Great Eastern

      This is what learning to ski looked like, circa 1970.  We started in the back yard, before progressing to the sloping edges of our neighbor’s field, and then the so-called Pinnacle – a hill on the edge of town with a rope tow that the town maintained.  Long gone, I’m sad to say. 

   When we were ready for a real mountain, my father would wake us before daylight and strap our skis and poles to the top of the car while we ate a hurried breakfast and stuffed ourselves into our warmest clothes.  We piled into one of our old Volkswagen beetles and drove all the way north to Killington East – over an hour away – to be standing first in line for the gondola when it whirred into motion a few minutes before eight o'clock.  Back then there was free skiing from eight until nine, which made the mountain briefly accessible for Vermonters like us who lived in the back yard of the fine ski areas but could not afford the lift tickets.

   We rode the gondola up over endless evergreens and exposed boulders, the trees at the top thick and white with frozen frost.  We strapped on our skis and trudged to the head of the Great Eastern, a single, five-mile trail that wound all the down to the bottom of the valley.

   There is much to remember about those runs.  The swell of anticipation as we struggled into our bindings in the frigid air at the top.  The nervous turns through tight, icy corners.  The elation of bombing down the straight-aways.  The itch of your forehead inside the wool cap.  The sigh of reaching the last pitch at the bottom, knowing it was a few minutes past nine, and time already for the long ride home.  Except for that one, impossible morning when we reached the lift line again at eight fifty-five and went around again, clambering into the gondola for a second run, as happy as bank robbers who have made the state line.

   The ride home is as memorable to me as the skiing.  Pulling our thick-socked feet out of our old lace-up boots, slowly squeezing the prickly burn of mild frostbite from our toes.  Stopping at a corner store for candy bars.  A Charleston Chew for me, because they lasted the longest.

   Although I remember them now as happy mornings, I felt bad, for a time, in recalling them.  I felt bad for myself, and for my father, that he didn’t have the money to buy us lift tickets.  It seemed pitiful, in hindsight, driving for hours to snatch an hour of free skiing, when others drove in leisurely at nine-thirty to spend the day, taking our parking spot as we left. 

   But then I got old enough now to know better, and to look back on those mornings with an unequivocal smile.  The gondola ride and the skiing – however brief – were pure joy.  And I had a father who was willing to get up in the cold dark of a Vermont winter morning to take us there.