Hilary Meyerson

So we went out for our first ski day of the season. Rough snow, high winds, pure bliss. Ski days are some of the purest, truest family time we have. I’ve been neglecting the blog, so I’m posting something I wrote a couple of years ago. Now I’m off to dry off the skis.

Ski Days, Redux

Twenty years ago, I fell in love. A suburban girl, I spent four years at college in rural Vermont where the winter entertainment, besides copious drinking and complaining about the cold, was skiing. I got a student season pass to Mad River Glen and discovered the joys of going downhill in a rush. I enjoyed the camaraderie of skiers and being part of a crazy social club for which only requirement is the senseless desire to get up at O-dark-thirty to spend a day sliding downhill in the freezing cold. But most of all, I experienced something I hadn’t yet in my almost twenty years: a sense of solitary contentment, a sudden consciousness that I could experience joy alone while doing something that I loved. When I was schussing downhill, there were a few moments in a day that transcended mere pleasure, the ones when I was conscious of a rare and fleeting sensation as gravity, my body, and my skis worked together on just this side of control. In these brief moments, I would laugh out loud for sheer pleasure, heedless of anyone else.

I was not a particularly good skier, but possessed a recklessness that brought inclusion with a group of skiers far better than me and caught the eye of a cute ski instructor at the college’s small ski bowl. We piled into barely functioning cars, careening up and back the slippery roads leading to the mountain, spending the drive time recounting spills, comparing runs, telling fish stories of snowy exploits. We ratcheted up our bindings with the screwdrivers chained to the lift line posts, then took to the slopes, our skis all but welded to our boots. With my skiing buddies, I embraced all types of terrain: the trees, the steeps, the downright stupid, heedless of injury potential. My skis were 185cms, two narrow slices of arrogance that towered over my 5’1” frame, but went downhill in a hurry. I loved the group experience, the nod of acknowledgement to another raccoon-eyed student in the library or chatting at night with someone in the dorm I’d shared a lift with earlier in the day.

But as much as I loved the group experience, it was the solitary moments that helped define my developing identity. It was when I was briefly alone, at a distance from my fellow skiers that I felt most like myself. I nodded knowingly through my philosophy classes during the morning as we discussed philosophy and the self, but it was on the afternoons on the slopes that I had anything approaching understanding of it. In my poetry classes, we parsed through the words of Yeats, and when we got to “how can we know the dancer from the dance?” I thought not of ballerinas, but of myself carving turns, my body and skis moving together more gracefully than my awkward legs could ever do alone.

As for the cute ski instructor guy, well, Reader, I married him.  We moved out to Seattle and began that real life with jobs and health insurance and mortgages.  We didn’t get out skiing as much as we liked.  When we did, we were out of shape and out of practice, our gear out of date.  One day in 1998, on a rare ski day, I took a tumble. My bindings were still set to “idiocy” from my screwdriver antics years before, and would not release without a sledgehammer.  The sound of my anterior cruciate ligament snapping was like a gunshot.  That was the end of skiing for a few more years.  When knee surgery and physical therapy were finished and I was pronounced slope-worthy, I became pregnant.  A kid.  Then another.  Then several years of the juggling of infants and toddlers, wonderful years, but a time when a good night’s sleep and children who can use the toilet take far more headspace than skiing.  These are the also the years of true selflessness, a loss of self, where it is easiest to forget you were ever anything but a parent, that you ever had an identity separate from the family sphere.

Finally, my husband and I decided to brave the mountains again with the kids, three and five years old, in tow.  After an almost six year hiatus, we emerged Rip Van Winkle-like into a brave new world of skiing.  We rented equipment, my 185’s long since gone, probably still in the storage unit of our first apartment. Acquiring new equipment was humbling and confusing.  Stumpy curved skis! Helmets for adults! We mocked the skis at first, then made a few turns on them, so effortless it felt like cheating.  We scoffed at the helmets, then changed our minds as we were nearly taken out by several snowboarders, several hundred pounds of teenage exuberance and adrenaline.  We scoffed at the helmets, then changed our minds after nearly being taken out by some crazy college kids on snowboards. There was something vaguely familiar about them, but regardless, skiing without helmets now seemed as prudent as driving blindfolded, a quaint throwback to the days our parents piled six kids into back of a station wagon, sans carseats, cigarettes glowing out the window on the way to the ski area.

