It’s funny what sticks with you. Hitting the slopes at Butternut in the Berkshires, I thought of The New Yorker’s “Shouts & Murmurs” description of Tucker Carlson as a “shithead with a ski-goggle tan.”
Shaking it off — I was there to enjoy skiing with my 17-year-old daughter, after all — I took a selfie of the two of us high up in a lift and shared it. She’s flashing a peace sign in the 20-degree sunshine while I smile in prescription sunglasses with my goggles coolly perched atop my cooler gunmetal gray, brand-new Smith-brand helmet.
Later, borrowing her phone because my battery had died, I noticed a message from my son off at college asking her, “Is Dad skiing with goggles over his glasses? How has he not hit a tree yet?”
Frankly, it was a struggle, but not because of impaired vision, because of impaired ability to control downhill speed, speed aided by the gravitational attraction downward of girth gained in the five years since we last visited Butternut.
What is it about the sliding sports, ice skating, snowboarding, what have you, that is so hard to master? Or rather, hard, let’s say impossible, for the old-adjacent to master — too much snowplowing to stop, too much under-the-breath swearing across those East Coast icy patches, and only a few but still one too many spills, mercifully just one in which a ski embarrassingly separated from my person and skittered away, but then, worse, another tangled trip-up that briefly halted a lift as I went to seat myself for what should have been a calming ride up into the pines.
As I said in a group chat to the family unit, for the first time I actually felt my 58 years.
Ah, but Crosstown, that never gets old, one of those runs that cuts across all the other runs mountainside. My daughter and I had a blast shushing its considerable length and gradual slope that last winter before Covid. Now we were back, and it was only there that I could keep my skis completely parallel and stay with her.
We found ourselves imagining the glory of a trip down its length entirely unimpeded by fellow travelers, and although this was a full-up, overcharged school vacation week, near day’s end, as the shadows lengthened and the crowd thinned, we pretty much had it — freedom to fly.
Five years is a long time to wait, and best not repeated. Because while I don’t see myself getting any better, if my daughter could somehow improve without so much as setting foot on a slope in all that time, she’ll be making like Mikaela Shiffrin if we sneak in a little spring skiing come March.