I went to the mountains to learn how to ski. I found something much better

Snowfall swallows you in silence.

The world is transformed, its imperfections painted away.

I have many special places.

Streaming along a highway aboard a motorbike, senses sharp as a blade.

Bunkered at night in my house by the coast, a storm on the bay, the concussion of waves exploding in the darkness.

A dinner table with family, laughter, good food and wine.

I came late to the high snowy country, where I found my most special place.

Snow did not visit my childhood.

Sometimes on frosty winter mornings, in the far distance from our farm, the hump of Mount William in the Grampians shone blinding white. It launched a longing to know what snow looked like up close; what it felt like.

An introduction to winter slopes, years later, was not promising.

A girlfriend who became my wife, Fiona, persuaded me to rent skis and boots for a day at Falls Creek.

I was captivated from the moment we rode the chairlift from the carpark.

All around gaily clad lunatics hurtled down snow-robed slopes.

I yearned to be one of them.

Fiona helped me click into skis and we shuffled to a T-bar. It seemed simple enough.

Halfway up the hill, I made the mistake of looking back.

And fell off the lift.

Horrified at the gradient, collapsing as I tried to follow instructions to adopt something called a snow-plough, my first descent was accomplished mostly by sliding on my bum.

Attempting a nonchalant attitude at the bottom, I suggested Fiona return to the T-bar and enjoy a run while I spent a bit of time “getting my ski legs”, though I had no idea what that was supposed to mean.

As I stood on those shaking legs, not daring to move, my partner, distinctive in a bright red ski jacket, disappeared into cloud.

I knew she could ski – why, her parents owned a ski lodge at Thredbo when she was younger. I didn’t know she’d been a slalom and giant slalom racer, however.

Some minutes later, this goddess in a red ski jacket burst at impossible speed from the cloud, leapt from a snow bank, soared 100 metres, landed perfectly and slid to an elegant swooping stop, showering me with snow.

Altogether unmanned, I clumped to the learner slope, there to spend the day crashing into other learners and once, memorably, putting a leg either side of a steel stanchion supporting the toddlers’ Poma lift. At speed.

By the end of the day, I was unaccountably hooked on this snow business, if slightly crippled.

We bought skis and boots at a discount joint and returned to the mountains each time we had the funds to cover the ruinous cost of a day’s lift tickets.

I learnt the agony of fitting chains to the wheels of our car during snowstorms.

And yet, I was in love: mountain ash and snow gums nodded with the weight of snow as we drove high into the hills, Mount Bogong over our shoulders.

I got the hang of sliding at speed but with little style down frozen slopes, sometimes launching out of control and digging my head into a snowdrift when enthusiasm overcame skill.

Once, cocksure as only the ignorant can be, I insisted that visible foul weather at the top of a ridge would give way to splendid conditions in the valley on the other side.

Fiona said I had no idea what I was talking about – the foul weather was actually a blizzard, and a blizzard was no place for anyone with half a brain to venture.

Recklessly, I argued. She decided I should learn about blizzards and off we went.

Up high, all contact with reality went to hell. The world turned terrifying, blinding me so utterly that red dots swirled before my eyes. Wind shrieked. I could not discern whether my skis were in contact with snow or whether I was whirling upside down.

A gloved hand grasped mine. I held on. We descended and emerged from the white-out. She of the rescuing hand said nothing, which said everything.

There have been a few mountains since then. Mammoth in California. Aspen, Vail and Breckenridge in Colorado. Coronet Peak in New Zealand. Back home, Thredbo, Hotham and Perisher.

Every winter for almost two decades I have spent time with a bunch of old mates at the beautiful little Snowy Mountains village of Guthega.

A couple of years ago, a daughter and I travelled the highest road in Scotland’s Cairngorms, where the wind very nearly blew us to Norway. Later we were blessed by the sight of the Swiss Alps.

Another daughter and I travelled through Vermont USA in the winter, the cold ravaging our lungs, the snowy plains and hills as beautifully formed as a Robert Frost poem, my daughter skiing with her mother’s speed and style.

Once I awoke in the tropical heat of Solomon Islands, flew home to Canberra aboard Paul Keating’s VIP jet, leapt into my car and reached freezing Perisher Valley in time for one late afternoon ski run.

I toppled over a cornice, dislocated a shoulder and broke a metacarpal. Neither my wife nor two daughters were impressed.

Along the way, I learnt something worthwhile.

The skiing, though exciting, has never been what makes these times and places special beyond words for me.

It is waking in a mountain lodge to discover snow falling in the dawn and piling against the windows, the stillness outside bewitching.

Science tells us snow is a porous sound insulator, trapping sound waves, but find yourself in the hush after snowfall and you don’t need science to explain. It is otherworldly.

It is wandering around a mountain in the night, snow on the shoulders, the crunching of boots muffled by the new fall.

It is breathing the purity of high country air chilled by fresh snow.

It is the loveliness of it, the world’s imperfections painted away, all care swallowed by silence.

It is my special place.