Street Tough -- Her Knee Is A Wreck. The Season's On Hold. But America's Best Skier Expects To Be Front And Center For The 1998 Olympics.

ONCE A YEAR, HEAT OCCUPIED the valley like gloom. Prospects for wages fell. Breezes refused to blow. Ron and Dee Street, resourceful and in love, saw a solution in the nearby mountains. So in the summer of 1970, the Streets left home.

To a mule, they strapped their 3-year-old son Baba, a bag of brown rice, a pressure cooker, a guitar and a canvas tent from Sears. They planned to make do for several weeks with whatever amount of mushrooms, trout and grouse the woods provided while they waited for their unemployment checks. They did not expect their lives to change.

During the ascent, the mule lost its footing, nearly skidding off a ledge. Ron snatched Baba off the animal's back, handed the child to Dee, and by the stubbornness of his grip on the mule's lead, managed to keep himself and the mule from plummeting over a cliff. That day, Gravity granted Ron and Dee the privilege of meeting their daughter.

They conceived in the mountains of Idaho's Sawtooth Range, at 9,000 feet, as Ron bragged later. The nameless child arrived on April 4, 1971, born at 6,000 feet in a town called Triumph, near Sun Valley, so small it is not on most maps of the state. The baby girl took her first breath in the primitive but spotless cottage her family lived in.

Ron and Dee once considered naming their son Juan Wayne Street but were persuaded by friends to spare the boy from the pun. He became Roland Wayne Street, Ron's full name, but is Baba to everyone

who knows him. He voiced the name while still a babbling baby. Naming the girl required more thought. She loved to play peekaboo; Ron and Dee were fond of a town they passed through while eloping, the town of Picabo, a beauty mark on the lava beds of the Snake River plain. At 2, baby girl Street got a name.

PICABO STREET IS AMERICA'S most famous skier, its best downhill racer, and winner of the past two World Cup downhill championships for women, her sport's highest level of competition. She could win the slalom championship, too, if she practiced, but making turns bores her. Speed thrills her. Life at 80 miles per hour, she said, is serene, orderly. Though the rest of the world rushes by, she is in complete control. Regular time, like buying a sweater or pausing at a stop sign, drives her crazy.

At the moment she has only regular time.

"The rest of my body is 100 percent capable," Street said, meaning everything except her left knee. "There are a lot of things I can do with the rest of my body."

The season barely had begun last month in Vail, Colo., when her knee came apart during a practice run for a World Cup downhill race. Street approached Pepi's Face, the last and steepest portion of the course, eight-tenths of a second ahead of the fastest time of the day. So much speed. It sent her so high into the air she did not recognize the ground beneath her, and all ability to gauge the terrain left her.

Her knee was unable to absorb the impact of her landing. She felt a pop, then a shift, then an intense burn. She slid for 200 yards before a safety net caught her. She had the presence of mind to roll on her back and keep her one attached ski, the left, elevated so it would not twist during her violent, uncontrolled descent.

"I felt like a cartoon," Street said, comparing her flight to the many taken by Wile E. Coyote in her delayed realization that earth had betrayed her.

In a strange coincidence, she flies over the edge of Pepi's Face in her television commercial for Nike, wherein she declares the "wind howls because it knows it has to race me."

She injured the same knee in 1989 but since then has walked away from her crashes. Teammates had come to think of her as invincible. She tended to think so, too.

Her friend, former racer Muffie Davis, visited her the day of the crash, smiling from her wheelchair. Davis is a paraplegic. Years ago, she lost control on a race course and hit a tree.

"It made me think," Street said, "as I'm lying here with my knee all bummed out, that I ain't got it so bad. I thought about her (Davis) when I was getting my tests done. This could be so much worse."

In fact, the prognosis is good. She walked almost immediately on her bad knee, against her doctor's advice. She underwent surgery a week after the crash. She was told to expect a recovery time of six months, which she chooses to interpret as six months maximum. She expects to be on the snow before June, winning races again in the all-important 1997-'98 Olympic season.

In the meantime, Street will answer fan mail, learn to play the piano, construct her website, go to Maui to get a tan, watch a Portland Trailblazer game, and generally enjoy being home in the hills west of Portland, where she recently purchased a house on a half-acre.

"I look at this as time out," she said. "Time to get a handle on my career and image and plot out a plan of attack for the next two years. I'm going to spend some time on what I've accomplished. I've never been able to sit down and gloat."

