On the Ski Lift

‘Are you skiing alone?” the stranger asked after we had settled into the ski lift. It was a two-person chair and it promoted a kind of forced intimacy that was familiar to anyone who visited Colorado’s ski slopes.

At the end of a run you ski into the lines formed at the base of the lift and shuffle forward awkwardly on your skis, hoping not to fall, in a snaking pattern. The closer you get to the empty chairs mechanically swinging around the more you are sorted into fours or threes or twos by the attendants to work the line down as quickly as possible.

You may be sorted into groups with friends or family, or you may be paired with a stranger. As it turns out, I was skiing alone on this occasion.

I can’t say that I had seen the gentleman in line though who eventually shared the lift with me; he seemed to simply appear at my side as the chair swung around.

The chair never fully stops but the mechanics of the operation slows it down just enough to make backing yourself into the seat just possible. You have at most four seconds to manage the motion, then the chair takes off upwards with a rush.

Not every skier is equally confident of managing the lifts, a lot of us would rather face a black run down the side of the mountain and take our chances than get in one more ski lift line than we have to, and I’m certainly one of those. The potential for an embarrassing fall on flat ground in front of scores of people is always there and can fully occupy anyone’s mind.

That’s probably why I didn’t notice him until he was seated beside me and spoke.

‘Are you skiing alone?” the stranger asked after we had settled into the ski lift.

“Yes, yes, I am,” I said.

‘Alone’ was hardly the word for it, I was flat solitary on this trip. At the time I am speaking of I was on the run from a set of failed relationships that seemed to topple into one another like a line of stacked dominoes, each taking down the next.

It was impossible to avoid drawing the conclusion that this string of low level catastrophes had one common denominator….me. Maybe it was time, I considered, to take myself to the sidelines for a stretch, cut ties with loved ones, turn the cell phone off, and simply give some time over to knowing myself again. Call it a mid-journey correction, though truth be told,  we were a little past the midway point in this particular journey.

“Sometimes a person needs time alone to make his inner and outer selves resolve,” the man said, as though he was reading my thoughts.

Yes, you see how quickly these exchanges can spring up and how quickly they can take a turn for the personal.

In the course of a single days skiing you can hear of someone’s impending divorce, loss of employment, the burdens of caring for aging relatives, a spouses substance abuse problems, even an affair or two.

Without experiencing it you wouldn’t believe how quickly people open up and tell you the most private things. The circumstances conspire to promote this crazy openness.

The splicing together of strangers, the necessary privacy of the conversation (it was rare indeed to hear anyone’s voice from the other chairs, much less understand what was being said), the physical closeness, the awkwardness of long silences, the way we were all bundled up so that we became interchangeable, the near certainty that among the thousands of skiers upon the slope at any one time and the dozens of lifts you’d never see one another again, the duration of the ride to the top, long enough to promote connections, short enough to handily forget, and of course the commonness of purpose, the slopes, the snow, the sun.

Ordinarily there was the sun.

But today one of those sudden and heavy snowstorms had seemingly targeted this side of the mountain.

There was no wind, it wasn’t a blizzard like we knew in the Midwest, but a steady heavy vertical dump of snow that enveloped each chair. The feeling is hard to convey: moving steadily upwards, many feet off the ground, into a driving sheet of snow, the chairs far ahead and the chairs far behind starting to fade into invisibility.

“So many people, so alone,” the gentleman said.

A common observation, though it was unclear whether he meant here on the slopes, in the town, or in the world at large. I asked him.

“All three, I suppose!” he said with a rich, cultured laugh.

I say ‘rich’ in both meanings of the word. There were certainly a lot of very well-to-do people on the slopes day in and day out, a lot of them lived in Vail, but the tone of his voice also, the easy baritone, a certain assuredness, a man who has come to know that people respond well to his voice.

Oh, yes, the rich in Vail. Apartments went for a million dollars there, much less houses. It isn’t a topic much explored but the ski slopes are probably one of the last places on earth where the working class and the rich rub shoulders, with no one thinking a thing about it.

Rich or not, the village had all the problems of any one-industry town, with a full assortment of today’s social problems thrown in for good measure.

The help couldn’t afford to live there for one thing, and they were a kind of transient population to begin with, with all the attendant problems of drug use and low level violence.

