Swain Wolfe revisits his early life spent among Colorado's mountains.

By Cathie Beck, Special to the News
July 7, 2006

Swain Wolfe is as much a poet as narrator and memoirist. He's also a former cowboy, copper miner, award-winning filmmaker and recluse. He suffered his parents' marital discord, his sister's emotional disabilities and watched his natural father die relatively young, broke and alone.

From all this chaos comes The Boy Who Invented Skiing, Wolfe's memoir of his boyhood and young adulthood spent among the Colorado mountains. Now a middle-aged man, Wolfe revisits his youth with the tender eye of someone who has experienced much upheaval and realizes that turbulent times can ultimately sharpen one's perspective.

There's a fantastical element to this memoir, which is at once charming and disjointed. Wolfe is a storyteller at heart, and The Boy Who Invented Skiing is an amalgamation of stories, vignettes and short thoughts presented chronologically, which add up to a tale of a sensitive yet masculine boy emerging into manhood.

The story begins with Wolfe wandering through the belly of his father's Colorado tuberculosis sanatorium. He played in its tunnels and, in recounting those strange afternoons, he evokes all of the mysteries and horror of the place and childhood in general.

"I was three years old when I first discovered a stairwell hidden by ferns in one corner," he writes. ". . . At the bottom of the stairs was a door and behind the door a tunnel. I opened it and looked in. It was dark, of course.

"Night after night, the tunnel was in my dreams . . . I would hide in the stairwell behind the ferns and breathe the dank tunnel air. The tunnel was waiting. I could feel its pull.

"I didn't have to ask. This was a forbidden place."

With the advent of penicillin, the sanitorium eventually shut down, and this event coincided with the end of Wolfe's parents' marriage, when the author was just 6. His father then opened a private practice on Main Street in Gunnison. Meanwhile, he and his sister moved into a tent with their mother, where she began a horse-riding tourist operation outside of town.

Life continually tested the young boy. His father, a morphine addict, beat his son when Wolfe came for visits. And although his mother eventually remarried, she fought bitterly with Wolfe's new stepfather, who regularly beat her.

Finally, his mother moved him and his sister to an uncle's Montana home, and ultimately, the small family ended up in a flophouse.

Even then, Wolfe reveled in life's joys. While his mother left his sister at day care and went to work at the other end of town, for example, "I hung out at the restaurant a lot," he writes. "The Mexican waitresses and the cook tried to get me to eat hot peppers. I wanted them to think I was brave, so I tried. My mouth burned all night. They thought it was funny, and their laughter made me laugh. I told them stories about the sanatorium and Spring Creek. They fed me and gave me food to take home. I was a breadwinner."

Wolfe held the usual teenage boy jobs as he grew: picking up trash at a drive-in theater, working at a fireworks stand. After high school, he turned to hard labor, working, by turns, in a sawmill, a mine, a slaughterhouse and as a firefighter with the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

The title of the book springs from the time Wolfe found old, hand-carved skis in a horse barn. Not knowing what they were, Wolfe attached the crude straps to his boots and shot down a hill, then several hills, then across a valley. He used worn down broom handles from the barn for ski poles - and, in his mind, "invented skiing."

If there's a quibble with The Boy Who Invented Skiing, it's with the occasional sense of randomness and disjointedness of some of his stories. Some are long and flowing, others mere quips. Sometimes you wonder why a particular story was chosen.

But it may be unfair to look too closely. Wolfe's prose, like poetry, is not meant to be taken apart, sentence by sentence. With great skill and gentle charm, the author offers the stories of his life, taking readers along on his amazing journeys.

Cathie Beck is a Denver writer. She recently completed a memoir, "Cheap Cabernet: A Friendship."

Copyright 2006, Rocky Mountain News. All Rights Reserved.