AMERICA LOVES the individual, so perhaps that is why it loves Picabo, pretty and freckle-faced and, assuming she qualifies after her rehabilitation, destined to be the most visible American athlete in the upcoming Winter Olympics.

"Americans are strong individuals," said U.S. women's ski-team coach Herwig Demschar, who used to coach the Austrian women. "It makes coaching them more fun."

Street, an American, dominates a sport dominated by Europeans, a dangerous, macho sport. Unlike tennis, golf, gymnastics or figure skating, skiing does not tend to make its women famous, or at least its American women. Remember Andrea Mead Lawrence, Gretchen Fraser, Debbie Armstrong, Cristin Cooper or Tamara McKinney? You shouldn't. Though among the best skiers America has produced, their names sound only vaguely familiar.

A poll, Street was told, conducted by Reebok in Boston, named her the most popular female athlete among inner-city teenagers. But Reebok's competitor, Nike, mined the opportunity. She is the only female athlete signed by Nike Sports Management, an arm of the giant shoe company. It manages, among others, Ken Griffey Jr., NBA stars Scottie Pippen and Alonzo Mourning, and NFL running back Ki-Jana Carter.

Nike's proven ability to divine star potential guided the company to Street, volleyball-playing model Gabrielle Reece, tennis champion Monica Seles, basketball players Sheryl Swoopes and Lisa Leslie, and sprinter Jackie Joyner-Kersee. All filmed television commercials with Nike or have a signature shoe. (Street endorses something called an Air Skeek.)

Yet none of these women are fixtures of American imagination. The icons of sport are abundant but almost exclusively male. Consider how profoundly the images of Muhammad Ali, Michael Jordan and Babe Ruth play in our subconscious.

The New York Times recently compiled a gallery of female icons that included a glut of actresses, singers, models, brides and one Jenny McCarthy, who attained the list by posing for Playboy magazine and hosting a game show on MTV. Of the 50 or so names dropped, only one belonged to an athlete, former Olympian Babe Didrikson Zaharias, a name most ESPN addicts would have trouble recalling.

The sports world includes plenty of successful women, strong women and fast women. It has had few that transcend their sport, though Billie Jean King comes to mind. She is a woman who beat Bobby Riggs and demanded equal tournament purses for men and women. Largely because of her, tennis is the only sport that profits both sexes equally.

Street, though, seems special. She possesses the potential to become something bigger than the sum of her trophies, to lead culture rather than follow it.

"I see it as a responsibility," she said. "It's a tremendous opportunity for me with Generation Xers who are in desperate need of the right message. To be a role model is very natural for me."

STILL, THE VOID BEFORE her is as large as the one she flew into last December in Vail, the outcome just as unforeseeable. Sports have put women in the limelight but also account for an alarming number of tormented souls.

Jennifer Capriati, teen tennis wonder, became a mug shot in a drug bust; Tonya Harding, a blue-collar ice princess, turned out to be a thug; Nancy Kerrigan skated at the ball as Cinderella, then ungratefully voiced her boredom at Disneyland; Carling Bassett could beat Chris Evert with one hand and was so beautiful she could be a model, before an eating disorder strangled her career; Martina Navratilova, the best ever, never got her due because she was mannish. The strange standards applied to female sports stardom - we seem to pounce on anything less than perfection - beg for someone like Street.

She is powerful, loud, righteous. She appeared on "Sesame Street" with Elmo but also took skater Debi Thomas to the rack in the "American Gladiators" TV competition.

Her message: "Be true to yourself. The bottom line is to have a good time, to do something that stimulates you and to follow your heart."

Street is far from being an icon. She lacks a cause. More accurately, at 25, she is her cause, making her a perfect spokesman for a generation criticized for being self-absorbed. She has the tools to lead: independence, an unconventional upbringing, a desire to command an audience, fame, an indelible persona.

"It's a cool name to start with and she has the personality of the name," said Robin Carr-Locke, who promotes Nike's female athletes. "She has an incredible amount of energy and is the most accessible of our athletes. She wants to be a role model to young girls and is willing to do the work. She's the kind of celebrity you don't hear about anymore, the kind that likes to be famous."

Street is a true child of the West, more intuitive than intellectual, roughly mannered, direct, resistant if not immune to pretense. She is the American heroine as earthy, gangsta'-rappin', iron-pumping, club-hopping, self-made, girl-millionaire skier who grew up barefoot in the mountains.