Sometimes not so low level it came to me at the time.

The visitor to a tourist community has a strange relationship to the daily newspaper, you only get a glancing view into even long-running stories that have consumed the community, but I do think I picked up that there was a string of killings in town, so it goes to show, you can’t escape the darkness of the human spirit even in Vail.

“They don’t count at the bottom, nor at the top, you know,” my companion said.

“Count who?”

“The people getting on the lifts at the bottom and the people getting off at the top. They don’t ‘square them up,’ I think the American phrase is.”

I wouldn’t have guessed him for a non-American, there is a kind of ease-of-the-rich language that easily straddles mere countries which is all I had picked up at first hearing, but now I did detect a strain of something foreign. Germany? No, someplace further east.

“Well, all that matters is that everyone gets down safely.”

“Oh, my, yes, of course, a person could go missing for days up here and never be missed.” He repeated, “no one counts.”

The storm grew heavier still if such a thing was possible, and the very next car ahead and the very next care behind were now entirely invisible.

We were floating, isolated, as though we were the only car on an empty mountain, hurtling along like a capsule through space. Now and again you could catch a glimpse of the massive pylons the lift was strung upon as you clattered by.

There is always a muffled hush when the snow falls, but in the case now the only thing you could hear were the minute impacts of the snowflakes themselves, it was a case of sensory data being stripped down to its bares essence, of light and sound and color being drained from the world.

It was enough to make a man uneasy.

I would like to say that my companion and I rode along in companionable silence, but truth be told the whole situation was unease piled upon unease. 

His small talk, so easy to flow along with before, seemed to ride atop a deeper and darker meaning. What that could be, this meaning that I speak of, I couldn’t say, but I’ll ask you who exactly sits down and thinks about the fact that no one trues up the numbers of people getting on the ski lifts and the people getting off?

What a thing to put your mind to!

The isolation too was unnerving. There are times when Nature lets you know in no uncertain terms who is in charge. A car breaking down in the desert heat, a sudden hailstorm when you are outside and far from shelter, torrential rains that blinded your windshield, or as here, the notion of the mountain, come to as a means of recreation, turning on you.

Turning on you, the phrase bounced around in my head, turning on you.

It seemed enough of an insight to point out to my companion, and I shifted towards him slightly with the small range of motion that the seat allowed.

He was covered now entirely in snow, I suppose I was too, but even given that, he seemed larger and somehow more looming is the only way I can put it, more intentional like an animal in the wild that has determined a course of action and is steering into it.

Only his eyes were visible now, black as the center of a sunflower, and his teeth as he smiled, white teeth and large, the most striking of his facial features it came to me now. I can’t imagine why they hadn’t arrested my attention before.

He didn’t look like a person who was interested in conversation but like someone who intended his next action to move past conversation entirely. Entirely.

I stiffened my arms and tightened my grip against the safety bar and steadied my center of gravity. It was an instinctive reaction, Lord knows what I thought was coming, though thinking wasn’t much involved, more, as I say, the instinct of an animal that senses the presence of a traditional predator.

He turned more fully towards me and had freed both his arms, and one hand was reaching into the pocket of his jacket, when….

The sun broke through. The snow subsided at almost the same time, and by degrees and then in great leaps visibility improved and the other chairlifts broke into our vision like ships at sea emerging from a fog.

Just in time, for the end of the line was itself visible, and what had been empty wilderness before under out feet and to the left and to the right, now took on signs of activity and human purpose. We were again part of the human community.

My companion settled back into his seat and said, after a moment, “I see our destination is within sight. We were quite invisible there for some moments, almost anything could have happened to us.”

There is a certain amount of readying that goes into preparing to exit a chairlift and after those few words of his, we went about them with the efficiency that regular skiers employ.

For the next few moments I was fully engaged in resettling myself so that I could push off the chair as the ground approached, leveling out my skis, and lifting the guard bar to allow our exit.

Before you knew it we were on the ground and drifting down towards the welcoming slopes.

I could see that he might have been ready to suggest that we ski down together, but I shifted directions and made clear that I intended to go my solo way.

He tilted his head towards me and said, “I enjoyed our ride together very much, perhaps our paths will cross again in the future.” He bared his teeth at the thought of that.

I smiled back and thought to myself, “not if I can help it. Not if I can help it.”