Amazing

I just got back from a week of skiing at Snowbird, Utah with some of my old friends from the East Coast—my “ski buddies,” a bunch of guys who regularly meet to ski together. Since our abilities and interests vary somewhat (and ages, too, I’m the oldest of the bunch, which tells you something about where my interest and ability level is relative to theirs), we sometimes go off on our own for awhile. That was just what I was doing, cruising along on one of the easy “groomers” (a slope that has had the bumps smoothed out of it), when two guys wearing similar yellow parkas stopped beside me. They turned out to be mountain hospitality agents, which is something like a Wal-Mart greeter on skiies, and we chatted a bit, and when we got to the part where they asked me what I did, I said I was a retired airline pilot. One of them said, “No kidding? What a small world. This guy here [the other guy in yellow] is an airline pilot too.”

“Really,” I said, “for what airline?” He said, “Continental. How about you?”

I said, “ATA. You have some of our airplanes. We sold you several of our '300s' [a Boeing 757-300, the stretch model] during our bankruptcy.”

“I know,” he said. “I’m on the 757/767. We’ve probably flown the same airplane.”

“Amazing,” I said.

“Want to ski a run together?”

“Sure,” I said. And then they showed me a way down the mountain that I hadn’t known about.

And the other guy in yellow, the one who asked me what I did, turned out to a helicopter pilot and had air lifted most of the lift towers in place years before when Snowbird was being developed. You never know who you’re going to run into on a ski slope.