Introduction Over Our Skies It was an insane place for a couple novice skiers from Ohio to be. Highland Bowl rises like a vision of dread from the necklace of two-mile-high peaks surrounding Aspen, Colorado. Its slope angle reaches 48 degrees at the summit, 12,392 feet above sea level, where my dad and I should have been if we'd had less attitude and more sense. I was twelve and thought I was immortal. My dad, Jeff Ebner, was forty-six and knew he was. That morning, we'd briefly discussed our desire to check out Highland Bowl. We'd taken ski trips out west before, to Colorado and Utah. We knew what we knew. Which wasn't a lot, as it turned out. That didn't deter us. Jeff Ebner had a wayward, cocksure confidence that discouraged all doubts. It applied to everything he did. I was born with some of it. By the time we studied Highland Bowl, I'd learned the rest. My dad's confidence made me believe we could do anything. His logic was admirably consistent: If other people can do it, why can't we? Someone knows how to fix this car engine, why can't I? Let me get the manual. Others are working hard to realize their unlikely dreams. Why shouldn't we? My dad sized up the crew of people we'd joined on the ski lift. He said, "If all these old, unathletic, overweight people who have never lifted a weight in their lives can do it, why can't we?" He didn't offer this in a bragging way. My dad was confident, not a braggart. There was a difference. Given that we were, in fact, stronger and younger than the others in the group and that we were, for sure, workout obsessives who'd already run halfway up a mountain earlier that day, even before we pulled on our ski boots, Jeff Ebner's logic seemed unassailable to me. "You wanna do it?" I asked. "You only live once," my dad said. There's no true manual for living. You can seek out advice from a book, but often that advice comes from someone who never got it right himself. There's a lot to be said for specialized knowledge, but on some level if you need to read about how to be a good parent, you're probably not going to be one. If you gotta ask, you'll never know. My dad was a simple guy, who valued obvious truths and squeezed them for every drop of living they contained. You want to be a good father? Time and love. "You spell love T-I-M-E," he'd say. Nothing else is so concrete. Not saying the perfect thing, not buying the perfect gift or smothering your child with affection that's not always real, or really wanted. Not trying to handle every situation properly. No one gets that right every time. Relationships involve some stumbling in the dark. Only time and love are enduring and authentic. Our love was quirky, because Jeff Ebner was the quirkiest man most men had ever met. He died at fifty-three, too young for someone so full of the world. Maybe he knew tragedy was coming and compensated for it by giving his life a workout it would not forget. Or maybe he never gave mortality a passing thought. Highland Bowl was the backdrop for the 1993 movie Aspen Extreme . It was prone to avalanches, a fact our driver casually mentioned as he escorted us to the summit. We'd ridden the lift most of the way up. A guy driving a tractor would get us the rest of the way to the top. "This is some of the most extreme skiing you can find in North America," he said over the loudspeaker. I gulped. Did my dad? I'm thinking, hell yeah, he did. He didn't want me to see his concern. He didn't want me to think we were so far over our skis on this one, we'd have to fall backward to stand up straight. "We got this," was all he said. I never wanted to let my dad down, and I didn't back off from challenges. For at least five years, we'd worked out together, run hills together, found new roads to bicycle. He was crazy about rugby, so we spent weekends at practice together. He ran an auto salvage yard, so I got good at pulling parts from dead cars. He and my mother divorced when I was a toddler. That didn't curtail my dad's devotion to me. If anything, it enhanced it and enforced it. If he did it, I did it. We moved mountains. Literally and figuratively. You try loading a crushed junker into the back of a semitruck. Everything we did together served as a time-love lesson on how I could become a better person. He was my dad. I was his Why. Years later, after his death, the roles reversed. Jeff Ebner would become my Why. Love and time would still be shared. Even if apart. Somehow. I'd dedicate myself to honoring his memory. Everything I'd do on the football field, on the rugby pitch, and, eventually, in my life as a husband--and someday I trust as a father--would reflect the love and time I shared with my dad. In the meantime, there we were, staring across this ten- or fifteen-foot crevasse we had to leap across, just to reach the beginning of the ski run from hell. My dad had always given me the security that things would work out, and the confidence to make that so. Let's do this. I should say that no sensible person with our limited