The Best American Travel Writing 2015 by Andrew McCarthy

Author:Andrew McCarthy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

After five days of constant anxiety, we are back in a familiar world of snow and gravity. The storm builds and so does a sense of camaraderie. A skier from Pyongyang poses for a picture with me. Another shakes my hand. Our guides can’t ski and have let us roam—alone.

Masik’s two groomers made only one pass up the middle of Slopes 1 through 9, all of which fall back to the base, leaving 30-foot-wide sideburns of untracked snow on each side of the pistes. Kim Jong-il could allegedly control the weather with his mind, but I doubt conditions were ever this good for his son. We have virgin powder all day long.

Dan and I race down Slopes 7, 8, and 9. They feel like intermediate runs but the signs don’t say. The birch trees to either side are as tight as toothpicks in a shot glass, so we stick to the runs. I imagine Kim Jong-un doing lonely giant-slalom turns with the angulation of Ted Ligety. We bounce past a midmountain pavilion where he probably did some tricks just as his GoPro failed. We settle for views of the brown valleys below, then leapfrog each other, high-fiving our powder eights.

Most of the North Koreans here have never been on skis before. They stick to the bunny hill below but attack it with gusto. Some crash into an orange safety fence. Others can only go right. One lady steams toward a table-filled patio, then diverts to port with the turning radius of a cargo ship.

“I told you you would see lots of local people here,” says a guide taking lessons. “This is very new for us.”

So new, in fact, that a lot of people don’t even bother with skis. Instead they cuddle up and ride the lifts around and around, up and down, thrilled just to be there. Each time our paths cross they wave and smile as if to confirm that this is no dream. These are not the brainwashed marcher-bots we tend to envision, but lovers, maybe my wife and me, content to snuggle on a dawdling loop where “only beautiful, please” plays on repeat.

That evening I go to a karaoke bar in Hotel 1 with a few of the Westerners. The place is empty, just two Korean guys shucking a dried mackerel for a snack. The two barmaids wear maroon skirts and vests. One of them hands me a full bottle of soju, a rice spirit. The other flicks on some disco lights and together they sing sassy duets for hours to a crowd of five. They seem a bit over­enthusiastic. Maybe this is the greatest job ever. Maybe they’re being watched.

Our last day dawns cold and clear, but the deal with myself collapses. I feel guilty for enjoying a place where the construction costs would have fed the hungry for years and there’s still this air of suspicion that lingers everywhere we go. The instructors ignore me when I ask to warm up with them. Dan and

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