In like a lion, out like a lamb, they say, but for us, March means something altogether different. Quite simply, the oft-underappreciated third month means SKIING, at least in our family. And because our roots first took hold one recent March, I can’t help but cast back to the beginning. I know I’ve hit on our family’s short history as Jay Peak skiers in previous stories; please bear with me if the next couple of paragraphs seem familiar. In my 9-5 life (or whatever the hell the hours are in a boarding school), I’m a teacher. Combine this with the fact that my wife Yupin and our eight-year-old son Luke are students of skiing, and you get a lot of repetition clanking around in this ole skull.
Two years ago, Yupin and then six-year-old Luke pizza-wedged their first ever turns down Interstate and Raccoon Run and the Moonwalk. It was 2008, their first winter in New England; my first back in the vicinity of home since 1998. I had gone a decade without skiing; prior to our move back up north, the most snow Yupin and Luke had ever seen had been three inches of wet sticky stuff that lasted a day on the ground in North Carolina. I was determined that their first day skiing would be perfect. Though we could have headed to the mountain over Christmas, 2007, I had urged patience. December skiing is just too boney and frigid. Then we passed on two powder weekends in February, one of which would have been fairly epic, but again, a little cold. I was building suspense, see? That, and I was afraid. Yupin had grown up and lived in Thailand until she was about twenty-seven; I was scared she would freeze in the early Jay ski season, that her first day would be her last on the lifts and slopes.
“Just wait till March,” I said. “You’ll see. It’ll be warm, the snow will be nice and soft, and there won’t be any ice.”
Not so, back in 2008. Our first day brought a chilling mix of rain, sleet, snow, freezing rain, and wind. The skies were grayer than a flock of Canada geese. The conditions could not have been more miserable. I managed to shuffle Yupin and Luke off to their respective lessons—I wasn’t so stupid as to think that teaching them myself would improve the situation—but as the foul precipitation continued to blanket me, I struggled to maintain even the slightest glimmer of optimism. I could not have picked a suckier day to introduce my family to the sport.
Fast forward two years. It’s Friday, March 5th, and it’s like the friggin Who out there: “I can see for miles and miles and miles and miles and miles.” Skies as blue as the waters off Yupin’s native Phuket. Not a breath of wind, not even on the Freezer. Plenty of snow after the previous week’s dump. It’s not fresh powder, but it’s the first real corduroy I’ve seen on the groomers all year, so perfect that I can teach Luke.
“Why do you think they call it that?” I ask.
“Because it looks like the pants,” he says, barely stifling a “DUH, Dad!” He looks at this new creature, perfectly formed wide-wale, with just a few S-slashes down its surface. “It looks like white corduroy pants.”
Soft as oft-washed cotton. Nothing like those chunks of man-made granola the groomers were coughing up a few weeks back.
This fancy new snow isn’t the only thing new in March 2010. With Luke’s Eight-Week Program behind him, after a Saturday make-up session—when, for a sort of graduation, he got to ski the FACE!—we spend Sunday morning skiing together as a family, not on the green circles of yesteryear, but on the runs I cut my teeth on back in the 80’s, on the very same Jet where Olympian Hannah Kearney famously claims to have learned to master bumps.
While both Yupin and Luke will still revert to the dreaded “pizza” in moments of uncertainty, they’re slicing parallel turns down some of the steepest runs on the mountain. And it’s all thanks to the Jay Peak Ski School and the Eight-Week. It’s not that I take my son’s progress for granted—I’m proud of his effort and growth—but it’s Yupin that makes the tears well up. There’s something about watching her ski down the lower part of U.N. that nearly overwhelms me with pride and gratitude. I realize that this section of the hill is easy, but her turns are fluid and confident. She looks like a skier. Part of it, I think, goes back to that initial fear of failure, to that first March day in 2008, in the sleet and rain and wind, when my inner pessimist told me that she would never learn to ski.
As I write, we’re approaching our mid-March break. Our ski vacation time. The week. It’s hard to believe, what with all of the great days we’ve had this year, all of the development we’ve made as a family raising ourselves on the mountain, that the meat of our season is still yet to come. Yupin will be tackling moguls and glades lessons, reaching for that next level. Luke, despite having skied, and tumbled, down the Face last Saturday, still has some habits to correct, some others to develop. Instructor Mickey told him to focus on keeping his hands up to better maintain forward pressure. “Think of your dad’s hands on the steering wheel,” he said.
Only I’m not sure if I’m really behind the wheel at all. My best laid plans, my steering if you will, led us to bypass powder for sleet back in the early days. It was other forces that kept us on the proverbial road. Caesar’s ghost, maybe, in the Ides of March. Or maybe it’s just that skiing is fun, though I know it’s more than that. Perhaps it’s the mountain itself, or the cloud, or its northern exposure, or some kind of karma built up over years of catering to skiers and riders rather than resort Gumbies. I don’t know. The only thing I do know, however, is that March is no time for platitudes, no time for casting about for esoteric answers. March? It’s time for skiing.
