Sure, I ski. In my dreams, anyway, and on accident reports. Which is good, because in the same week she goes back to school, Sophie lays down a ski trip she’s been toying with a while. It is not the first time I’ve heard the crazy plan, but it is the firmest. Skiing??! In Virginia? As with many things my girl, it starts with a completely random question. By text, from an upstairs bedroom. When we are both at home. You would have to speak Sophie to know that “Does Will have off any days this week?” really means “Do you want to consider shortening your life and depleting your bank account by going downhill skiing for the first time in 32 years?” Somehow on this iteration, however, she is able to transfer enough “What if…” to my side of the fence that I start to really consider it, and by midweek, “What if” turns to “Why not?” When Mr. No-winter-sports-not-ever (bad-knees-and-ankles) chimes in that we should stay the night and that way be able to drop Sophie off at school on our way back, it’s as if we’ve had this thing planned for a month. Sure, let other families load up their little darlins’ with a couple boxes of microwave popcorn and houseplants and head directly to drop off: A to B. Not so for those crazy Burks. College move-in by way of ski trip.

And then it’s done. Rewind, 48 hours. We are seated on the living room sofa, she and I, watching a mother-daughter movie (my idea of a “last week” activity). On her cell, the Wintergreen “cart” loaded up with lift tickets and equipment and I, the hotel reservation on mine. Little green button on both orders glowing and inviting us to “submit.” Understatement of the century. She hits her go button and I hit mine, and then I am no longer watching a movie but looking at it, dimly registering the flickering images while my mind reels in panic. What have I done? What you you mean I have to sign an electronic death and dismemberment waiver?? What, wait a minute, how old am I? I’m paying money for an activity that requires a helmet?? Abort! Abort! (See The Magic Disney – January 2012). Now we are side by side, both un-watching a movie, both sort of stupefied by our rash act. Did I just call her bluff? Did I just pave the way to disaster, giving in where I was really supposed to resist and catch caution as it came screaming in from the wind? I know Sophie’s thinking/feeling the same thing when she turns to me, a little plea in her eyes: Mom, you do know how to ski, don’t you?

Sure, I ski. Why, I grew up cross-country skiing through the backwoods and orchards of the classic New England winter (read: snowy), out in the elements at all hours (read: cold). Call me Jenny Ingalls Wilder. The mittens dripped continuously from a drying rack by the woodstove, the rows of skis and heaps of boots, socks, and winter gear a constant assemblage by the back door. It really was different then. There really was (or could be) snow on the ground all winter (November through March)–but no snow days. The busses ran regardless because they had chains on the tires, and the grade school principal really did flood the kickball field so we could ice skate at recess. We had a German Shepherd named Sarge whose doghouse was just big enough for two and I, a trusty transistor radio wrapped in a scarf to keep it warm–doggie and me, out there in the single digits chillin’ to Air Supply. I remember the itch of fingers just shy of frostbite, that feeling of trying to walk on ice blocks for feet when you came in, the lung-burn from winter sports in the bright sun and shocking air. Stored deep in me like a hibernating bear is a love of cold, white things, and the beauty of a country winter. The silence of the night woods. The stillness, perfect stillness, stunned with cold. Beautiful in moonlight, and mysterious, half expecting to come through a snowy thicket and find a lamppost or the back of a wardrobe. I romanticize not, it was that magical.

