Pope on a Rope Tow (Cont.)

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Outside Magazine January 2002

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Pope on a Rope Tow (Cont.)

It may come as a surprise to the bourgeois Western skier, raised on a diet of fresh powder in the Rockies or the Alps, but southern Poland is carpeted with mountains, chairlifts, and après-ski huts full of sausages and beer. There are four major ski areas and all have names that would garner triple-digit Scrabble scores: Szczyrk. Zakopane. Szklarska Poreba. The Bieszczady Mountains.

Zakopane (the easiest to pronounce: Zock-o-pah-nay) is situated in the Tatra Mountains, a gnarly spur of the Carpathians that crowds the border with Slovakia. Thanks to the mounds of fresh snow that pile up there every year, it is known as the winter sports capital of Poland and a former stomping ground of JP2. Accessible via a well-marked two-lane road, the town lies just a couple of hours south of Kraków, unless you're stuck behind a horse-drawn vehicle, in which case it takes much longer. Joining me on my journey is Witold Krassowski, a dry-witted photographer with a bushy mustache. Witold's usual assignments take him to war zones. He can't understand why anyone would be interested in the pope's sporting past, but he's happy to play along, and as a translator he's invaluable.

As we creep along in our rented Renault, Witold reads aloud from Papiez, Jakiego Nie Znamy (roughly "The Pope in Nature"), a paperback we found among the kitschy glow-in-the-dark Jesuses and cards depicting Catholic saints in 3-D at the apartment in Wadowice (30 miles southwest of Krak-w) where the pope was born in 1920. Now, of course, it too is a museum. Young Karol was studious, serious, and religious, but he also dug the outdoors, and it was in Wadowice that he first strapped hickory sticks to his feet and felt the wind whistle through his hair as he slid down farm hills, past chickens and cows. Later, the freedom of downhilling would take on immense spiritual importance. "In the mountains," says Witold, quoting the more mature, philosophical pope, "the ugly hubbub of the city disappears and the quiet of immeasurable distances prevails, which allows a person to more clearly hear the inner echo of the voice of God." Sounds like some hippie telemarkers I know. And yet, JP2 has tapped his ecological veins to add a little more green to a typically anthropocentric religion. He's gone so far as to declare the worldwide environmental crisis an urgent moral problem and has called on Catholics and all humans to show respect for "the hidden, yet perceivable requirements of the order and harmony which govern nature itself." Could it be that the foundations he laid for his own brand of peace-and-earth-loving Catholicism as pope are rooted in his powder-loving past?

Well, it seems totally obvious to me. After he was elected to Rome, enough skis arrived from well-wishers to outfit half the Vatican, but the Pontiff resisted the call of the backcountry. "I pray to God to lead me from this temptation," he said in 1979 to an Italian mountain sports club that had presented him with a pair of custom white boards. "I might yet slide into a ravine, and then what?" (Though he did think to add, "God bless skiers and their legs." Amen.) Eight years later he proved he was a regular guy by caving in to that temptation. He donned dark glasses, jumped in an Alfa, and sneaked up to a resort in the Rhaetian Alps. It was the last time he was healthy enough to ski. (Since the early nineties, JP2, who is now 81, has had his gallbladder removed, a hip replaced, and has battled what the Vatican calls "symptoms" of Parkinson's disease.) Still, it certainly lends credence to the Papal Powder Linkage Theory.

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