Shtepping Around With Hoobert

A few hours later I ran into an old friend in the lodge. "Hey," he said loudly, "was that you I saw ducking out of the lift line today?"

"Are you kidding?"

"I coulda sworn it was you going through the fence," he said louder than ever.

"If you say that again," I said, "I'll kill you."

That night at dinner I found that all had not gone well with the children either. Evan confessed that he had lost control on the small hill and crashed into an instructor, who was upended in midlecture and dumped to the snow. "What'd he say?" I inquired. "Did he get mad?"

"No, he didn't say nothing. He just fell down."

A few minutes later Evan brought a perfect day to an end by rejecting the dessert. "No, thanks," he said to the waitress in a voice that reached every extremity of the small dining room. "Peaches give me diarrhea."

FIFTH DAY: Today the kids worked on their snowplows by themselves, while Hoobert took me up on the lift. We made three runs in the morning, and by the end of the last one I was snowplowing madly down the hill, shouting "Track!" and having a gaudy time. "Please," Hoobert begged, "don't call trrrrrrrrack! all za time." I moved right into stem turns, learning how to lean to the left to go to the right and vice versa. To be sure, I fell frequently, but one learns by one's errors. Once I got going very fast, while Hoobert shouted at me to stop. Surely, I thought, I must be the fastest skier on this novice slope. Just then I was passed by the ski-patrol sled bearing a loser on his way to the first-aid station. I slowed down.

In the afternoon Hoobert took me back up, and we worked on stem turns. After an hour or so I went into a turn too fast, brought my skis together too quickly and skidded half out of control through 90�. "Hey!" Hoobert shouted. "Dot vass a shtem Christy!"

A stem Christy!