But how long since I’ve gone downhill skiing in said wonderland? Oh my. The thought puts the O in OMG. In the days I speak of, downhill was a further reach for us than cross country, economically speaking. Friends went, their multiple lift tickets dangling from Patagonia puffer coats that would fetch a fortune today on Ebay–and Vermont slopes were practically in our backyard. I might have managed a dozen trips —maybe??–by the time life claimed me to flatter planes and adult postures. Perhaps the most memorable time would also have been the last: Montreal, Christmas 1987. Or was it ’88? Mom was looking for–oh, how I understand this now–last minute family-makers after my grandmother died and my dad left, trying to tie her college-bound crew with a few fond memories and strong fibers for the storms ahead. Only the biggest and boldest adventures would do. So yeah, Canada. Mont Tremblant (yes, “trembling”) elevation 2,781 feet. Mostly what I remember (other than trembling) is the uncontained height of that mountain, and the plunging depth of the bottom I needed to get to, so as to climb up and do it again. It was exhilarating in its prospect and paralyzing in its execution. A little like today, over 30 years later. But I found a way. I made a conscious choice to follow my brother, the then daredevil of the family. I didn’t exactly close my eyes, that would have been a bad move while strapped to rockets and pointed downward, but I locked them on him and I followed his disappearing back through the falling snow and the night wind, aligning my skis with his tracks and (the real clincher for me has always been decision-making) turned where he turned. As long as I could keep vertical I would make it, every time. So, too, today. I follow Sophie’s lead and Will’s courage to try anything, anything. It is the parents’ World Cup: I will go where they go, do as they do, be where they are. I will not miss this moment because I am afraid.

Still, it’s good that I don’t have long to think about what I’ve done, or what we’re in for. Like, Target run and a Starbucks not good enough for you, departing daughter? Nope. Got to do this thing, Sir Edmund. It was there so I climbed it. (See Ground – July 2019). We checked and rechecked our other parameters: Hanover County Online School, check. Will has his last exam Thursday. We can leave immediately after and make the 4 pm check-in at the slopes. UVA move-in, check. Sophie wants to be on campus in the very first window on Friday. But please people, let’s stop calling it a drop-off, shall we? I’m headed for the mountains. The only thing we didn’t check? Weather. (Weeping smiley-face emoji here as I hastily scroll down my weather app) Ok…Tuesday: cold. Wednesday: cold. Thursday: oh my. Whoops. On the day of our upcoming skiing adventure it will be 27 high, 14 low. Get up the next day and that figure has dropped to 12. What?!! What on the earth?! We are night skiing, people. Night skiing, because it is cheaper and because it fits with their student-hood this week, which for all intents and purposes was (IS! IS!) is a priority. How in the heck are we going to survive 12 degrees on the top of a mountain?? I am now so loaded up with panic and alarm that little tears squeeze from the corners of my eyes when I laugh, for what else is there to do? It is not the first time I’ve committed to more than I can … uh, manage? All that biting and chewing aside, I have on a number of occasions bought tickets on the Hairbrained Express. Train of ultra-high speed, it starts with your comfort zone and rockets at the speed of light in the other direction. No round trip. Just submit. I know this feeling, old friend o’ mine. I feel it before I get on any roller coaster or water slide. I felt it prepping for the high maintenance hike up Old Rag last summer (see Ground – July 2020) and mountain biking last fall, little tune of mild hysteria welling up in the pit of my belly: I don’t wanna I don’t wanna I don’t wanna, steeled by the clear, cold refrain I’ve often told my people: You can, and you will.

It’s indicative of my fear and trepidation that I gave only a passing thought to what boy wonder would do on the slopes. Like, he has never been. Biggest hill he’s seen with snow on it would be Maymont, day after Christmas a decade ago. And even then I put him in a sled with strangers so he could have a proper thrill ride at three years of age–right into one of those enormous furry cedars at the bottom of the hill. But this is Himalayan yeti boy, boy who likes all his bike trails muddy and steep, all his diamonds black. He skateboards, scooters, go-carts and bikes with abandon. In his off-hours he climbs on the roof and in his dreams he hang-glides and bungie jumps. Boy eats danger for breakfast and chases it down with adrenaline. He’ll do great. Still, the whole ride there he is peppering Sophie with questions, trying to wrap his brain around the stunt-fest ahead, one that he himself did not conceive. (See??! I’m not the only one out of my element here–most of the crazy stuff Will pulls come from his own authorship, not for Pete’s sake, his mom’s.)

