Bigger and Bigger Mountains

A big organizing dream for my life was to build a ski family. Skiing has taught me that we have so much power to create the lives we want and to become the people we want to be. Many of my life's choices have been shaped by my adopted love of skiing and of the mountains.

Whenever I ski, my face hurts from smiling. You don't have to be born into a wealthy family to adopt the sport, I surely wasn’t, though it helps.

In 2015, after a miscarriage, I wrote, “Many of my dreams for my life are not coming true and may not come true.”

In 2024, we got all of our kids up on skis for the first time! As it turns out, this dream did eventually come true, and so I’d like to tell you about the skiing portion of it.

I'm not a particularly fast or skilled skier — I ski with total control, which means, slowly — and I just go out there to enjoy being outside and enjoy using my whole mind and body.

I love ski culture. I love the beauty of the mountains. I love that feeling when you snap your boot into the ski and you know that fun times are coming!

(Footnote 1: I say “ski family” as shorthand for a family who does alpine sports together.)

(Footnote 2: Video is my son, 3, last week, and me, to the tune of March of the Penguins.)

*~*~* Grit & determination *~*~*

After both of my parents died, I moved to Willingboro, N.J., to live with extended family. I was awkward, not very social, and depressed. No one was sure what to do for me, so they enrolled me in a local Girl Scout troop. That troop had a tradition: If you sold 120 boxes of cookies, your ski trip to Spring Mountain in Pennsylvania was fully paid for.

Thus, I was 13 years old when I first strapped two metal sticks to my feet and attempted to throw myself down a slippery slope.

I hated it.

I distinctly remember the moment I decided to give up. I’d fallen (again!) and was crying halfway down the mountain, disappointed, bruised, exhausted and unable to get up. Every time I tried to stand up, my ski slid out from under me and I crumbled again. I laid there in the snow, wearing bell-bottom denim jeans and an equally inadequate jacket, experiencing nearly unbearable frustration.

No one was coming to save me. I realized that even quitting this awful activity was going to require more effort.

I don’t remember how I got down — but I’ve seen that same humbling frustration in many adults I’ve taught to ski over the years.

Once at the bottom, I snapped off my rentals and clomped back to the lodge where all the kids were staying. The Boy Scouts were also part of this ski tradition. We all slept in a cavernous lodge, with the girl sleeping bags on one side, the boys down the other, and various adults sprinkled in to ensure everyone behaved.

I arrived at the quiet lodge soaking wet and defeated. Everyone else was out having a good time. The other kids seemed to love skiing, and they impressed me with how they knew how to stop and spray snow while doing it.

One of the moms, Debbie, greeted me with hot chocolate and soup. Everyone struggles at first, she said. Even Jason, her son who could now spray snow.

After I had been thoroughly warmed, fed, and frankly, maternally loved and encouraged by Debbie, I went back out.

I didn’t improve much that trip or on subsequent ones — indeed, I needed proper instruction — but I made up in attitude what I lacked in skill.

Over the years, I skied bigger and bigger mountains, and bought better clothes, and eventually, thanks to a series of free lessons at Beaver Creek, Colo., from a generous and retired former ski instructor, and I eventually came to be a decent skier in my early 20s.

Observing families who skied together gave me something to aim for in life, beyond just my career.

Skiing as a family would not just happen. I would have to will it into being with my very being. From conceiving and bearing children to getting them up the mountain to being able to afford all of it, such a dream would encapsulate many endeavors over decades.

Learning to ski requires grit.

It’s scary to have two metal devices strapped to your feet while you careen down a snowy slope! It’s uncomfortable wearing all those layers. You’re either too cold or too hot, at first.

Ski boots feel unnatural and make you walk like an idiot.

And on top of all that, it’s dangerous!

Why the heck would anyone be crazy enough to ski?

Because, if you can stick with it, and get to the amazingly awesome bestest fun part where the mountains open up before you and you have mastered those metal sticks, you will have proved something deeper about who you are.

Being able to stick with something even when it’s hard serves us well in life.

This doesn’t mean that every hardy person with grit, skis. But it does mean that people who ski are hardy, with grit.

That was the kind of person I wanted to be. Those are the kinds of people I wanted to raise.

*~*~* Marriage *~*~*

When I chose daily newspaper journalism as a career, I knew that in the early years, I wouldn’t make enough money to embark upon fancy ski vacations. So, I needed to work someplace where skiing was a part of the local culture, where I could go skiing on the weekends. Thus, I set my sights upon either the Denver Post or one of the two (at the time) Seattle dailies.

This, my friends, is how I came to apply to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which hired me and moved me to Seattle!

Initially, I skied quite a bit with folks at the paper. I was unbelievably happy as a professional newspaper reporter who skied with friends of all ages on weekends.

