At a recent NENSA Staff Retreat, it snowed all day and the idea to, paraphrasing, “try and download Adam Terko’s brain” was thrown out more than a handful of times.
Such are the strange perambulations of spring mending-time for New England skiing.
One of the small treats of April is that Adam gets some of the MNC blogs he’s been dreaming up all winter out into the world. Which, this week, came with a touch of sadness and the sweet sentiments of remembrance for Mansfield Nordic Club’s founder, Murray Banks.
You can read Adam Terko’s “‘Tighten Your Boots’ a Murray Banks remembrance” here.
Murray was a familiar figure to this New England skiing community for many years prior to moving to Crested Butte, Colorado in 2015. In late February, the word came down from the mountains that he’d passed on after a long and courageous battle with cancer. He was a rare person where continuing to hustle through the thickest, busiest part of a ski season seemed the most apt way to convert the extreme kinetic energy of his life into a legacy. So, we did.
As the Spring has stilled now, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Murray has started to bubble back up through Adam’s mind. He certainly has been on mine.
Prior to my coming to NENSA, this time of year involved many hours spent with Murray half a continent away in his miner’s shack turned satellite Vermont-haven in Crested Butte. I’d landed in CB as a coach fresh out of college in Maine, and Murray jumped in on partnering with Molly Susla (formerly of Maine) and I to coach our upper-level BKL skiers and build a club program infused with a very NENSA bent. Which is to say, all of our youth races had themes and became costume parties.
Murray’s favorite way to debrief every year was over lunch. I’d bike across town from my office, often in the middle of an April snowstorm, and drop my bike on the curb like I’d just finished my paper route. There was that kind of throwback innocence to the whole thing. This guy, who’d lived a whole life and was pushing 80 years old, insisting that I, his “boss,” had to come over to give him his “annual performance review.”
Once at the Banks place, I’d drink too many espressos, and Murray would toss out aphorisms culled from his life as a motivational teacher/ski coach like “never V1 when you can V2” and Terko’s favorite, “tighten your boots,” and we would chew on big ideas about program development interspersed with appreciations of the particular growth of one of the CB junior skiers, or a new coach who had really taken to their role that winter. Inevitably, he would pull out a slip of paper from his back pocket with a list of names and a circled number. “I did some brainstorming on kids who I think are ready for the Devo program,” he would say, and the number circled would be how many skiers he thought we could have in the program next year. My first year it was 20, then 40, then 60. “Hope you can find the skis, boss!” he’d say.
Murray and I always let those afternoons linger on and on as if they would never end. As if, if we did this odd mending-time perambulation with time itself, it’s scale would grow a little closer to the one the mountains out his kitchen window marched in, and the sixty years between us would blur, and we’d continue working on as partners forever. Of course, eventually the afternoon would end, and that seemed an acknowledgement of the timescale we were actually moving in.
As I biked home, my head would spin with the possibility. Murray’s slip of paper would work its way into my back pocket, and I’d stare at the number later, which almost entailed doubling the size of our still small program, asking “How are we going to do that?” Yet, come next winter, we almost always did.
For all the way that his ideas beamed with positivity and possibility, Murray also held that you ought to push things a little further than you thought they could go. Amid all his energy, there was a quiet reassurance he provided all of us in his pure passion for cross-country skiing. A Phy. Ed. teacher by trade who had tried every sport out there (including as a professional triathlete), he believed that this one – nordic skiing – had the perfect mix of qualities to make it his perferred way to grow through life. In an old NENSA video detailing the Bill Koch League, he put it simply, “in other little league sports, how many times do the parents cheer for the other team?!” He then turned to MNC regular Charlie Cobb, then a BKL-er, who chimes in, “and it’s fun,” to which Murray turns on a dime, “FUN! It wasn’t any FUN!?” in a way in which you know the congregation has already taken the sermon to heart.
Right now, as we sit down across New England and kindle new ideas about helping skiers grow, gain an appreciation of competition, and of the outdoors that our sport uniquely places them in a place to gain perspective on, we’re well-placed to carry Murray’s spirit forth, here in New England, and wherever we might get a next bonus ski.
