A One-Legged Skier Finds Salvation on the Slopes

“Aaa-ooOO,” Cale Kenney howls as she swoops down the slopes, all breathless bravado and grace.

Past the group of blind skiers she flies, a shower of fresh powder in her wake. “I can ski! I can ski!” she whoops at the instructor, a longtime friend and skiing partner, who grimaces in reply.

Swoosh. Kenney crunches to a halt on a precarious slope and starts looping through the snow in a kind of liquid waltz. “Ball . . . room skiing,” she sings, her body swaying to the rhythm of her lone blue ski. Then she’s off again, slicing down the mountain in a clear, crisp line.

It’s hard to believe this one-legged skier, this poet, once described herself as “a perturbed flamingo.”

Today the only connection to the exotic bird is her shocking pink ski gear. Kenney has become one of the wild women that she writes about, an irrepressible athlete and writer who knows exactly where she is going--and the effect she is having along the way.

“At my navel I am making a statement,” she muses in a poem in which she fantasizes about being a mermaid. “I can be any shape I want to be, and no one can stop me.” Kenney has been making a statement ever since the motorcycle accident that in 1971 cost her a leg, hip, pelvis and friend. She was 19 at the time, a blond Boston rebel whose athletic experience was limited to running from cops and bowling--the latter so that she could “wear shorts and be ogled by boys.”

The accident devastated her body and, for a time, her spirit.

Skiing, Kenney says, gave her back both.

She pauses on a ridge halfway down the slope and inhales the mountain air. The Rockies seem to stretch forever, their peaks glistening like diamonds on the horizon. The spring snow is crunchy underfoot.

“Here, you become very sure of what is important,” she says.

It took awhile to get here--to this peak, to this consciousness.

Kenney’s first forays onto Haystack Mountain in Vermont in the mid-1970s were a disaster. She hated her butt-less body, hated the cold, the spills, the stares. The only redeeming part was the hot chocolate and schnapps with the guys apres ski.

But a friend kept pushing and her pride kept pricking, and finally she mastered balancing on one ski. She wears no artificial leg but holds a pair of “outriggers”--crutch-like poles with mini ski-tips on the end that act as stabilizers.

Now Kenney, 46, writes freely about the experience in articles for “Howlings,” the magazine she publishes for the “wild women of the West.” The name was inspired by the Warren Zevon song “Werewolves of London,” whose howl Kenney mimics when she’s tearing down the slopes.

Kenney calls skiing “the great equalizer,” which is one reason she loves it so much--enough to move to Colorado in 1977, without her doctor, her mother, or a job. In this sport, everyone falls, even champions. Everyone gets injured. Everyone plays the fool.

“Follow the blue powder road,” Kenney writes about those glorious early days when her lift passes were free and Social Security paid her rent.

Sometimes she coached other skiers. Mostly she would swing up the mountain on an early-morning chairlift and pick a solitary trail back down. During those long days on the mountain, Kenney says, her spirit was called back to her new body “to be trusted again.”

“I was Dorothy, winding my way through Oz,” she writes. “Only I didn’t fall asleep. I came alive.”

Skiing gave her enough confidence to hobble into the local newspaper and ask for a job. Kenney started working at the Winter Park Manifest, which carried the motto, “News is news and life is entertaining” and cost “a mere dime.” It was the perfect time to be covering competitive skiing for the disabled. Kenney had the right skills, and the right injury, to make the most of it.

She went to speed-skiing trials and interviewed Olympic champions. She wrote about advances in equipment for disabled skiers. She became a fixture on the mountain and in town, hobbling around on crutches with her notebook and her smile and her mop of curls, poking fun at the ski world and life in general.

“My guts and gumption period,” she calls it, and it landed her smack in the center of top-level competitive sports: national champion in 1979; seventh in the Olympics for the disabled in Norway in 1980; silver medal in the nationals in 1983.

Kenney loved the travel and the glory and the fun. She howled at the emperor of Japan (well, he was still just a prince at the time) in an elevator in Norway. She partied all night at a pass in Squaw Valley, and wound up stranded by an avalanche. And she learned about the “suffering side” of skiing when she injured her knee two days before the U.S. team left for the Olympics in 1992.

“They were all going to Switzerland, and I just wanted to go to the Wailing Wall,” Kenney says. “I didn’t know anything about it, but the name sounded like something I could relate to.”

The injury knocked her out of the competition and back into writing, into a serious, more reflective self. Today, Kenney does more than quip about “the misery factor” when she’s having a bad day. She strains to find the right words to describe the feelings of phantom-limb pain. She writes essays about the language of crying and the sores that spring up to remind her of the past.

Driving through the mountain passes to the slopes, propped up on “Big Bertha”--a fake, foam butt--the fearless skiing werewolf shows her vulnerable side. She has spent the last six weeks on her back, laid low by a sore on her grafts.

“Do you think that souls have arms and legs?” she asks, wondering aloud about the piece of her soul that was ripped off with her leg. Maybe it’s in heaven, reserving her a spot.

Still, that impish delight in shocking the world is never far from the surface.

“What happened?” a little girl gasps in the Winter Park locker room, staring at the empty space where Kenney’s left leg belongs.

“Motorcycle,” Kenney replies, as she slips out of a ski suit and into a dress.

She winks at the adults. “Usually I say, ‘Shark.’ ”