Learning to Ski

Learning to ski at forty-seven years of age became a family affair.

Since I was reared in Charleston, West Virginia, I never learned to ski. My wife was reared in New England and skied from an early age. We had settled down after our marriage in Massachusetts, so our children learned to ski at an early age. Fifteen years slid by before we built a town house in Lincoln, New Hampshire, directly across Route 112, the Kancamagus Highway, from the Loon Mountain Ski Resort.

Two more years disappeared before I decided that I no longer desired to sit at home while my wife and four children went off to ski together without me. So the following winter, I drove on a Friday after work to our New Hampshire town house.

The following morning I rose long before my family. I quietly slipped into corduroy pants, a green plaid woolen shirt and a suede leather jacket before heading to the mountain with my hands encased in thin calf-skin gloves. I shivered and my breath was misty as I stood in line to rent 150-centimeter skis, boots and poles. I waited in line again, inside the warm base lodge, to sign up at the ski school desk for a two-hour private lesson.

Under a cloudless, bright-blue winter sky, with a base thermometer recording thirty degrees Fahrenheit, Ray met me at the bottom of the bunny slope known as Little Sisters. With medium height, Ray had a stocky torso and a full head of brown hair graying at the temples. He had emigrated immediately after the Second World War from the Sudetenland where he had survived the Nazi occupation, because Ray was a non-Jewish, non-political German. Although Ray had lived in the United States for the past thirty-five years, his speech still contained a German guttural accent.

“Goot Morning, Herr Doctor.” With a broad smile and a cheerful voice, Ray greeted his grim-faced student. “Today, ve learn to ski, ja?” Ray quickly taught me to snowplow by making an angle with the fronts of my skis. With my knees pressed together, it would force the inside edges of the skis to dig into the snow and control the rate of my descent. “Now,” Ray said dramatically, “ve go on da chairlift.” He pushed his poles behind him and easily glided across the surface of pristine, white snow.

I froze in place and my jaw dropped as I gawked at Ray’s back in disbelief. “Wait, Ray,” I shouted nervously, “I’m not ready for the chairlift.”