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Click to close Instant Karma: The Heart and Soul of a Ski Bum by Wayne Sheldrake Ghost Road Press $17.95/174 pages/paperback

Wayne Sheldrake's life has been going downhill for a long time, but the good news is that for a skier, that's the direction he wants to go. His newly released memoir, Instant Karma (Ghost Road Press, 2007) makes it clear that snow and altitude have an unavoidable impact on attitude.

Subtitled The Heart and Soul of a Ski Bum, the story appears at first glance to be just another book about skiing, and for a non-skier like me, the prospect of snow-plowing through 174 pages of white pulp sent shivers up my spine. There's a quick chapter up front where Sheldrake attempts to compress his childhood into a bite-sized nugget, though it's hardly a happy meal. Maybe it sets up his character, maybe not, but get past the first 13 pages and the book literally takes off. Ski enthusiasts will have a tough time putting it down.

Sheldrake's life apparently contains no shortage of life-threatening events that turn his memoir into a tale that reads like a thriller. He takes his readers on a run from his early ski instructor days at Wolf Creek, to several intimate encounters with trees on the way down - near-death experiences. Sheldrake's slightly defective but enormous heart opens to include the reader into his love story, his family, even his bypass surgery, and of course, more skiing. There seem to be two bottom lines in Sheldrake's life - risk and recovery. I don't envy the size of his ski boots, but as a reader I am privy to an insight: The chance to understand the mind-set and consequences of a man who has put into prose his lifelong obsession with skiing.

I've never been much of a fan of memoirs in general, because the writing often reads as if it's being dictated from an armchair, self-conscious and full of predictable lessons. Sheldrake's prose, however, is consistently on the edge - sentences that play with the phrase, words that bump up against each other, polished but approachable, like state-of-the-art equipment at a ski swap. Speaking of his stint as a Wolf Creek ski instructor, Sheldrake writes, The clientele were lowlanders - ribs, red-beans, and cornbread folk. Many were stunned, frazzled, dizzied, and dehydrated by the high altitude. When they fell, they slithered in the snow, like catfish in mud.

I'm attracted to the speed and elocution of his syntax, which maintains its sense of balance throughout his tale, shifting between humor, shock, information, and reflection. Speaking of his time in the recovery room for a second time - sent back for yet another surgery to re-inflate a lung after his original bypass: The greenhouse hoses sprouted, again. Tiny tubes hung like spaghetti, again.

The incessant gurgling. Flashing numbers. Beeps. Squeaky shoes. A pile of pillows. A towel draped over a clock. My little stained Valentine pillow. The lung was okay, but on the morning after, a stranger, my surgeon's partner, dropped in. My surgeon was out of town, skiing.

I love his staccato for trauma, of language from his post-anesthesia recollections, the details that filter through his perception, the sense of irony that subtly surfaces along with his consciousness - the fact that he is still alive but abandoned on the white linen slopes of a hospital bed by yet another ski bum. It's impossible not to smile.

If you get to the point in the story where he returns to skiing after his medical recoveries and that old adage about getting back up on the horse comes to mind, then you're reading the wrong book. For Sheldrake, the only fear is the one that means he could never ski again. To hell with the horse.

Except for a hiccup a few years after the heart surgery - a minor stroke that put me in the hospital for some tests - and a few minor injuries, my health was good.

I'd given up most everything that might seriously endanger me, except skiing.

This was a conscious bargain of the sort that every true addict understands.

The storms are memorable, the races exciting, the backcountry powder pristine, and the tumbles legendary. Sheldrake keeps us making tracks above the deep, sends us careening down slopes we never saw coming. If it's white, to Wayne Sheldrake it has to be right, which partly explains why he headed to the Great Sand Dunes National Monument for a downhill run on sand. Partly. When it comes to skiing, his eyes may be going but you've still got to respect his vision.

David Feela is a regular columnist and contributing editor of Inside/Outside Southwest magazine.