Wayne Sheldrake’s new memoir is less a story about his skiing exploits than a soulful and humorous adventure about discovering what is most important in our lives and about life itself. In Instant Karma: The Heart and Soul of a Ski Bum, Sheldrake draws upon his life lessons and journeys which are tied to the mountains, landscape, and people he treasures most. This extremely well written title has passages that read like poetry while conveying both a gripping life story and its resulting soulful philosophy.

The narration begins with a history of key moments in Sheldrake’s early life and his immersion into the ski bum lifestyle. This introduction, interspersed with key skiing recollections generally involving bone breaking accidents (Sheldrake manages to break his legs three times and his pelvis once), serves as the main memoir aspect of the book as we learn about the author’s situational hardships including excessive family dysfunction. Most notable amongst Sheldrake’s hardships is a defective heart valve that sidelines him from his most treasured passion of skiing. The heart valve issue puts him in a heart surgery ward alongside people twice his age.

“Why wasn’t I here when I was twenty-two” I asked Larry wistfully. “If you had been, you’d be a different person now.”

The ski bum’s journey defines the fantasy most skiers might realize if they could let go of their everyday lives and commitments. But most skiers are not taken by the romance and allure of the ski bum lifestyle. Most skiers understand the amount of sacrifice and commitment this short term oriented hardscrabble lifestyle choice entails. The choices we make and the paths we choose shape who we are as individuals right down to our souls. Sheldrake made his ski bum decision with remarkable clarity and purpose for both the lifestyle and personal aspects entailed. And he would also later leave that lifestyle with the same remarkable clarity and purpose.

“The wilderness had come to me. I was submerged in it. Call it lunar solitude: when you know that no one else knows where you are and you’re seeing something you know no one else is seeing. Instantly, you realize your smallness, realize that the world is huge and insurmountable. It’s possible to fall in love with this seclusion, for it is in these accidental moments that you understand the joy and pathos of human memory, that yours is the only one of its kind.”

The writing in Instant Karma is exceptionally top notch and high quality. The author’s vivid descriptions, narrations, and comic dialogs are brilliant. Both skiers and non-skiers alike will delight in Sheldrake’s amazing writing style. But skiers will especially enjoy passages detailing such time honored traditions and compulsions as obsessing over the first snow storm of the year, watching the radar loop and tracking storms, and prepping gear en route to first tracks of the season. Epic powder descents are detailed in vivid prose combining the physical and spiritual aspects of skiing into stunning paragraphs that, much like those epic powder runs, conclude all too quickly. The book’s only down fall is an exceedingly long passage (a quarter of the length of the book) narrating a rather humorous trip to ski sand dunes. Sand dune skiing aside, Instant Karma is one heck of a page turner with a wonderfully told soulful story and is highly recommended for all audiences.