PICABO WAS THE CHILD of counterculturalists. People called them hippies. Her parents called themselves adventurers. For a year, they lived out of a van, which they drove all over the country before arriving in Idaho. In mechanized America, he carved stone and she taught music.

They thought nothing of living for a year, with their two young children, on a train and out of knapsacks in Mexico and Guatemala. The Streets befriended locals on trains by sharing their fruit and letting them put makeup and lipstick on Picabo.

Once a year, the Streets drove to New Orleans for the city's annual jazz festival, if only to let their children know that black people existed and counteract the effects of growing up around a "white, yuppie ski resort," Ron Street said.

At home in Triumph, the kids learned to cook on a woodstove because that's all there was. They were given the task of making kindling for the stove, which presented a dilemma. The thinner the kindling, the easier the fire caught, but the more it hurt when they got spanked with the sticks they spent hours splitting.

They grew their hair as long as they liked but were forbidden to reach across the table or chew their food noisily. The Streets had chickens, ducks, rabbits, pigs and a garden, but no television. The family lived in one room and learned to like it. Childhood fun for Picabo was body-surfing in the river, herding sheep and eventually skiing. She was baptized a downhiller, told from the beginning to ski the fall line.

"I would tell her always to ski straight down," Ron said. "If you stop on the side of the hill, you'll get hit. You don't stop in the middle of a freeway and you don't stop in a ski run."

Young Picabo feared nothing, whether laughing wildly through barrel rolls in a crop duster at age 8, or winning the state BMX bicycle championship against the boys despite her concussion, broken rib and the tire mark on the back of her shirt, or having to be restrained from leaning over the edge of the Grand Canyon, or drinking a bottle of lamp oil, or beating up kids who made fun of her name.

The apparent permissiveness that ruled her childhood was cleverly disguised. In truth, her parents extended a great deal of control over their kids.

"Our strategy was to get totally involved," Ron said. "Put them to sleep and be there when they wake up. If you want to enjoy your kids, you got to be there."

They were there when Picabo got drunk for the first time at age 10. It was her parents' anniversary party. Her mother filled Picabo's glass with champagne as many times as her daughter asked. Picabo got good and drunk, threw up and has "never been much of a drinker" since.

Discipline a la Street.

The prospect of her as role model is so intriguing because in some ways she is what nice folks fear. She drives fast - her all-wheel-drive, Audi S6 "redlines at seven grand and tops out at 175" (miles per hour) - she is uninterested in college (she earned a GED in lieu of a high-school diploma), she finds her muse in the late rapper Tupac Shakur, she swears liberally and she often closes down dance clubs.

She does not censor her disdain, be it for a teammate, manager or her own father, for his ability to relate random, unending stories.

She will, for example, tell you she thinks Powerbars are gross and so will never endorse them, but uses Chapstick all the time and would say so even if the company weren't paying her thousands of dollars. She will tell you that when she first met teammate and main rival Hilary Lindh, she thought she was uptight and basically a drag. She will tell you that she just doesn't like her manager at Nike. She will tell you that upon meeting basketball's Shaquille O'Neal, he seemed to be a "12-year-old making millions of dollars, without a clue." And she will tell you that just by watching her body language on TV, she knows model Cindy Crawford probably stayed up all night, hates her hair and purposely wore that short skirt to draw attention away from it.

THE BEST SKIERS, says Demschar, the coach, simply ski the straightest line down the course, though an intricate set of decisions and maneuvers are required to remain on that line. But in the final hundredths of a second, the fastest skiers have to be lucky, too. That's why, before a race, Street's technicians perform a voodoo ceremony, waving jawbones over her skis before giving them to her.

Applying the right amount of wax to a pair of skis, with brushstrokes of the correct length, and applying a finish with the correct number of passes of a metal file, is largely guesswork. No technician can perfectly account for snow conditions at race time. No one sees the future.

So it was 26 years ago in a gentle summer rain, beneath the slow leak in an old canvas tent, high in the Sawtooth National Forest, that the best skier in the world happened by accident. Ron and Dee planned to have only one child. Birth control failed to prevent Picabo.

"She's been a lot to handle from the moment we found out she was coming," Dee Street said. "It turned out pretty good."

Hugo Kugiya is a Pacific Magazine staff reporter. Harley Soltes is the magazine's staff photographer.