closed for lack of Swiss replacement parts and the lift operators on duty had a bearded, furtive look. They seemed evil trolls, in their polychrome parkas and lumberjack shirts, mining the mountain with clanking, creaking ore-carts that went up full and came down empty. The overweight, pockmarked woman behind the ticket window asked to see my driver’s license in verification of my claim to the senior rate. “Sixty-six,” she said, having done the arithmetic with a frown. “O.K., sonny. What’s your secret? Cheeks like a baby’s. A mop of hair.” Her coarse attempt at flirtation made me wonder if she had scented Deirdre’s youthful body oils clinging to me, giving me an ungeriatric aura of sexual success. Ken and Red crowed at my blushes, and got their own senior tickets without challenge.
The conditions were lovely. The winter’s many snows, first falling in November, had created an eight-foot base, and snow-making had kept it replenished. The surface was scratchy with yet plenty of loose corn to turn on, and there were no lift lines. The crowds were eerily sparse. A few brats with snowboards gouged their rude arcs into the shining slopes and hurtled up and over the jumps that had been constructed for them, and a few of us fun-seeking retirees made our careful, controlled way down the trails. Actually, only Ken could be called careful; his stiff linked turns are executed with studied knee-dips and pole-plants. Red, who has never taken a lesson, sets his skis a foot apart and just heads with a whoop downhill, turning only when his gathering speed bounces his skis into the air. His scarlet ski-hat dwindles rapidly down through the granite-walled chutes and undulating mogul fields. His employees in Gloucester gave him as a joke Christmas present a silver windbreaker lettered EAT FISH ALL WEEK FOR GOD’S SAKE in big capitals and today he wore that over a turtleneck and a Shetland sweater of undyed wool.
I have a staid but furtively daredevil style. I try to think of my feet, the weight on first one and then the other, and of the inner edges, where all my weight and intricate, unseemly innards balance as if on a single ice-skate blade. But my skis, their rust sharpened away by a hunchbacked troll at the ski shop, tended to run out from under me and nearly snagged me into a fall or two, until I remembered that skiing is falling, a surrender to the unthinkable and the fearful. Then I began to fly, to feel my loosened weight gracefully check my speed as I turned, left and right and then left again, into the fall line. We rise as we age; the older we get, the longer and more treacherous the distance to the earth becomes. To a toddler, the ground is a playmate, a painless bottom-bump away.
My legs—the knees, the quadriceps—began after four or five runs to ache so much I kept braking and gasping, while Red’s hat vanished down below and Ken steadily, stiffly traversed his way out of sight. I was calling upon muscles that had been resting for a year. The years move into us; their cyclical motion is not their only motion. Pausing, gasping, I admired the sky, a bottomless gentian blue in which the two moons hung, their top hemispheres by some multi-cogged permutation of the celestial mechanism sunlit, so they looked like porous cookies being dunked in a translucent celestial brew. The valley with its twisting roads and stacked condos spread itself far below me, and at a bit more than eye level Mount Washington’s white crest gleamed above the intervening darker crests. Everything here in New Hampshire was dun and brown and blue; the clear air arrived at my senses with the sharpness of a dog’s bark, sounding somewhere unseen in the valley.
On the drive back, we were all three silent, stunned by so much unaccustomed fresh air and exercise. Our elderly proximity to death seemed a not unpleasant thing, shared in such companionable silence. The Audi’s cruise control pulled us steadily southward. Snow thinned into dirty crusts along Route 93. On the right, at Concord, the elongated gold dome of the state capitol caught the day’s declining light. Below Concord, at this hour, there used to be streams of headlights as the commuters returned to this low-tax haven from their daily raid on the coffers of “Taxachusetts.” Now that golden stream was reduced to a trickle, on a highway engineered for six times the traffic. The