She gives us but a few critical details: Cold. According to Sophie, the reason you get cold skiing is because skiing isn’t really exercise. I kid you not. Just muse on this a minute with me, as I did. She elaborates: “I mean, it’s not like exertion, like you have to do anything…” Oh really daughter?! Here come the little tears I am talking about. I’m about to pour the equivalent of my own personal tough mudder marathon into staying vertical on that mountain, my girl, so–yea, I do anticipate a little exertion. Maybe “cold” is a little further down on the list for me. Will takes the memo to heart, having boy scout camped in 29-degree sleet and freezing rain. I kid you not: he’s wearing eleven layers on his top. He smiles and shakes his head sheepishly as he counts them mentally… “yeah, that’s 11!” 100-pound boy morphed into linebacker in my backseat, he can’t bend his arms enough to get out of the car. Sophie, also, has brought the contents of our hall closet and is preparing to put it on. In Covid-times of course, no lodge, no leisure, no lingering: it is all business. Standing at the car in the parking lot, we pull on wool socks, snow pants, masks, hats, hoods, gloves–the entirety of our arctic tundra get-ups, and we are off.

What I’ve learned about adventures with this younger set is it’s all about the gear. The concept of “Just Do It” is a bit of a hype unless you have the right spandex, the right branding and a $52 water bottle. (See Ground – July 2020). Maybe it always has been.  I remember being terrified hired to teach college juniors at the University of Maryland at age 23. Nothing a simple business skirt and a pair of pumps wouldn’t solve. It was like a mantra: just get one chapter ahead of them and look the part. Is this life, then–you have to fake it to make it? But I am not that anymore: I have to see it to be it. And of course, all I can see is sheer drops, rock cliffs, and burst-through orange safety fences at the edge of plummets. In my dreams I see avalanches and chair lift disasters. Drama in Real Life, here I come.

My “gear” is older than Sophie and Will’s ages added together. Where did these snow pants come from anyway? I think they are older than my marriage. My lovely down parka, reclaimed from an active listing on Ebay (literally, hope I don’t get any bids today), wool glove liners complements of the US Marine Corps, circa 1981, and a hat that Sophie insists was not hers though I know it was. As I pry open the jaws of the moon boots to beg my mangled bone spur foot inside a narrow enclosed space and eye the spaceman motorcycle helmet I’m supposed to cork my head into, I think…. It’s a good thing I’m not claustrophobic. Or out of shape. Or old. Or like basically, here and breathing. Because I might be having a real problem right now. Instead I am practicing my yoga breathing and praying without ceasing, all the while dimly aware (even though I’ve donned only four layers on top) that (a) I am wearing bib overalls and (b) I have to use the bathroom. 

My heart is pounding as we step out into the brisk, bright air. The sun is still shining late afternoon and the day has not yet surrendered its warmth. Let’s call it a toasty 25. We are so fully encased and hermetically sealed into the gear that we cannot hear a thing and have to communicate via hand signals and thumbs up. Though I can see perfectly well through tinted goggles until the snow machines spray little speckled ice chips across them, I cannot be seen, so forget all the communicating a mom usually does through the eyes: No! Don’t you dare! Absolutely not! are almost always optical communiques. Tonight, we look like a cross between astronauts and black ops with all our exaggerated and silent signaling. I half expect James Bond to appear from the wooded sidelines on a ski-do. Out loud before starting we manage one overlying agreement: if we get separated, wait at the bottom. Hmm. “Bottom.” A word of endless meaning when the middle aged go skiing.

