set up a camp stove. After he paints on the pungent pine tar, he pulls out a palm-size gas can, torch and matches. He struggles to light it in the wind, but eventually it catches. Then he heats the pine tar on the skis, and turns dreams to fire. The tiny flame suddenly rips a foot-size bonfire across the ski, making Morse laugh: "That's what we'd say as kids, 'Our skis are on fire.' " The process takes a good hour - that's if the torch lights. No worries this cold day. Patience is a wooden skier's friend. "What I like about wooden skis is, it slows you down. As a ski coach, all you're thinking is 'Race mode, race mode, race mode,' " said Morse, the veteran Yarmouth High School ski coach. "I like it. It's the traditional way. It calms you." ONCE A YEAR Mainers love their wooden skis. That's why L.L. Bean came out with the Heritage ski last year. The new ski looks wooden, even though its bottom is made of fiberglass. Andrew Jaspersohn, who works at the ski shop at Pineland Farms, loves pulling out the wooden skis at least once a winter. "It's a different feel. It's fun to ski on. I use them when I want to bushwhack, and I don't feel like using really, really good skis," Jaspersohn said. At the New England Ski Museum in Franconia, N.H., Jeff Leich said more than half of the museum's 30 board members grew up skiing on wooden skis. That's because before 1960, that's virtually all there was. As fiberglass came on the scene in the 1960s, Leich said, people began to use fiberglass skis, but still most stuck with wooden for another 10 years. "Most people, when you get down to it, like the exercise, like the glitz and glamour. But (with wooden skis), you're talking about the soul of the sport," said Glenn Parkinson of Freeport, president of the New England Ski Museum. "That's the reason I took it up, for the quiet, the solitude." Like Morse, Parkinson doesn't use his wooden skis all the time, but once or twice a winter, he takes them out to go back. Wooden skis take you away from the smoky city air, Parkinson said. Life is just as stressful as it was back when Mainers first started using wooden skis, Parkinson said, but now many use what is new, faster, more high-tech. The wood in wooden skis reminds us to be a part of the land - to use tools and toys that are part of the woods. It's comforting, this journey back in time. Become a tree, become your skis, dissolve into the trail and follow it home. GUESSING THEIR AGE At virtually any auction in Maine in the winter, you're going to see a pair of wooden skis hanging on the wall, if not up for bid. How did they get there? Where did they come from? It's not always easy to age these ubiquitous winter treasures. Parkinson has wooden skis from the 1930s and some from the turn of the 20th century that he takes out at least once a winter from his Freeport barn, where about 300 wooden skis are stored. "I'm a geek," Parkinson said. Consider him a devotee. The evolution of wooden skis in Maine started when Swedes settled New Sweden in 1872, said Parkinson, who wrote "First Tracks," a book about Maine's skiing history. "Their skis were very long, up to 10 feet. They were not made for speed," Parkinson said. At the New England Ski Museum, with more than 1,000 skis in the museum's collection, there are some that are more than a century old and many through the early part of the 1900s. But not all are dated, Leich said, because not everyone who donated them knows when they were made or used. For those who have wooden skis in their attic, or see them at an auction, there are a few simple ways to narrow down when the ski was made: The era of any ski is most easily determined by the binding, Leich said. If the ski has a cut-out through the wood to allow a leather strap to pass through the ski and up and over the toe of the boot, that is roughly pre-1920s or early 1930s, Leich said. The skis from pre-1930 all had the strap through a hole through the ski. "The term I like," Parkinson said of the older skis, "is 'skiing is like upright tobogganing.' You can't turn in them." Around 1930, ski manufacturers started to do away with the cutout ski and screwed in what became known as the "bear-trap" binding, which was not much more comfortable, Parkinson said. "Your foot is sort of jammed into them," he said. Any skis without the cut-out and without a single piece of wood for the ski, were very likely late 1930s or 1950s skis, Leich said. "Another of the highest developments of wooden skis, instead of making one solid piece of wood, they used strips of wood," Leich said. Skis with metal edges, another good feature for dating wooden skis, generally were made after the 1950s, Leich said. No matter how they hooked on to your foot, they all had the slower wooden bottom - and a quiet sound. TRUE CONNOISSEUR As the Yarmouth High School ski coach for 35 years, Morse is a walking lesson in the love Mainers have for the sport of Nordic skiing. Morse grew up in Portland, got into skiing living in Canton, and skied for Deering High School against future Olympians. He worked at one of the early ski shops in Portland, and began a collection in wooden skis without even thinking about it. Morse, of Standish, was inducted into the Maine Ski Hall of Fame last fall for his successful years as a school ski coach. He could have been inducted for his knowledge of wooden skis, and love for them. Take him into the Visitor Center at Pineland Farms where he is a regular with his high school team, and Morse is drawn immediately to the displays. He eyes an old 8-foot-high pair - and he's gone. "There were two groves," Morse says massaging the bottom. "That was for stability, to keep them on track. It's just a piece of wood." This is a classic wooden-ski connoisseur. You'll find these traditionalists out on any groomed trail. He draws the ski toward him, as if to listen to it. In fact, while inspecting his own, which he's had for decades, he still seems to find details that amaze him. His face draws within inches of one as he reads the tattered sticker, now 40 years old: Chalet Ski Shop. "That was in One Monument Square," Morse says. "I worked there in the late '60s. Well, in the early '60s." While his "bear trap" skis with the gnarly springs and large mousetrap hinge date him, Morse loves these toys. "Bear traps. That's what everybody had to ski on," he says. "Once your feet were in there, they're locked in. That's why they had a lot of broken legs." Staff Writer Deirdre Fleming can be contacted at 791-6452 or at:
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