Shtepping Around With Hoobert

Various Sadie Thompsons vamped around the lodge in their true element, happy to be rained out. A few maniacal skiers persisted in skiing, some in aircraft-orange slickers. But one by one the lifts shut down, brown spots peeked through the snow, tufts of grass exposed themselves to the rain. A fat man stood on the lodge porch and did balancing exercises, left, right, left, right, feet firmly planted, gently rotating from the waist. "What's that man doing?" Evan asked me.

"He's practicing skiing."

"Why's he practicing skiing in the lodge?"

"Because he's a little strange."

"How do you know?"

"Because he's practicing skiing in the lodge."

I find that sometimes one can get away with such circular reasoning with children, and this time I was lucky. "C'mon," I said, before he had time to find me out, "let's walk home and eat candy."

FOURTH DAY: A miracle! Two inches of snow fell during the night, and the temperature dropped to 12�. As we walked up the road to breakfast, loose, windblown snow filled the sky and made the sun a silver ball. The pines and birches were freighted with ice. I said to the children, "Isn't it all beautiful?" The consensus was that there was nothing beautiful about it. The weather was too cold, and they wanted to spend the day playing games indoors. Nevertheless, I was able to talk them into a rewarding day of instruction with Hoobert, while I sneaked off for some tentative skiing of my own. I had given myself a good talking-to and decided that if little kids and young women could go up the chair lift and ski down the mountain, then so could a grown man with a background of athletic achievement. Looking back on my life, I can recall occasions when such reasoning had resulted in a broken arm and a broken collarbone and third-degree humiliation, but I never learn. I stepped into line for the chair lift.

At overcrowded ski resorts you are shunted along a narrow, zigzagging corridor of fencing toward the lift, and it may take as long as 30 minutes to reach the chair. During that time I began to think too much. For one thing, I pondered the lift chairs. They came moving along the cable, banged you in your rear end, then swept you to astronomical heights in the sky, 15, 18 feet up. For the first 50 feet or so the chair bobbed up and down, while you sat there utterly at its mercy. If you ever got to the top, the chair spat you onto a short, steep "exit" hill, where even experienced skiers had been known to fall.

"And suppose I made it to the top without serious accident?" I asked myself, as I inched closer to the lift. Then I would have to come all the way down in a rudimentary snowplow position, and I hadn't mastered the rudimentary snowplow position. I could get killed or even maimed up there. Not that I was afraid. Far from it. But I had reached the age where responsibility can no longer be shirked, and I was the sole financial support of three dear children. With such thoughts spinning through my mind, I decided to drop out of the lift line and live to ski another day. I turned to back out and looked into an impenetrable forest of skiers, ski poles and skis behind me. Even if I could go backward on skis, which was doubtful, it would have taken hours of bumping and shoving and excusing myself to get through that line. "Move along, buddy!" a man said, and I moved along. Now I was only three or four people away from the lift, and my knees were gelatinous. "Never mind your lousy pride," I said boldly to myself. "Think of your kids!" Scrooching myself way down like somebody doing a reverse limbo under a 10-inch bar, I ducked through the fence, fell, scrambled to my feet and fell again, got up and skied away as fast as I could.