ever-fixed mark

I’m already behind schedule. Where was I? Skiing!

So, sometime after Christmas I decided that I wasn’t going to let another winter pass without getting the whole family on skis. Husband and I like to ski — we met in a ski club in Chicago, in fact — and we’ve missed it. Sadly, neither of the boys was very enthusiastic about skiing, and Aitch outright refused to take lessons. I decided to concentrate my efforts on Minor, who was a bit more tractable. Reader, I bribed him. Over the course of five ski lessons the kid ate so many nacho cheese Doritos that his sclera turned orange. Finally, weary of standing in the rental line, I bought Minor his own skis, and as soon as Aitch saw them he decided he wanted to ski, too.

Well, once Aitch twigged to the concept — speed! bumps! Teenage ski instructors, like Gods walking among us! — this huge self-satisfied smile appeared, as if he were thinking, “I have found my métier, and it is SNOW.” Oh, he was a total diva, and refused to take direction from anyone, and threw a fit when the ski school wanted to move him up a level, because he wanted to stay with the hot instructor, but the kid could ski. He basically taught himself; he fooled around— first pizza, then french fries, then crouching at full speed; now edging, now flat-footed, now skiing backward down the hill, now leaning back his butt perched on his skis— until he found what worked. He distinguished not between downhill and freestyle; it was all kif-kif to him. Within a few weeks he was carving parallel turns (wide-set, but real parallel turns with edges) down black diamonds and doing tricks in the terrain park. At one point he went off a jump and over the side of the slope into a ravine; his skis came off and none of the adults noticed he was missing until he had climbed out of the ditch and walked down the mountain. His ski name was “Hot Dog.”

Minor’s progress was more stately. His ski name was “Ketchup.” At one point Husband begged me to ski with him, because “no human can ski that slowly.” Minor, in fact, skis a lot like me, making numerous, slow, cautious turns, resorting to snowplow in hairy terrain. (My ski name is “Escargot.”) At first, he rarely experimented with anything he hadn’t learned in class; as Shakespeare might have said, he skied by th’ book. He was a surprisingly good sport, though. Minor is doughy, uncoordinated, and overly sensitive to changes in temperature, spatial orientation, and atmospheric pressure, but he was wonderfully game. When Aitch was intimidated by the chairlift, he begged to go first (”I want to go on the snow rollercoaster!”). A few times we ventured beyond his abilities, taking him on longer or harder runs than he could handle, and he frequently fell and ended up crying on the mountain. Yet the next time we said, “Hey, you want to try that slope again?” he was up for it, as long as we threw in a package of Doritos. He may be the only child who ever gained weight skiing.

On our last weekend, we had the two boys ski a few green runs together, and as Minor followed Aitch he started imitating his movements. Something clicked, and he started skiing better and faster. We took him to the top of the mountain, and after a few runs I was suddenly the slowest skier in the family.

The northeast got a huge dumping of snow mid-season, which was fortunate because the snowpack lasted through the subsequent monsoon and heatwave:

If there’s anything better than spring skiing in a t-shirt with the scent of sunscreen in the air, I don’t want to know what it is.