Gotham Diary:
Skiing
18 June 2014
As I was lying drowsily in bed this morning, hopeful of falling back to sleep, a train of thought that might have led to another interesting dream took instead a different turn, toward the actual. It carried me back to my season of skiing.
Four, or maybe five (or perhaps only three!) times, my Uncle John took me along on day trips to ski slopes in the Catskills. He had learned to ski at Dartmouth (or so I always assumed), and he must have longed for more exciting runs than could be reached within day-trip range, but with four children and a job to look after, he had to make do. As a consolation, he could teach his two sons, who were the older of the four.
How I came into the picture is unknown, but I strongly suspect my mother’s connivance, because after the first outing, she took me up to White Plains to be kitted out not only with boots but plus fours, heavy socks, a zooty parka, and goggles. Plus, doubtless, some silly tasseled cap. She had discovered a way to get me out of the house on the weekend, and, who knows, I might slam into a tree. I’m only … joking.
If you are born to ski, it seems, no amount of attendant tedium will curdle the thrill. I was not born to ski. Don’t get me wrong — I wasn’t bad at it. And I had (in those days) a certain desperate taste for recklessness — as we shall see. By the time of the last ski trip, I had just progressed beyond the snow-plow, and was managing turns with awkward competence. But all of these charms failed to numb me to the drawbacks. The drive was long and not very pleasant; my uncle’s car was “practical,” meaning low on creature comforts. Then there were the lines at the rope-tows. And of course I always had to go to the bathroom — even then.
Once my eagerness to join in these adventures faded — I have no idea what anybody else was thinking — it may be that my uncle decided to get out of the babysitting business, at least for babies other than his own.
The humiliation of the whole thing — I had, once again, let everyone down — is embodied for me in the memory of a train trip. Ordinarily, I liked train trips. But not this one. Because neither my parents nor my aunt and uncle could manage to ferry me from one house to other (upon our return from a ski run), I was put on the train at Rye. This I took to the end of the line, Grand Central Terminal. There I boarded another train, one that stopped in Bronxville. I don’t know how I got home from the station there, still dressed for the slopes. If you inscribe the Empire State Building in an isosceles triangle, with the short base the distance from Rye to Bronxville, the other two sides of the triangle will convey some idea of my extra mileage.
The first ski trip was, indeed, the best — a thrilling delight in its way. Had it been the only one! Not knowing any better, I was drawn, as soon as my uncle led my cousins off to a practice slope, to the ski lift. This took you all the way to the top of the hill. My uncle had quickly taught me how to snow-plow, but, other than that, I had no experience on skis. What I mean by “not knowing any better” is being unaware that riding the ski lift back down the hill was not allowed. I admired my uncle immensely and cherished the hope that he might really think well of me, too — I thought that this might be just possible — so I overrode my instinct for breakdown and airlift. I pushed out onto the slope, and began whizzing downhill.
Almost at once, the baskets on my rented poles fell off, rendering the poles more dangerous than useful. Soon, it didn’t matter. I wasn’t actually barreling down the hill, because I remained upright, but something happened to my goggles that made it difficult to see. Maybe that’s what happens as you approach the speed of light. I could make out the buildings and the people at the bottom of the hill, but they took a long time to come closer. And then suddenly they where whooshing right up to me. I managed to fall down on a flat bit of ground.
You must bear in mind that, although I was only fourteen, I was an inch and a half taller than I am now. That’s a lot of out-of-control.
By the time of the last day-trip with my uncle, skiing had clearly emerged as a sort of good-will bridge between my mother and me. Neither one of us were quite ready to abandon it. So I spent a few hours on different afternoons on the pathetic little hillock in Van Cordtland Park, with its pathetic little rope-tow, right alongside the parkway.
This story, like so many others of that time, clattered to a reasonably happy ending when I packed my bags and went off to boarding school.
As I recall, the skiing experiment followed an earlier attempt to make a sailor out of me. My uncle had served on a destroyer in the Navy, in World War II, and somewhere along the line he took up small sailboats. On three or four occasions, I sailed across Long Island Sound and back. If I were in the mood to do so, I’d catalogue the drawbacks of sailing on sailboats for someone like me. Instead, I come back to that line of Pascal’s, that all the trouble in the world is caused by man’s inability to sit still in a room. It seems to me now that I already had this ability in spades, even as an adolescent. All I have ever asked of this life was a comfortable, well-lighted reading chair.
That’s nonsense, of course. But the chair is one of dwindling number of things that I’m still asking for.
***
Have I told this story, about the baskets falling off the poles, before? Here, I mean. It seems hard to believe that I haven’t. Every time I tell the story, however, the point of it shifts a bit. It used to illustrate what a big idiotic galoot I was, because that’s what people said at the time, and they loved the “idiotic” part because it explained why my obvious intelligence didn’t “work.” Now, the point of the story is the uncongeniality of the lifestyle that everyone had in mind for me. It was impossible for parents and other authority figures to abandon the attempt to unearth the outdoorsman that must be lurking beneath my carapace of sophistication. They convinced me that failure to display this character was a personal defect, if not an outright perversity. When I un-convinced myself, the story reads differently.
In any case, I’m re-reading old entries. Yesterday afternoon alone, I went through the latter half of 2010. I was not impressed. The excitement of new-grandfatherhood is the only excuse that I can come up with.
Daily Blague news update: Unmarried Mothers.