Under the Shadow of Jay Peak
On the first Monday of summer vacation, my seven-year-old son, Luke, and I leave home in Marion, MA, to head for the mountains—and no, we’re not heading for Busch Beer—we’re off to the Northeast Kingdom, to Jay Peak country. Luke completed first grade on Friday, and we’re wasting no time leaving sea level behind.
“What does Jay Peak look like without snow, anyway?” he asks as we ride the commuter rail into Boston’s South Station.
I tell him it’s green. But of different shades. “The trails are really light green, because there aren’t any trees.”
“Oh,” he says with that cloudy ambivilence that he gets sometimes, when it’s not clear if he’s totally disinterested or completely absorbed. “It’s going to be weird to see it without snow.”
I explain that he’s already seen the mountain in the summer. In fact, we have photos from three years ago of him frollicking about in the tall grass near the Metro Quad, and he saw it from my parents’ condo in Newport in 2007, when we stayed for a week. But it has been awhile. His associations all have to do with the whiteness of winter.
My mother gathers us from the bus station in White River just before one o’clock on a rainy, ugly afternoon that belongs more in April than June, and we continue north to the condo, where we see the mountain clearly, rising on the far shore of the lake, like the north country’s version of Mt. Ranier, not green as promised, but gray, like charcoal in the pewter sky. Luke casts me a glance and switches on Disney. It’s raining.
We’re here, in Jay Peak country, for the first week of his summer vacation for two reasons: 1) my wife, Yupin, is going to school full-time and needs the family car and 2) I want to keep Jay at the forefront of Luke’s mind, to reinforce his love for the mountain and for skiing—to keep it green, as they say. The seven months between his last ski week, back in March, and opening day 2009 are long, about one-tenth of his entire life. In today’s fast-forward society, that’s plenty of time to forget.
It was March break, 2008, when I first brought Luke and Yupin skiing at Jay. For the better part of the past fifteen years, I had been odysseying about: Peace Corps and teaching in Thailand, grad schooling in Arizona, getting married, becoming a dad, and finally, moving back to New England. Yupin, a Thai citizen, and Luke, born in Phuket, had never seen snow. To ride the tram, to climb, in winter, up the stairs to the summit, was as otherworldly and wonderous to them as SCUBA diving the Similan Islands had been for me. They had to have more.
Since then, we’ve made the voyage north on weekends and vacations, and I’ve watched my wife transform from a wobbly-legged fawn to a confident intermediate skier who can’t get enough of Vermonter and Ullr’s Dream. While Luke’s jump from the magic carpet to the glades of Moonwalk Woods was predictable, none of us could have anticipated that skiing would become Yupin’s favorite activity in so short a time. She’s from the tropics, afterall, but here she is, facing north, skiing Jay Peak in temperatures hovering right around zero degrees.
On this first summer trip, Luke and I never actually make it up to the mountain. “It’s boring if we can’t ski,” he says, a line I could not have better scripted for him. When the sun comes out, we bike along Memphremagog to spot painted turtles, beavers, and a mother snapping turtle laying her eggs. Later, we hike Mt. Wheeler, which Luke cannot believe is roughly a thousand feet lower in elevation than Jay—to him it’s more like K2. We soak up the Northeast Kindom, driving along the shores of Lake Willoughby, cutting through Mt. Pisgah and Mt. Hor. Throughout our adventures, though, Jay Peak looms on the horizon or veiled by the branches of a willow, as familiar and reassuring as the North Star.
When we return to the sea in Marion, Yupin asks Luke if he had fun.
“No,” he says dramatically, his eyes wide and sad. “Because we couldn’t go skiing. I miss skiing, Mommy.”
It’s one of those moments when I, as a writer and dad, have to wonder—does he know that I’m taking notes? All I know is that my plan seems to be working. And we’re going up again, in July, this time for a tram ride and a wander about the mountaintop, where I can only hope he’ll complain about the lack of snow.







