I wake in darkness, and spend a full five minutes trying to decide why. The tip of my nose is frozen where it protrudes from the icy hole of my sleeping bag. The rest of me is marginally warmer but sticky with sweat beneath layers of long underwear. My legs ache. As I drag my body from the tent and force my blistered feet into frigid ski boots, I decide that what woke me was my own malodorous scent. I shake my head. I’m halfway done with the Catamount Trail, a ski trail that runs 330 miles along Vermont’s spine. Right now, I’m wondering why I’m out here.
My first memory on skis is not mine. It’s my father’s. He likes to tell of when I was young enough to still be carried and he’d take me to the local ski slope. He’d spend the morning skiing with me in a baby carrier on his back. Dad still chuckles when he recalls swooshing and swishing down the trail as little baby snores punctuated his turns. He has told that story frequently enough that now it has become my own. It was the first date of my love affair with skiing.
I soon graduated to active skier, chasing Dad down that same mom-and-pop place on beat-up, ski-swap equipment. That was in Massachusetts, where I grew up. Later, we began taking family trips up north, to Vermont and New Hampshire’s taller peaks and deeper woods. Dad grew up in Vermont, and we combined skiing with family time – inviting aunts, uncles, and cousins along before returning to my grandparents’ house for meals. To this day, time on skis brings to mind the warmth of familial love and always, always, my grandmother’s freshly baked chocolate chip cookies.
I went to college in Maine, which I chose based exclusively on its proximity to a ski resort (although that’s not what I told Dad, who was somehow unaccountably more concerned about academics). Maine was beautiful but I didn’t stay there. Later, I moved to Utah, home of the “Greatest Snow on Earth.” The skiing was unsurpassed. But I didn’t stay there either. I moved back to Vermont.
I’m told I ski like my father. He charges as he skis, aggressively taking on moguled slopes and treed lines with graceful movements and quick, sharp turns. I’ve spent my skiing career trying to emulate him. When observers recognize him in my own style, it’s the greatest compliment I could receive.
Dad has never been much on sentimentality. Don’t dwell, he tells me. Get to the point. And move on. Maybe that’s why he has often taken advantage of chairlift rides to offer succinct life lessons. After all, they enforce a time limit. Once we’re at the top, there is skiing to do. Although the run down always seems to be a continuation of the conversation, as together we navigate the bumps and challenges on the trail.
I took to Vermont’s woods and the Catamount Trail in January 2015. I wanted to reconnect with the North Country’s forests. Find out what it feels like to exist in these snow-clad mountains. I was also trying to figure out what came next, which trail my life was headed down. Although Dad might disagree, a chairlift ride simply wasn’t enough for me to find an answer. And that’s why I find myself awakened by my own stink in an icy tent high on a peak in the Green Mountains. Why I still can’t feel my toes as I strap on my loaded backpack. Why I’m questioning my purpose right now.
But then I straighten up and reach my arms skyward, stretching. The twinkle of new-fallen snow sparkles across the pillowed landscape, and I shiver in the cold stillness of the morning. And then, faintly, over the smell of unwashed man, I catch a whiff of my grandmother’s cookies. And I know. Deep down inside I know. Here, amidst my father’s people, this is my place. These woods are my home. And there’s skiing to be done.