Over the weekend, I stopped in at my parents’ house – I’d gone on a road trip, and I needed to return my trusty car Shadow to the carport where she lives most of the time – and as I always do when I return to the family homestead, I noticed the changes that my parents had made in my absence. It seems as though, every time I go “home,” another room’s carpeting has changed color or another beloved (but decrepit) piece of furniture has gotten its walking papers. I don’t expect Ma and Dad to maintain the house as a museum to my childhood, obviously, but occasionally I feel disoriented and wander into my brother’s bedroom (formerly mine), or drop a magazine into thin air because I’ve forgotten that there isn’t an end table there anymore.

Last night, after parking Shadow in her hutch, I walked down the driveway, and I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but something had changed. I noted the new masonry near the garage, and the prickle bushes that had finally gotten yanked out, but those renovations didn’t account for the sense that a key element was missing from the backyard. I stood outside for a few more minutes to smoke a cigarette and look around, and as I surveyed the snowy hill in back of the house, it hit me – no sled run. Every time it snowed, my brother and I had to pack snow across part of the driveway so that we could cross it in our plastic toboggans and not shred the bottom, and we complained about doing it, but after watching one of us hurtle across the driveway in a metal snow saucer and nearly perish in the resulting shower of sparks, our mother insisted on it. Long after the rest of the snow had melted, the sled run – starting at the top of the hill between two identical oak trees, veering past a sickly dogwood and through another two-tree “gate,” shooting across the hard-pack on the driveway, and terminating in the underbrush that separated our property from the neighbors’ – remained, a four-foot track of grooved ice that often hung on until March if the weather stayed cold enough. I liked our sled run. We didn’t have as steep or shriek-inducing a hill as other kids, but we liked it that way – less risk of personal injury, less huffing and puffing to clamber back up to the top in those restrictive snowpants. The gentle slope of our sled run allowed us to experiment with primitive snowboarding techniques (read: standing up in the plastic toboggan until a parent materialized to yell at us because we might break it, or our legs), as well as to strap on the wimpy little plastic “skis” we’d received as Christmas gifts. We’d whiz down the hill in the tuck position, schussing away like little Tombas, zipping over the moguls we’d spent half an hour patting into shape, and doing that Alpine Extreme expert stop at the edge of the property – and the bigger the arc of shaved snow we could carve off, the better.

Of course, the first time I visited an actual ski area and donned actual skis, I thought I’d have a pretty cinchy time of it. Hey, I’d skiied Bunting Little Gorge, maaaan – I don’t need no stinkin’ lesson! So what if the slopes at BLG required skiers to take a running start, jump into the little leather bindings, and pole madly to accrue enough momentum for Fun With A Capital “F”? Who cared if I’d never seen a lift before? Yeah, yeah, real skis measure three times the length and weigh ten times more than the ones I’d gotten used to. Whoop dee doo, I thought. And no, I couldn’t even walk in the boots – and I don’t speak metaphorically, either; after I’d pitched forward onto my face on the muddy floor of the Summit Ski Shop for the seventh time, another customer asked my mother if I’d gotten into the liquor cabinet – but I didn’t let that bother me. Once I got out on the slopes, I’d show the so-called experts a thing or two.

Fitted out with skis and poles, I headed out onto the slopes of Vernon Valley Great Gorge with the rest of the kids on my eighth-grade ski trip. Eighth-grade ski trip. Just let those words sink in for a moment . . . okay? Okay. My friends on the trip had gone on many a skiing trip with their families and knew their way around a ski slope, so even if I hadn’t wildly overestimated my abilities, I would have planned to skip the lesson, because I didn’t want to seem like a dork. Again, we should take a moment here to ponder the words “didn’t want to seem like a dork,” because falling down no fewer than eleven times on my way to the lift line didn’t exactly convince my buddies of my expert downhill credentials. Anyway, I finally got a bit of momentum going, but since I had not taken a lesson – did I mention that the lesson covered such novice-skiing essentials as slowing down, stopping, and learning to fall without bringing the entire state of New Jersey down in a tangled heap of wool hats and waxed metal? No? Well, it did, and that’s sort of important to the story – I did not know how to snowplow, so I careered not to the lift line but into it at a speed of thirty miles an hour, knocking everyone in said line to the ground in a rather nifty domino formation that I would have enjoyed a great deal had I seen it, but I didn’t, because I had landed face down in the snow and the forty-year-old man at the end of the line had fallen on my head. Once the ski patrol had gotten everyone untangled, they suggested rather forcefully that I take the lesson or consider getting the hell off of the mountain. I took the lesson.

