Skiing with the Father

The man was on top of the world.  Or on top of New Hampshire.  Or, merely, on top of New Hampshire’s Mount Sunapee. 

 

He sat on the deck of the summit lodge with a 360 degree view, interrupted in a few directions by clumps of trees, and in one direction by the mechanism of the ski lift.  The sun was warm, for February.  There was little wind; the ski runs were well groomed.  It was a Wednesday.  School vacation week had brought families to the mountain, the man’s family included.  At the moment, though, he was alone. 

 

He was exhausted by the blandishment of the present time. 

 

During vacations, many persons desire to drop out of the present, the man included.  In a week, the same public arguments and scandals and breathless excitements will once again nail them to the—might the man say ‘to the Cross’?—of the present moment.  But vacation offers a momentary cessation of the noise. 

 

“I’m looking even more like my father,” the man had said to his wife that morning, after shaving. 

 

“Yes, you are.”

 

The man’s father had died twenty months before at age one hundred and one.  The man’s father had been a poet—highly regarded, internationally lauded—whose fame had then faded before his own demise.  But the father had possessed the toughness to hold stubbornly to life. 

 

“You know the critics?” his father, sitting in the sun at age one hundred, had asked him. 

 

“Yes?” 

 

“They’re dead.”  He smiled, “And I’m not.” 

 

After the man’s father reached a high place at age one hundred, he continued to push life’s rock uphill for one more year.  That’s grit!

 

The man missed his father fiercely.  Often, when he was driving alone, he put into the CD player a spiritual which promised that those who are separated by Jordan will one day find each other on the other side. 

 

Also, his father had been a skier.  In his father’s day, athletes ascended mountains by strapping sealskins to the bottom of their skis and walking there.  A day might be occupied by a long climb, stopping now and then for a breather, a swig from a flask, and a refreshing pipe when the view inspired.  There would be a picnic in the snow at the top, and then would come the reward at the end of the day—that one, long, delightful schuss back downhill again. 

 

Today, of course, we use a speedy chairlift to carry us through the air to the top of the mountain, and we are able to enjoy a score of downhill runs in the time that the man’s father had experienced one. 

 

Mechanical devises nowadays truly do make life’s uphills easier to master than was the case a mere century ago.  But that does not justify chronological snobbery, as C.S. Lewis called it, our unexamined assumption that things of the past ought to remain in the past and ought not to trouble us cleverer moderns. 

 

The man was sixty, and he was feeling about his own past a new weightiness.   There were now accretions upon him.  They were the results of life assumptions, relevant to himself in years before, of the events and philosophies and choices by which he had lived.  He was beginning to experience the old person’s anxiety that these important events and philosophies were hidden from young adults of the present. 

 

What must the burden of the past have been on his father at age one hundred?  That man could reach back nearly to the Boer War.  The Boer War!  Scarcely anyone today has even heard of it, but it was a bellwether of its time. 

 

Lounging in the winter sun on his New Hampshire deck, the man thought back forty years, and he remembered himself on the deck of another summit lodge such as this one, but on the other side of the world.  Then, he had been high in the Bernese Alps, enjoying the same mid-winter ambiance as today, except that the mountainscape was limitless—dazzling alpine peaks, stretching all the way into Italy, with the Jungfrau as a magnet to the eye.  On the deck with him were skiers who had taken the train up the valley from Schoenreid to the base of the funicular car.  Then the funicular had carried the merry group to the summit, where they had debouched upon the deck of the lodge and now sat in the sun, drinking beer or schnapps, and eating fat sausages with sauerkraut.  As compared with the present day, no ski garment worn by anyone on that long-ago deck was an advertisement.

 

The man’s father came and sat down next to him.  “Just like in the 1920s.”  Then he laughed, “Except the last time we had to climb up, and once we got above the tree line, it was harder.”

 

“Why?”

 

“There wasn’t any way to know which route across the snow fields was safe.  If you were the first to cross.”  He filled and lit a pipe.  “And we always wanted to be the first to cross.”

 

The man had a vision of his father as Nick Adams, from Hemingway’s Cross-County Snow, but as a Nick touched more closely by the Muse than Nick the brawler ever was.  

 

“In those days, were you ever here, right here?”

 

“Above this valley, yes, but lower down, by the Diableret Glacier.”  His father mused a bit and then said, “You know, if we time our runs right, we could make it there today.  It means skiing the snow fields above Saanen and Saanenmoser.  Then we could ski down to Gstaad and take the train back up the valley to Schoenreid for dinner.” 

 

And was there ever anything more romantic sounding than that? 

 

As it happened, the man and his father didn’t make it all the way to the Diableret.  His father was more comfortable with a slower series of runs, and they ended by dropping down out of the snow fields and into the trees above Saanenmoser.  So the up-valley train ride was shorter, and they were early for dinner, and the man’s mother was pleased.

 

 

*      *     *

 

The man’s memory up there on top of New Hampshire took him back only forty years, to the 1960s.  When his father was skiing the Diableret, in the 1920s, the lessons he was concerned about came from the great conflict so recently ended—The Great War.  The French speakers were wounded and vengeful; the German speakers were resentful and truculent; the English speakers (except some of them like Churchill) were hoping conflict itself would go away; the Russian speakers were saying nothing at all because they sagged under the Bolshevik weight and were silenced.  And the Americans were ascendant…and talking all the time.  More than had been the case twenty years before, when the man’s father was born, human aspiration was seen now in political terms—what can government do about man’s lot, or can it do anything at all?—and Christianity was no longer the one world religion that was generally understood in the West to be true.

 

But when his father was born, in 1904, the lessons learned by the adults of that time concerned what had happened in their pasts.  In those days, at the beginning of the brand new 20th century, big were colonialism, its pros and cons, and also rationalism’s challenge to religion.  Manifest Destiny was, indeed, still manifest.  Explosions were occurring in what was later to be called psychology, physics was bending time and finding that light has gravity, and cubism, Dadaism, and other movements of the artistic avant-garde were delighting or affronting, depending.  The big storm that rumbled over the horizon was the fight between capitalism and communism.  That would have its hellish impact later…but it was only after the democracies finally decided to fight back against their own destruction and defeated despotic fascism that they turned their attention to despotic progressivism. 

 

            Yet, as the man mused in his silent space atop that New Hampshire mountain (he had recently re-read a good deal of C.S. Lewis…together with John), there’s a longer perspective as well, and it was there in the man’s father’s day, as well as in the day of his father’s parents and of their parents, too. 

 

There’s a greater Father still, and He saw the universe at its beginning, knows its present, and understands its future.  He isn’t compelled by chronological snobbery; he has not our limited human perspective.  What all persons struggle with today is no different from what persons struggled with in ages gone by.  They, all of them, they climbed through life, up their snow fields, and they took their looks from their summits all around.   

 

We today are comfortable with the sins we have chosen, until we learn to ski with the Father. 

 

 

*     *      *

 

 

            The man walked down to the snow, stamped into his skis, and pushed off for the long run home. 


*****


Reach me, if you like, at dikkon@dikkoneberhart.com