As those of you who own digital watches are already aware, the winter months are approaching, which means now is the time to start planning that ski vacation.

I understand that some of you may be reluctant to plan ski vacations because you’ve seen the snippet of film at the beginning of “Wide World of Sports” wherein the Agony of Defeat is depicted by an unfortunate person who loses control of himself going off the end of a ski-jump launcher and various organs come flying out of his body. If you’re concerned that something like this could happen to you, here’s a statistic from the National Ski Resort Association that should be very reassuring: the so-called castorbean tick, which sucks blood from sheep, will respond to a temperature change of as little as 0.5 degrees centigrade! Wait a Minute, there seems to be a mistake here: that reassuring statistic actually comes from the Encyclopedia Britannica. Perhaps someone in our reading audience can come up with something more closely related to skiing safety.

Meanwhile, the rest of you should decide what kind of skiing you want to engage in. One option is cross-country skiing, which has become very popular in recent years because it is highly “aerobic,” a term health experts use to describe how dull an activity is. What you do is find a patch of country and slog across on skis for no apparent reason in a manner very much reminiscent of a herd of cattle, except of course that cattle have the excuse that if they stop, armed men will ride up and kick them with pointed boots. A more fun option is downhill skiing, which is when a machine takes you up a hill and you have to get down.

Whatever kind of skiing you decide to do, your next important task—in fact, your most important task—is to make sure you have proper ski equipment. When your great grandfather was a boy, of course, he’d simply take two barrel staves and tie them to his feet. This could well be an indication that there is some kind of congenital mental illness in your family, and I urge you to look into it immediately.

Next you’ll want to select a ski resort. The important thing here is to decide whether or not you are rich. If you are, you’ll want to ski at an exclusive resort, the kind your congressperson goes to, where you have to examine your pillow before you go to bed at night lest you wind up with a complimentary miniature Swiss chocolate lodged in your ear. But even if you belong to the middle or lower class, there are plenty of newer resorts with names like “Large Rugged Wolf Mountain Ski Resort and Driving Range” that entrepreneurs have constructed in places such as South Carolina by piling industrial sludge on top of discarded appliances. just before you leave home, you should call the resort and ask for a frank and honest appraisal of the slope conditions, because it would make little sense to go and spend money if the resort operator did not frankly and honestly feel it would be worth your while. Most resorts use the Standardized Ski Resort Four-Stage Slope Condition Description System:

“REALLY INCREDIBLY SUPERB”: This means the entire slope is encased in a frozen substance of some kind.

“REALLY SUPERB”: This means there are large patches of bare industrial sludge, but persons with good motor skills can still slide all the way to the bottom.

“SUPERB”: This means persons wishing to get to the bottom will have to remove their skis at several points and clamber over rusted dishwashers with sharp exposed edges.

“EXCELLENT”: This means it is July.

OK! You’ve reached the resort, and now it’s finally time to “hit the slopes.” Not so fast! First attach skis of approximately equal length to each of your feet, discarding any leftovers, and check the bindings to make sure they release automatically just before your ankles break. Now grasp your poles and try to stand up. We’ll wait right here.

(Three-hour pause.)

Ha ha! It’s not as easy as it looks, is it? I mean, here are all these people around you, and they can do it, and their kids can do it, really little kids, babies practically, skiing past you without a care in the world, and there you are, thrashing around on your back in the snow right smack in front of the ski lodge, making an even bigger fool of yourself than Richard Nixon did the time he resigned and made that speech about his mother! Ha ha! Years from now you’ll look back on this and laugh, but for now you can lash out with your poles and try to inflict puncture wounds on the other skiers’ legs.

Now that you’re comfortable with the equipment, summon several burly ski patrol persons and have them carry you over to the chairlift. While you’re riding up to the summit, you’ll have an opportunity to admire the spectacular sweeping panoramic view of the little tiny wire that you and the chairs and the other skiers are all hanging from. it looks far too frail to hold all that weight, doesn’t it? But you can rest assured that it was designed and built on the basis of countless careful measurements and calculations done by scientists and engineers who are not currently up there hanging from the wire with you.

I have come up with a sure-fire concept for a hit television show, which would be called “A Live Celebrity Gets Eaten by a Shark.” To help you understand why I think this show would be a success, let me give you a little back ground.

The human race has been fascinated by sharks for as long as I can remember. just like the bluebird feeding its young, or the spider struggling to weave its perfect web, or the buttercup blooming in spring, the shark reveals to us yet another of the infinite and wonderful facets of nature, namely the facet that can bite your head off. This causes us humans to feel a certain degree of awe.

I know what I’m talking about here, because I once had—this is the truth—an encounter with a shark. It was in 1973, in the Bahamas, where I was sailing with a group of friends. One day, we were anchored near a little island that had a vast shallow sandy-bottomed lagoon next to it, maybe a foot deep, and a friend of mine named Richard and I were wading around in there, and lo and behold we saw this shark. it was a small shark, less than two feet long. The only conceivable way it could have been a threat to a human being would be if it somehow got hold of, and learned to use, a gun.

So Richard and I decided to try to catch it. With a great deal of strategy and effort and shouting, we managed to maneuver the shark, over the course of about a half-hour, to a sort of corner of the lagoon, so that it had no way to escape other than to flop up onto the land and evolve. Richard and I were inching toward it, sort of crouched over, when all of a sudden it turned around and—I can still remember the sensation I felt at that moment, primarily in the armpit area—headed right straight toward us.

Many people would have panicked at this point. But Richard and I were not “many people.” We were experienced waders, and we kept our heads. We did exactly what the textbook says you should do when you’re unarmed and a shark that is nearly two feet long turns on you in water up to your lower calves: We sprinted I would say 600 yards in the opposite direction, using a sprinting style such that the bottoms of our feet never once went below the surface of the water. We ran all the way to the far shore, and if we had been in a Warner Brothers cartoon you would have seen these two mounds of sand racing across the island until they bonked into trees and coconuts fell onto their heads.

So I know the fascination of the shark, and thus I have been particularly interested in all these shark documentaries on television. You’ve probably noticed them. Any given night, you tune into a channel at random and odds are you’ll see divers hurling themselves into shark-infested waters. The narrator always claims this is for Scientific Research, which is blatant horse waste. I mean, if that were true, you’d figure that after two or three thousand documentaries, they’d know all they needed to know about sharks, and they’d move on to another variety of sea life. But they don’t, because they know darned good and well that the viewers aren’t going to remain glued to their seats to watch divers paddling around in waters infested by, for example, clams.