The lesson helped – slightly. Regular readers of the page already know that I have the worst coordination of a non-legally blind person in the forty-eight contiguous states, so I learned the basics, but I had varied success in actually employing them, not least because I had so much to remember. I had real problems dealing with the ski lift. I could now approach the lift line safely, but I still couldn’t stand in it without falling down – often for no reason other than that a slight breeze had cropped up – and when the chair turned the corner and zoomed up behind me, I usually got flustered and left a piece of equipment behind. Like a ski. Or both skis. Once, I left one pole stuck in the snow and had to row down the bunny hill like a Venetian boatman. The next time, I lost the other pole while reaching for the first one and had to surf down; that worked out pretty well for me, and I wanted to ditch the poles, but the rental shop wouldn’t let me. More than once, I disembarked from the lift, swerved down the little ramp, and promptly fell in a heap, the better to get run over by every other skier coming off the chairs.

Even if I got off the lift in one piece, I, uh, had a few problems. To say that I fell down frequently understates the case quite a bit. True, I fell down with operatic flair, but it hurt, and people laughed, and sometimes I got cursed at, because whenever someone behind me called out, “On your left!” in order to pass, I instinctively moved – where else? – to my left, causing a collision that generally wound up with me at the bottom of a short stack of other skiers, all of whom had a few choice words to say about me and my mother. My skis often got away from me and slithered onto neighboring slopes with higher difficulty ratings, which meant that I had to sneak onto the black diamond, put my ski back on, and hitch down the mountain on my ass, poles in the air as a distress signal. The fact that my friends could ski a lot better than I could, and wanted me to hang with them on the harder hills, caused a few incidents too. One friend insisted that “only babies put the bar down” on the chair lift; she described in detail the way she sang Queen songs to herself to up her speed, all the while inching closer to the edge of the chair, while I clung tightly to the back and tried not to look down. A couple hundred yards from the end of the lift ride, she fell off, landing with an unharmed thunk on an intermediate slope and yelling, “Hey – stop the lift! Stop the lift!” I slammed the bar down just in time to arrive at the end, couldn’t get it back up in time to get off, and whipped around the terminus and headed back down the slope. You don’t know the meaning of contempt until you’ve had to ride past every competent skier going up the lift while you go down.

I’ve only gone skiing two or three times in my life, but I have a hundred of these humiliating stories. Like the time I found myself on a hard slope by mistake and decided to tough it out and ski to the bottom, but because I didn’t want to fall too hard, I crouched low to the ground, thus lowering my wind resistance and turning myself into a screaming bullet of clumsiness that people literally had to throw themselves into the bushes to avoid. Or the time Scrapper and I went down an intermediate slope together, and she decided to take the dogleg while I took the main slope, and as she waited at the turnout, she saw a single ski fly past, followed by another ski, followed by yours truly at a dead run, clomping down the hill at a breakneck pace and hollering, “Can someone stop my skis? Someone? Anyone? My skis?”

The Biscuit and I used to go to Stowe in the wintertime, and he would always try to convince me to hit the slopes, but I always elected to do the lodge-bunny thing. All that money spent on rentals, all those full-thigh bruises, all the memories of putting too much of my weight down on the J-bar lift and getting dumped on my dupa in the snow and having the J-bar catch on the hood of my ski jacket and drag me five hundred yards on my face with seventeen pounds of snow up my nose and down the front of my snowpants – no thank you. Until they make the skis a lot shorter and lighter and start clearing entire runs so that I don’t take anyone down with me, I’ll just sit by the fire with a cup of cocoa and a magazine. Maybe I’ll just go home the next time it snows and reopen the sled run instead.

My hero!
Skiing in Jersey. Don’t worry, I don’t go here.

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