The Hills Are Still Alive
We had the opportunity to head for the hills and early Sunday morning we took it: the South Ferry to a sleeping Shelter Island, then we stemmed the tide and a few car-size icebergs over to Greenport on the North Ferry where we bought scones and coffee for the ride to meet the 9 a.m. Cross Sound Ferry to New London, bound for Stowe, Vt.
It must have been the late 1950s when I first skied Stowe’s Mount Mansfield with my parents. I remember being proud when my mother sewed a Stowe patch to the shoulder of my parka, proof of having stem-Christied the legendary slopes. The skis were wooden, the bindings a broken leg just waiting to happen. The attendants serving Stowe’s famous single-chair lift handed you a thick blanket poncho as you got on the slow-climbing chair so they would not have to pry your frozen body off it at the top.
It was a marvel of technology at the time, a lazy man’s way to attack the mountain, compared to bunking in Stowe’s old lumber camp and climbing for it, or ascending Mansfield using the primitive, and dangerous, rope tows in the 1930s and ’40s. A plaque on the brick fireplace of the old Mansfield lodge, with its giant half-hewn timbers, tells those drying their gloves, warming their feet, and enjoying an apres-ski beer that the lodge was built by the C.C.C., Franklin Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps, in 1941.
I had not been back in quite a few years, nor had Kyle. She too was introduced to Stowe by her parents, and was stunned as a young girl the day her mother offhandedly mentioned that the von Trapp family lived just up the hill.
She loved, no, lived “The Sound of Music,” and its romantic story of the nun, Maria, nurse to the seven children of Baron Georg von Trapp, the Austrian Naval officer who balked at Hitler’s ambitions, fell in love with Maria, and fled with her (the future Maria von Trapp) and his singing brood to where the hills are alive in Stowe, Vt., not Switzerland as in the movie. Kyle knows every song, and will burst forth with “High on a hill was a lonely goatherd, lay ee odl lay ee odl lay hee hoo,” et cetera, at the drop of a hat. In fact, a week earlier, before the Stowe trip was planned, she’d bought and read a book about Maria von Trapp.
These days the Trapp Family Lodge, overlooking Stowe Village, serves as a hotel and restaurant. It’s still run by the von Trapp family, which opened its own brewery in 2010 (great beer, by the way). Kyle knew that Johannes von Trapp, one of Georg and Maria von Trapp’s children, was still among the living.
On Monday, we skied most of the day. The mountain had received eight inches of fresh, light, fluffy snow during the night. The conditions were perfect. We quit in the afternoon, that is, our legs quit. We were driving back to our lodging in the village, saw the sign to the Trapp Family Lodge and decided to visit. We hung at the small brewery for a while, sipping on benches, faces to the sun, then decided to visit the lodge.
We walked through the reception area and were led to the bar and restaurant by a man who obviously worked there. En route, Kyle made small talk with the man. She asked if Johannes von Trapp still lived in the area. He said, “Yes.”
“Do you ever see him?” she asked.
“Yes, I see him all the time. I just got out of a meeting with him. He’s my father,” he said, smiling at her with eyes as blue as the Vermont sky outside.
When Kyle gets emotional, she fans her face rapidly with her hand. I saw the tears welling in her eyes. Needless to say, the hills came alive with the sound of music for the rest of the afternoon, night, and I’m sure for some time to come. Yodel-ee, Yodel-oh, et cetera.