experience would even consider skiing the Highland Bowl. We crept to the edge of the slope, which looked more like a cliff. We made the leap across the ditch. I can see my dad now, in his goofy goggles and thirty-year-old ski suit, telling me how we were going to tame this mountain, as the old, unathletic people who'd never lifted a weight in their pathetic lives bombed down the hill past us, like pros. The plan was to ski sideways down the mountain, zigzagging parallel to the slope until we approached the bottom. If we started going out-of-control fast, we'd purposely turn straight into the mountain and fall down. We did all that, until we reached a turn onto a path that would take us around the mountain, to the "normal slopes" where we should have been in the first place. Jeff Ebner missed the turn and, with no control at all, flew off the slope and into a stand of pines. I freaked out, thinking he was hurt. As I lumbered across the slope in my dad's general direction, I heard his creepy little laugh from the base of a pine. "Heh heh heh," he said. "That wasn't so bad." Life, I learned, would be trial and error. The error would always be forgiven. The effort, the trial, had to be made, and it had to be made honestly and with the fullest intent. Often, I'd enter into something with a naivete that would have been reckless had I not been consumed by the need to succeed. In a way, the wacky run down Highland Bowl was no different than walking onto the football team at Ohio State or being drafted into the NFL or marching into Maracanã Stadium at the 2016 Olympics. Each was an improbable dream. The Jeff Ebner alchemy of blind faith and hard work saw me through. We could have walked away from that mountain. We got our asses up and we got our asses down. When I talk about my dad now, two decades removed from Highland Bowl, people want to know how we created such a relationship. As if there were some step-by-step plan. There wasn't. It was just two people who shared the same joys in life. We liked each other's company. And then he died, leaving me empty and full at the same time. Empty with the sadness that comes from losing my best friend. Full with the purpose of a promise made. You can miss someone while also feeling his presence. Your little wins can be his, in his absence. But not without an excruciating pain that can make you feel most alive, while sometimes wishing you weren't. After my parents split up, I watched my dad make two-hour round trips three or four times a week, from Springfield, Ohio, to my mom's house in Mason, just to share a meal with me. He was there whenever my car needed fixing. He flew solo to Wales to watch me play rugby in the Junior World Cup. I'd call him every day, even if just to tell him the workout numbers I'd put up. I made that call on the day he died. We shared anything and everything. He never thought twice about doing anything, if it was for me. The memories of the trips we took are family heirlooms now, no different to me than a photo album or a grandmother's diamond-crusted wedding band. Some people have a showy way of displaying their affections. That's fine. I don't trust it, though. It seems staged. My dad and I expressed our love frequently, but quietly and without show. We weren't big on "I love yous" on the phone or buying gifts for each other at the appropriate times. He'd say those gestures were "a given." When your actions are genuine expressions of love, your words don't need a stage. I miss him terribly, but I try not to dwell on that. Dwelling does no one any good. It's a waste of energy. He wouldn't want me to do it. I've tried to remember that at the important moments in my life when I wished he was there. We had an ethos, a path, whatever you want to call it. We were on it, and the only thing we didn't do was deviate from it. And so we stood on that ledge at Highland Bowl, where we had no business being, and we jumped off. In November 2008, I delivered the eulogy at my dad's funeral. I told the story of Highland Bowl, and I finished with this: "I hope if I ever become a father that I can be half the man to my son that he was to me. And to show the love he showed, which was genuine and real. A favorite quote of his that he used only when necessary--usually while we were doing some of our crazy workouts--was, 'Only the great ones can deal with the pain. I know it hurts, but can you fight through it is the question. Aight, Eb. Let's see what you got. Finish strong.'" I've dealt with the pain of losing my dad by living a life he'd be proud of. One of these days I'll go back to Highland Bowl, hopefully with a son or daughter of my own. We'll share the heirloom. My dad's short life was a raucous novel, notable for its well-lived moments, not for the number of pages turned. He finished strong. As for the both of us? We lived, man. We lived. Excerpted from Finish Strong: A Father's Code and a Son's Path by Nate Ebner, Paul Daugherty All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
