My father grew up in Syracuse, New York, where winter is like a mini Ice Age with some of the biggest blizzards of the year and the wet constant cold that seeps into your skin. Only broken little slopes like Song and Labrador sprout up in weather-beaten remnants of the Adirondacks to the north, and that first day on the golf course, on the white wooden pair of Army Surplus skis he bought for $15, he knew there must be something better. He could feel it in his toes like a tingling sensation. He could see it in the pinned-up pictures of the Obermeyer girls of Colorado, the beautiful blonde skier Gretchen Fraser, the beautiful blonde skater Sonja Heinie, and the Sun Valley brunettes with the cold apple cheeks staring into black peaks in the distance as if they were windows in his room.
“It’s like you’re king,” he said about standing on top of his first Colorado mountain. “Like what you see is what you own.”
He read us Hamlet when we were too little to understand, except for the slings and arrows, the ghost on the wall and his voice like a soft wind. To train for the winter, he ran up the stairs with a backpack full of sand. In the early 70s he worked at Vail every weekend as a volunteer ski patroler.
Every Friday night we drove up out of Denver in our baby blue Volkswagen station wagon. It was before the Eisenhower Tunnel was blown through the mountain. Over the icy switchbacks of Loveland Pass to the top of the world with snowflakes like schools of fish against the glass, white whales past the headlights, big bare winter moons and the orange-lit faces of men beside jackknifed trucks—the skeletal aspen.
There were ghost stories on the radio: The Beach Boys and The Beatles, and only because I know it now, Gram Parsons. Copper Mountain was like a truck stop where we never stopped. And Vail Pass seemed like a haunted forest of deep secrets in its bunched up black trees and frozen meadows, the waterfalls as blue as rock candy against the cliffs, and the heater against our hands and the lights in the valley below, and so many stars that your head would swirl to see them.
“There, with the golden belt, is Orion.”
Dad’s friends owned a house in East Vail. Then it was called Big Horn. It was like a Swiss chalet with blue shutters and white walls into the trees where we hunted raspberries in the spring. We built a fort in the boulders with realty signs and dead aspen. Two ski instructors rented the downstairs and kept a greenhouse in the woods. They played guitars and rolled cigar-sized joints that the adults would smoke in the living room. We were there when they said Elvis was dead on the news. It didn’t make me sad until I really started to listen.
We slept swaddled in sleeping bags on the floor and woke up with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches already packed in the pockets of our parkas. Ice on the beaver pond.
“It’s like they’re on fire,” my brother said as the sun smoked snow from the tops of the trees. But I was already dreaming.
“You have your father’s eye.”
Vail is built on the idea of beautiful women. They are in the showers and saunas where Spanish-speaking girls sweat away the chill like chocolate melting. In the wood-carved doors that lead away to restaurants with candles on the table, fireplace bars, stringed white lights and bright European ski clothes like presents waiting to be opened—green-eyed girls from Cherry Creek with red hair and perfect crooked teeth, freckles and big brothers in letter jackets that want to drink Coors with you and chew Copenhagen. And the best blondes in the best restaurant windows bloom as sudden as white ponies in the streets, in fur coats and cowboy hats when you turn around to see who is laughing.
There is the smell of woodsmoke like sex on the wind. The slopes into town like falling ribbons. And in everyone’s breath, the smoke signal surety of human warmth held up against itself—under all those puffy parkas, long-knit scarves, tight turtlenecks and black stretch pants with the promise of secret skin.
“I think about it with my legs,” my brother said. The memory. The anticipation. In the drum of our boots as they would sound through town, carrying our skis over our shoulders by the tips like we were off to the cool war, as if just by walking to the lifts we were capable of a greater something. “The way it feels to have people stop and watch you come past them.”
Peter Kray is EO’s editor-at-large and co-founder of the Gear Institute (gearinstitute.com). This is an excerpt from his upcoming book, The God of Skiing.
