After a delicious birthday dinner of Finnish Mushroom Pie at the A1 Diner in Gardiner , I set off in my trusty station wagon toward Craftsbury, Vermont. Well, actually, since in Maine (insert accent here) you can’t get there from here, I probably set off going more towards Middlebury, but Craftsbury was my ultimate destination, for what was sure to be a scintillating, controversial story on the Craftsbury Green Racing Project (CGRP, which always gets me thinking of the AARP, but enough with the asides…).

It was already eight o’clock, and I wasn’t expected at Craftsbury until the next day, so I was planning to find a place to camp somewhere past Bethel. I knew that there were a number of campsites in the area, and I figured that I’d just stop at one when I got tired.

Somewhere around Wayne, I remembered that one of my ski teammates, who will remain unnamed to preserve his reputation, had a house in Gorham, which was about where I was looking to spend the night. Given that I’m a extremely well-respected member of the nordic ski writing community, I figured it wouldn’t be a problem to give him a call at nine o’clock to ask if I could spend the night. An hour later, as I was contemplating where there was enough shoulder on Rt. 2 to pull over and set up my tent, he called back and told me he had a place for me to crash. After some gymnastics with directions, I arrived at the house where he lived.

Despite my reputation as a classy professional, I had initially been pretty skeptical about arriving at this house at about 10:30 PM. I was worried that I’d be waking up small children, dogs, ogres, etc. So when, upon my arrival, I discovered that this was a house for a trail crew composed of other college-aged individuals, I was quite relieved.

This relief quickly turned to dismay, when I was informed that this was the trail crew’s first night off after two weeks of work. For anyone who doesn’t know anything about trail crews, the only thing that there is to know is that they’re usually totally insane. Example A: the Appalachian Mountain Club’s trail crew is known as the TFC (Trail Fucking Crew). Example B:  go to the TMC’s web site, and you will be greeted by a series of questions:

 

Do you:

Want to keep in touch with

 current or past TFC Members?

Want to find out what the hell

 ever happened to Whatshisface?

Need bail money?

Being aware of this reputation, I was not too excited to discover that–this being their first night off in two weeks–I had arrived smack dab in the middle of a huge party (huge referring to the amount of alcohol consumed, rather than the number of people participating [it was just the six crew members, and me]).

Here are a few of the things that occurred during the two hours that I spent at the house before going to sleep:

1. After my teammate had given me a tour of the premises, we returned to the main room to find the rest of the crew eating the pie I had given them–with their feet (i.e., fork between two toes).

2. Trail crew initiation, which consisted of my teammate having raw eggs thrown at his head from point-blank range. Fortunately they allowed him a hard hat.

3. Crisco wrestling. This does not need or deserve any elaboration.

I certainly do not mean to demean the hospitality of my teammate by recounting all of this; rather, I’m merely attempting to convey the surreality of the evening’s experiences. Fortunately, when the time was right (which was immediately after the Crisco wrestling began), I was able to find a quiet, dark room in which to sleep.

The next day, I awoke at quarter to six and set off on Rt. 2 again, pleased to discover that VPR was in the middle of its quarterly membership drive. Given that MPR’s membership drive had just concluded, this was not actually all that awesome. By the time I made it to St. Johnsbury, I was ready to kill the obnoxious people who kept making preposterous segues to ask me for money (“and speaking of George W. Bush, we have plenty of bushes outside our offices, 55 percent of which are paid for by your support!”), but instead pulling a crazy-astronaut-lady and making a beeline for Montpelier, I managed to keep my anger and check and stay the course towards Craftsbury.

My contact at the CGRP, fellow FasterSkier blogger and renaissance man Ollie Burruss, had apprised me of the morning’s workout, which I was excited to witness and photograph with my new digital camera.

The workout was supposed to start at 9:30 on the East Craftsbury Road, and I was about an hour early, so I drove all the way up to the Outdoor Center to see if I could meet up with the team before they headed out to train. I didn’t find anyone, so, like any good professional ski journalist would do, I hung out in the car and wrote down some questions on my classy reporter’s notebook. At 9:25, I headed back down towards the East Craftsbury Road.

I made the turn onto the road, and started driving up a gigantic hill. No one was around, but I figured that they probably didn’t want to start their workout in zone four, so I kept on going. I drove through the village (well, cluster of houses) of East Craftsbury, and kept on going for another few miles. No sign of any rollerskiers. After about six or seven miles, I made it to the Highland Lodge, and then the pleasant town of Greensboro. Hm. Maybe they were running late. I turned around and drove the six miles back to the bottom of the big hill. Still nobody. By this point it was 10 A.M., and I was getting both a little concerned and a little irritated (though not yet as much as at donation-starved folks at VPR). Conveniently, there is diddly-squat in terms of cell phone service in the Northeast Kingdom, so I drove down to Craftsbury and–like the professional ski journalist that I am–called my dad.

After a tense phone conversation with my technologically-challenged father, I ascertained that I had not misread Ollie’s message, so I got back in car and started driving back towards the East Craftsbury. Up the hill–no rollerskiers. Through East Craftsbury, past the Highland Lodge, into Greensboro–nothing. Not even a measly reflective vest or water bottle holder. In Greensboro, I got out at the library and checked my e-mail for myself. Still no more clues as to where the CGRP could be. At this point, my rage level was pretty high–far beyond VPR anger and maybe even approaching crazy diaper-wearing NASA-astronaut lady. Again, I got back in the car, and this time I stopped at the Highland Lodge to scope out some cars and talk with the waitresses. I only could find mountain bikes in the cars, and the waitresses hadn’t seen any rollerskiers. Fortunately, one of them knew that they sometimes rollerski on the Creek Road. How do I get to the Creek Road? “Oh, you just go back into East Craftsbury, take a right at the barn, left when the road ends at a T, and then stay right at the log cabin.” Okay. After just two wrong turns and some potentially serious damage to my suspension, I arrived–guess where–back at the access road to the Outdoor Center. Still no rollerskiers, but one steamed journalist.

Ultimately, I met up with Ollie and the CGRP at their house, and I managed to get everything I needed in terms of interviews, photographs, etc. (It turned out that the workout got changed at the last second.) The whole team was incredibly open and friendly, and Ollie and I are (I think) still friends. The moral of the story is that in order to be one of the pre-eminent cross-country ski journalists in the country (You can find them here. I may or may not have had anything to do with the creation of that page. In any case, I’m fairly confident that there are less than five xc journalists in the country, which means that I’m at least in the top ten, and top ten is definitely pre-eminent), one must be flexible. Even if it’s the kind of flexibility where it’s your coach or teammate stretching your hamstring and it really, really hurts.

In Part II: the huge baller travels to a world cup mountain bike race in Quebec, obtains credentials, and enjoys all of the associated benefits, including donuts, coffee, and doritos at 8:30 in the morning.

Tags: Craftsbury Green Racing Team, Huge Baller Journalists, Pre-eminence

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