Saturday, August 29, 2009

I feel...different

What's happening to me lately? I've gone from a mountain man willing to forgo lucrative pay for ski town wages in order to live close to my dreams. It makes a nice slogan for Cloudveil, but a tough life for those working to make seasonal service job income match up with destination vacation location cost of living. But a shadowed clause in the basic contract of "work for subsistence wages and we'll give you a ski pass", represents a gaping hole for the majority of those working in ski towns: no employer-sponsored health insurance with your seasonal job.
So back to me. I live in Jackson. Manage 6 employees as one part of an operation with over 40. Make less than $20K a year with no health insurance. Still, I ski (as we all do here), climb, paraglide and bike and get stupid drunk while building insane pump tracks in the back yard.
So here we are, living for love instead of for work, and when the inevitable injuries happen, we're hosed. Some of us have insurance, but it doesn't cover much, and if your injury takes you out of work, you might lose it all together. At least one injury this summer forced the victim to leave town and move back in with his parents. You'd think people around here would be interested in securing some kind of reform to help them get more affordable insurance. At least, that's my thinking.
So I organized a couple meetings through BarackObama.com, Healthcare for America Now, and Facebook. I called my senators and rep. I wrote letters and signed online petitions. I post constantly on FB the articles I find here and there and have become a crusader in "Hands off My Health" -a group that is dedicated to saying "NO" to everything proposed by the Obama administration.
That's what I've been up to. Not entirely changing the focus from mountain adventures, but adding the perspective of politically active mountain town people who are concerned about the world beyond their own idealistic vale. Not many blogs out there cover a political issue, except some of the conservative quips on Wildsnow.com, so if you find any that straddle the gap between active lifestyle and politically active, please let me know.