Enter: The Seattle dating scene, which wasn’t that great at the time, and if social media is any indication, hasn’t improved since.

There was a man whom I’d met briefly at journalism school, when I was 22 and he was 29. We’d kept in touch, and while most of this is a different story for a different post, when I was 25 and he was 32, he told me that he wanted to visit Seattle.

He wanted to date and he was playing for keeps. He began to court me — which was an old-fashioned term even in 2006, but remains the best word to describe what it was and the only thing I would have responded to: A formal courtship.

Though we had shared values, I had an important question: “Are you willing to learn to ski?”

Ladies and gentlemen, this man flew to Seattle for a weekend, strapped metal sticks to his feet and endured the misery of learning to ski. For me.

He actually never did learn to ski. Several weeks into our budding relationship, some mutual friends took pity on his misery and taught him to snowboard. He’d loved surfing in Coronado while in the Navy, and within a few sessions, he was a better snowboarder than I am skier.

He co-signed onto the ski family goal. (And good thing, too, because he loads all the gear into the car and I am scared to death to drive over mountain passes! So we’re a good team!)

We married about a year later.

We enjoyed five full years together as a couple before having our first child — and every winter we skied so much that we never put our equipment away. We simply dumped all the kit in front of the television in the living room, where it dried out and sat until the following Saturday.

We took many friends up the mountain in his Jeep — playing music and singing the whole way. We’d drive up in the early morning to Stevens Pass, about two hours from Seattle, and stay until the lifts closed.

During the Great Recession, even when money was tight, we still went up to the slopes — and we’d eat MREs so we had hot food on the mountain. (MRE = Meals-ready-to-eat. My husband is a veteran.)

By the time I was approaching 30, and he was 37, it was time to start having children. We were both unsure about this momentous change, but I said, “We gotta get these babies born and growns up so we can ski with them!” And this vision was reassuring.

(“Growns up” is a movie reference.)

*~*~* Children *~*~*

During the baby-bearing and nursing phase of life, which lasted a decade, skiing became more scarce for us. I missed it so much. It is the only thing I do that serves no other purpose than to have fun.

We put each kid in skis starting at age 2.

Let me be clear on what this means that my kids have been skiing since age two:

It means we deployed maximum executive functioning to work through tears and toddler tantrums and way too many things to think of to drive the child to the mountain, and put the kid into skis, so they can ride the magic carpet a couple of times, before we call it a day, buy them a hot chocolate, give them a snack, and take them home.

Gone are the days of carving through freshly groomed morning corduroy to riding the last lift under bright lights. Instead, you learn to love the togetherness and appreciate the beauty of snow on evergreens and if you get two runs in, you count your blessings.

Just getting the kid to the mountain equals success. At first.

(Hilariously, my youngest child right now thinks the magic carpet itself is the point — you only go down so you can ride back up again. There’s wisdom in that!)

Also, critically, we snapped a few photos so that when the kids get older, we can feed their internal fortitude to stick with it, showing them that they have been skiing almost as long as they could walk.

There were a lot of low moments over the years when I wondered if my dream of a ski family would ever come true — like in December 2015 after my miscarriage, when our strong-willed-three-year-old got kicked out of Whistler ski school, and then again in 2018 in Sun Valley, when our friends counseled us that we needed to invest in ski school.

It felt miserable and I almost felt like an idiot until the first time I skied with our oldest child. Then, I wept with joy.

Also, I was wrong in thinking that I could teach them myself, the same way I had taught several friends over the years. Ski school — proper instruction from patient mountain people — made a major difference. It took me until 2020 to heed my friends' advice.

If you want to ski with your family, know this: Skiing with your kids is no fun until one day, it is fun.

You already know this from getting to the ski hill itself. It is all sucky drudgery and heavy lifting until the moment you boot in and fly.

*~*~* Paying it forward *~*~*

This sport means so much to me because of so many people who encouraged me when I had nothing to offer in return. Debbie at the lodge, the kindhearted retired instructor who taught me over spring break at Beaver Creek, Colo., families of friends who welcomed me on their ski vacations and lent me proper clothing, my newspaper friends who drove me up the mountain, and more.

To pay the kindness forward, I introduced many adult friends to the sport, lending them clothing and giving them lessons. I’ve paid for lessons for our au pairs, visiting from warmer countries.

Because I had to borrow so much when I was younger, our family now hangs onto all of our used equipment. We have plenty of spare jackets, pants, helmets, goggles, mittens and balaclavas, to help beginners get into the sport. I like introducing new people to skiing.

And in part, I’m writing this post to encourage you, dear reader, whomever you are and wherever you are in your journey.

This post is another way of paying it forward.