Top Ten Nick Paumgarten Pieces: #4 "The Descent of Man"

Photo by Immo Klink for Nick Paumgarten's "The Descent of Man"

My #4 pick is Paumgarten’s recent masterpiece, “The Descent of Man” (April 29, 2019), an account of his attendance at the 2019 Hahnenkamm, a World Cup ski event held annually in Kitzbühel, Austria. Did I say “attendance”? “Immersion” would be more accurate. Paumgarten walks the treacherous course, eats with the U.S. team at their training table, rides in the back of the team’s supply truck, visits the old wooden starter shed (“the Hahnenkamm’s emotional epicenter, the germ of the mayhem down in the valley”), skis a substantial part of the race course (“As the pitch fell away, my edges failed to bite. I’d been told to stay off the racing line, and stick to the softer snow on the fringe, but I couldn’t really see any snow, as I understood snow to be”), watches the racers’ training runs, and visits the workshop of Christian Steinbach, “the inventor of the system, now all but universally implemented in competition, of injecting water into the snow.”

On race day, he hikes up the course, outside the fence, to observe the action:

I worked my way up the course, outside the fence. From towers of speakers came the sounds of hair metal from the eighties and an announcer shouting sharply in German. Halfway up the Zielschuss, I passed through the Matthias Mayer fan club (orange parkas) and the Christian Walder fan club (black parkas), before finding myself in the company of the Ski Club St. Martin, enthusiasts from Switzerland, who were passing around a flask. Austrian troops snowplowed down the fringes of the course, to push aside fresh snow, and the public-address system began to play the national anthem, as the Swiss jeered and waved flags. 

Then, after the race, he checks out the street party in town:

Stately town houses and hotels in mint green, terra-cotta, mustard, ochre, and pink. A fourteenth-century Gothic church. Bogner, Moncler, Lacoste, Louis Vuitton. As a day-drinking backdrop, it was almost comically grand. “Sweet Caroline,” not even the Neil Diamond version, seemed to pop up on every block, a Whack-a-Mole of song. Bands of young men in red-and-white Dr. Seuss hats erupted in drinking chants. Swiss men in white smocks marched in formation, swinging giant cowbells called Trychlers—each bell weighing more than forty pounds—with deadpan expressions, holding them at arm’s length in front of their privates.

True to form, he stops in at a bar – the Londoner Pub, “the town’s epicentre of excess”:

Inside, it was hard to move—or breathe, if you were accustomed to smokeless bars. (Kelley Altick, Bryce Bennett’s girlfriend, had told me that morning, “If you go into the Londoner, you’ll have to burn everything you own.”) A clutch of women danced on a platform in one corner. “Get Down on It,” “99 Luftballons,” “Summer of ’69”—the patrons, whose average age seemed about half mine, sang along. I forced my way into an eddy by the bar and ordered a beer.

He attends a high society bash at the Stanglwirt Hotel (“At a certain point, I found myself trapped in a vortex of flashbulbs, loden, jawlines, and boobs”). 

Paumgarten is like a human GoPro; he sees, he records. His pieces are verbal records of his experience. They’re marvels of description, none more so than “The Descent of Man.”