We didn’t bother with poles, as they would only be a hindrance as we slowly followed our skiing progeny, scooping them off the slope and setting them back on their skis over and over.  Poles only made it more difficult to lift bundled children on to lifts that hit them square in the center of their back.  On lifts and in lines, we doled out candy, dropping gummy bears into their mouths, open and expectant like baby birds.  We struggled through lost gloves, pinchy goggles, outgrown ski pants.  In those days, we’d finally make it to the top of the mountain with our many-layered children only to hear the dreaded words: “I have to go potty.”  We paid the usurious prices for full day lift tickets never to even get off the beginner lift, never to move at more than a glacial pace.   In short, we muddled through two seasons of a very expensive and cumbersome sport known as nearly-skiing.  Like skiing, but twice as expensive and with half the fun. I was as far from my skiing self as I had been in the slopeless years.

Nevertheless, we soldiered on. One day toward the end of the season, the weather brought an unexpected gift of snow. After checking the ski report, we began to prepare for another family ski day. Somehow, the kids managed to gather their own clothing and gear and lay them out the night before, chattering excitedly about the upcoming day. In the morning, everyone remembered to use the bathroom before piling into the car in the still-dark morning. The two-hour ride to the mountain went by in a blink. We’ve fallen into a routine of reading stories and playing car games that make the time fly. Once at the mountain, we stowed our sack lunch in our usual spot and joined the line for the high-speed chair, bypassing the line at the bunny lift. My daughter raised her arms at the precise moment, and I lifted her up onto the chairlift, a practiced duet. My son sat next to my husband, adjusting his goggles, lobbying for a harder run, rather than the long green warm-up run I insist we start with every week. Candy was delivered to small mouths, a habit I’ve maintained, mostly because I like candy. As we approached the top, we swung up the safety bar and unloaded swiftly, without the tears or spills on the part of parents or children.  Even a year ago, all four of us would have been ready for a break.

We stood at the top for a minute, then wordlessly slipped into our follow-the-leader routine. My husband went first, skiing with the same distinctive form that I can pick out from any lift, the same form that drew my eye twenty years ago.  Soon he was far below me, carefully carving out exaggerated turns, laboring under the illusion that the kids were watching him and attempting to emulate his actions. I could see him about to be overtaken by my son who was in a full tuck, poles under his arms, his skis chattering straight down the hill, as he experimented with the limits of physics as only an eight-year-old boy can. Trailing them at a distance, my daughter was cruising, searching the trees on the trail’s edge, looking for a path into the woods that she loves. I watched her unconsciously shift her weight as she turned, her small form moving gracefully. She has a natural affinity that I never possessed, and I know that she will be a far better skier than me.

Watching them, I realized we’d reached a new point in our family dynamics.  My days of enjoying the shared experience of skiing were back. I could see the whole day ahead of me. At lunch, we’d be replaying the inevitable crash of my son, soon after he passed his surprised father. My daughter would gush about the waist-deep powder, and we’d respond that it was only knee-deep to us. We’d eat the traditional Fig Newtons on the drive home, and the kids would fall asleep and then my husband and I would have time to talk, the dashboard-lit car a setting more intimate and familiar to us than a candlelit restaurant. Standing at the top of that mountain, watching them, was one of those rare moments when I realized that I was currently living a day that I’d be revisiting again and again throughout my life, a lifetime memory freshly-minted.

But first I had to get down. My family was far ahead, so I had to pick up speed to catch them. I took my usual spot at the rear. No one needed scraping off the snow right now, so I concentrated on myself. I made a mental note to buy some poles in the near future, then pushed off and picked my own line down the slope. The only sound I could hear was my skis carving through snow. I made a few good turns, then fell into a rhythm, turn, turn, turn. Muscle has a long memory, I thought. Then I stopped thinking and focused on the skiing. Suddenly, I was twenty years old again, and in love, and in that moment, there was only me, just a deep satisfying sense of self as everything else fell away. Picking up speed, I felt the old thrill. I laughed out loud, the sound echoing off the snow.