Then there is only me and the mountain. And this is how it was: What the mind forgets, the body remembers. It wasn’t instantaneous, but it came, and came with a sureness like a dawning–that un-pushed, certain glide of skis down a slope. The feel of the snow, the smell of the air at night, the glinting lights and slowly, gradually, the way to go. Like the words coming back to me for a song that’s been playing all my life. My knees remembered and my body weight responded, leaning… weaving… knowing. Fear leaving me like an unseen wake as I made my way down that mountain. And then the lift, up again and down; down and up, down and up, tireless as the two in front or behind or all around me as they, too, came into their own on the slope. Since my body weight and thigh muscles had this thing going with the snow that seemed to keep me upright, I focused intently on controlling my speed–perfect job for a mom, if you think about it: channeling and shaping the raw nature of things. Several times I careened, regained, came in at her side ridiculously fast, and cut–Swoosh!–to a stop. Just call me slalom Jenny. But oh, it was fun to see their faces. Twice I fell, the first time alone and badly, and that sobered me for the possible damage that could be done, here, on this mountain by this wanna-be. Will and Sophie had gone on ahead, didn’t see me fall, and I could not get up. My skis were pointed down and the 25-pound cinderblocks strapped to each foot wouldn’t allow me to reorient them. I had used my left wrist to break the fall so that was momentarily out of commish, and there was nothing and no one to pull up on. I managed to get myself to a seated position trying to see where the kids had gone, trying not to look too pathetic and helpless, or lost, which I entirely was–there, directly below the chair lift going by.  The feeling of flying and invincibility left me on a passing wind and I was a polypropylene lump there in the middle of the trail. “See,” said my wrist, “that’s exactly how people break stuff. Now, take it easy.” What? Your bones don’t talk to you? You should have heard my knees. 

In the end, it was nice to be able to pull one more ace out of my old pockets. Like having popsicles in the freezer, a costume in the attic, or poster board at the 11th hour, my ability to change water into lemonade (see To Mother Another – July 2019) has waned over the years. Covid and her senior year caught me woefully bereft of magic wands, things to say, ways to help a hurting heart. Simply not enough band-aids on the 2020 shelf. And while we are in those limbo years between needed and wanted, let’s face it, a parent–any parent–is a little unsteady on her feet. Never mind her skis. Isn’t that the parents’ irony: spend the first 18 years telling then what they can and can’t do so they can spend the next 20 telling you the same. (Mom! Mom, are you really going to wear that hat? I’m wearing a perfectly appropriate LL Bean fair isle cardigan with those classy metal buttons and a beanie I pulled out of the closet I could swear belonged to her. No, Mom, what! You look like a Dutch schoolboy going off to work in the mines. You can’t wear that!!)  And I’ve learned the hard way, or at least the “Huh, how about that?” way, that to raise strong, independent children–doers, givers, survivors, thrivers–is a constant sacrifice. You don’t get the warm fuzzies so much as the cold shoulder time and time again. They don’t look for you, they don’t consult you, they don’t come for you first, really, for much at all. (See Think I may have one of those – January 2020). So, to go and have something to show for myself, well, that was worth every minute. To see the surprise on Sophie’s face when I didn’t plant mine into a snow bank. To see in her wise eyes a mix of wonder and dawning that this old girl has been alive–count them–36 years before her and might, just might have done a thing or two–well, hot dang. Gimme me another round of terror and trepidation. Call me Hans and pass the lieder-schnitzel. Worth every minute.

In a million years did I picture myself pointed down a mountain in the middle of the night in the middle of my life dressed in clothes older than time. And though I apparently wowed my daughter (I wasn’t really “whizzing,” that was just the sound of me praying, which was louder than the snow machines) mostly, I felt relief. Relief that we did it, relief that I made it, and that amazo-boy enjoyed it, and that we safely communicated Sophie to school the next day. I went to drop off and I stayed on. I let that MOTY award go years ago–too much struggling and striving after wind, and man they were so ornery at times, but I still enjoy their happiness like lifeblood. So, to drive home after dropping Soph at school for round two, listening to Will regale the trip and relive our many moments on the slopes, was nothing short of glorious. We weren’t on the third ride up that chairlift before boy was tallying up the cost of ski gear and loudly envisioning all the money he was going to drop on his brand new love-sport. He was enamored. Besotted. Doing moguls in his new dreams. We drive home along a silent 64 east, winter woods all around, snow ahead and an impromptu ski-trip behind us. “Were you scared, son? Were you worried at all?” “Oh yeah,” he says, grinning and shaking his head as he studies the passing trees, “I mean, it was pretty steep and all, and I couldn’t see the bottom. But then I saw you and I knew it would be okay.”