goodbye evans

When I talked to my parents on the phone today, I learned that Evans Huber, a childhood friend of mine was struck by lightning and killed last night while camping in Baxter State Park with his mom and brother. I had not seen or talked to Evans in years, but I was affected by the news. Two years younger than me, Evans grew up on Peaks Island, Maine, where my family spends our summers. His parents and mine were close friends, and my mom and dad had recently started visiting more regularly again with Lare, Evans' dad. I remember Evans as the quintessential island kid, curly-haired, barefoot, bike-riding. He hung out with the island crowd, the kids who snuck beers on the Back Shore and jumped off the towers at the ferry dock, but also seemed more interested in the world beyond Peaks, a trait he no doubt inherited from his parents.

Evans went to McGill University in Montreal and graduated the same year I did, in 2005. I hear that he was in love with a woman he met there, a Canadian, and was planning to get a visa to move to Canada and live with her. His brother Emmett is still an island presence at the age of 18; he was hit by the bolt, too, but survived. Their mom, my mom's friend Lois, was uninjured.

How do you deal with something like that if you're Evans' family? I have no answer. I have never been touched by tragedy in that way, and I am grateful. I do not know how I would or could respond to the death of my own brother, but I know that I am looking forward to seeing him next week, even more than I was before I heard the news about Evans.

power invasion ministries

Yesterday while biking along the Platte River trail here in Denver I saw a building that scared the hell out of me. It's a fortress-like concrete edifice, nearly circular in shape, located in a barren industrial area. Two large signs on the building identify it as the home of "Power Invasion Ministries," with a King Arthurish sword-and-shield logo. Of course I had to Google it when I got home from my ride -- was this really a church, and if so, who or what were they invading with their power? And why were they located in what looked like a fallout shelter to be used in case of industrial accidents?

I found their website (which includes the breathtakingly candid slogan "Desperate people, desperate for God"), and it answered my first two questions. Apparently, the "power" part comes from Acts 1:8: “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the ends of the earth.” They don't cite a biblical verse mentioning an "invasion," but their mission in that regard is spelled out pretty bluntly. The Power Invasion folks apparently believe they have been

[a]ppointed and anointed by His Power to Invade [sic] the greater metro area of Denver by uprooting, tearing down, destroying, and overthrowing the power of darkness; and called to build and plant a new foundation.

Invade, uproot, tear down, destroy, overthrow -- wow, those are some strong verbs. I suppose that's the point, but like the ministry's building, its intentions scare the hell out of me. These people would like nothing better than to see people like me either converted to (their particular brand of) evangelical Christianity or driven out of town. These same people are on the pulpit every Sunday denouncing the spread of ideas they find dangerous -- including, I'm sure, fundamentalist Islamists, whose ambitions exactly parallel their own. One recent Power Invasion sermon (by "Pastor Randy") was titled "What you Tolerate May Destroy You." In a free society, I am reluctantly willing to tolerate the existance of groups like Power Invasion Ministries. But I really hope their Pastor Randy was wrong about the destruction part.

what makes bode different

If you've been following the current World Cup season, you may know that Bode Miller already has three wins this year, more than he won all last season. He's still as unpredictable as ever — winning one day and missing a gate five seconds into a course the next day — but he's still one of my role models in ski racing, for one simple reason: he races for himself and no one else. He wrote a whole book outlining his philosophy on this, but I think it's summed up well in something I just read in his online diary:

"The best run I've ever laid down was in Val Gardena back in 2001 — I came in 6th, but to this day it stands out in my mind as nearly perfect. "

Is Bode Miller just delusional, or does he have a bad sense of when he's skiing well and when he's not? I don't think that's the case. There might be a hundred reasons he didn't win that day (bad wax choice, a strong gust of wind while he was on course), but if he's never felt better on his skis than he did that day, and he can recall that feeling and harness it for future performances, that's something significant. For 99% of athletes, if you ask them to recall their best day, it will be a day they had their best results. But not for Bode: he has that rarest of abilities, the power to separate his own feelings about his performance from the outcome associated with it.

bramble in n.y. times

As astute NTAA reader Botice has pointed out, the sports section of yesterday's New York Times featured a profile of my teammate Kevin Bramble, Paralympic downhill champion, monoski designer/builder, and lover of cannabis, alcohol, and women. You can read the story here (free registration required).

The article begins with the observation, "Kevin Bramble is a madman." This is not inaccurate. The whole profile, in fact, does a pretty excellent job of deconstructing one of the most intriguing and self-contradictory people I've ever met. This is a guy who, at times, literally seems not to care whether he lives or dies, and yet seems to survive incidents no one else could; a guy who tells a story about getting banned from a particular California town for an incident involving an underaged girl, an empty wine bottle, and a video camera, and yet has told me, passionately, about his desire to meet a woman to settle down with (he's now engaged, apparently); a guy who gets more media coverage than anyone on the team except maybe Ralph and who bragged to the Times that he has "taken [my] sport to a place it had never been" and yet is easily the most down-to-earth person on the team; a guy who never trains and has atrocious technique, yet regularly wins downhill races by full seconds; a guy who wants to be a successful businessman and yet missed an appointment to meet with me so I could try his monoski and perhaps purchase one — because he was in jail. As a result, I'm one of the three current U.S. team members who doesn't ski on his equipment, but somehow I still like the guy.

There are a few facts the article doesn't get quite right. For starters, a caption implies that the accompanying photo shows Bramble building a monoski; in fact it appears to be some kind of wakeboard. And the story says that he "left" the team in 1999 because he wanted to go powder skiing instead of racing, while my impression on that trip was that he was kicked off the team for telling a staff member to go fuck himself. And Bramble himself is wrong when he dismisses the accomplishments of Bode Miller, saying "He didn’t invent the skis. He hasn’t redefined the convention”; in fact, that is pretty much exactly what Bode did at the Junior Olympics in the late 1990s when he became the first racer to have significant success using new super-sidecut skis. But the article's only egregious error is one of omission: it doesn't mention Bramble's significant "lifestyle-related" health problems, which (combined with his distaste for training) have kept him from attending any team training camps or competitions since the Paralympics. Given that there are no downhills scheduled on the disabeld race circuit this year, I'll be surprised if we see him show up to a single race this year other than the X Games sit-skiercross at Aspen in January. For all intents and purposes, Kevin Bramble seems to be retired.