November 24, 2011
Remember when: Allure of New England's ancient hills endures
by David M. Shribman/Special to New England Ski Journal
(photo: Black Mountain)
It was a magnificent day in February, the sky the precise color of the two stripes on Colorado’s flag, the temperature in the high 20s, the snow almost as soft as the inside of a Paris-perfect croissant. And as we paused for just a moment on a turn on Breckenridge’s Peak Seven, I had a thought I simply just could not repress:
This run, more than two miles long on one of the Rockies’ most storied mountains above perhaps the greatest ski town in the world, was almost as good as the one I took a month earlier on the little Upper Speedwell trail on tiny Black Mountain in the sparkling heights above Jackson, N.H.
Because for me, as for some of you, the pull of those ancient hills in New England endures, not only because it is where skiing started in North America but also because it is where we started skiing.
Skiing is the most personal of sports, in part because each run offers so many potential routes, so many potential techniques, so many potential ways to wipe out. On the slopes, your wedge is as good as my stem Christiana, though I’m old enough to remember when people actually did the stem Christie, and why it’s called what it is, and you’re probably not.
But most of all: Skiing is personal because it is about more than muscle memory. It is, above all, about memory itself.
So every time I settle into the magnificent Grand Timber Lodge in Breckenridge, or think about maybe someday checking into the Stein Erickson Lodge in Utah rather than just walking wistfully through the lobby, I compare both places — and so many others, like one of my favorites, the Chateau Lake Louise — to two hostelries of my youth: the Christmas Farm Inn, which is still on the side of the road heading up toward Black Mountain, and the Edgewood Inn, which closed in 1973.
It turns out that I was in a hotel just last night. Hours later, I don’t remember a thing about it. But my memories of the Edgewood Inn are so strong that I never pass the precise point where it stood on Route 16 — there’s a miniature golf monstrosity there now — without thinking about the jigsaw puzzles in the living room, and the logs in the fire, and the special feeling of being far, far away that descended on us like the snows of my memory, which almost always fell at night and piled high along the tracks of the Mount Cranmore Skimobile. I also recall the little cars, red and green like a Christmas idyll, that climbed to the sky, or at least to the halfway station, where you got out and, if you were very brave, mounted the second stage for the ride toward what I then regarded as the forbidden territory of a trail that bore the ominous name of The Ledges.
And now that we are at it, I can still summon the smell of the cheese strudel that Voyin P. Stoykovich, a onetime tailgunner in a Yugoslav unit in World War II, used to craft back there in the Edgewood Inn and the fresh bread that his wife, Aimee Rehr Stoykovich — American-born and a graduate of Smith College — used to bake. You can have your artisan loaves and your Kalamata Olive bread that make the city people feel so sophisticated, so evolved, so self-satisfied. I’d do anything for a slice of Aimee Stoykovich’s white bread, and don’t even think of pouring some oil on a plate as you serve it. I want a pat of butter, please, to go with that, and I’m not even insisting that the whole thing cost $7.50 a night, M.A.P., which, in case you’ve forgotten, means Modified American Plan: a plentiful breakfast and maybe the best dinner of the winter.
The waitress in those days was almost always the Stoykovichs’ daughter, Susanne, who skied all day and served skiers their breakfasts and dinners. I recall the way, one weekend, a table of Dartmouth boys flirted nervously with her, remembering the way my brother Jeff and I thought their giggling that evening in the dining room was silly and beside the point — the point being the skiing — and not realizing that in a decade’s time I’d be a Dartmouth boy myself and just as nervous around a pretty girl.
When you skied in the Mount Washington Valley in those years, you did not tuck hand warmers into your gloves, nor buckle your boots, nor did you fuss about the grooming. You went skiing, and it was an adventure, not an avocation, and the older skiers regaled you with stories about the Snow Train that left from North Station, and your ski instructor actually knew Hannes Schenider, who brought skiing, and a special way of looking at winter, to New Hampshire. You listened to those stories with respect, not only because young men treated their elders with respect in those days, but also because those stories prompted respect. Plus you respected the hills, because they were tall and unforgiving, and you worshiped the word wedel, even though today there breathes not a soul, except for this magazine’s editor, Tony Chamberlain, who has the faintest idea what it means and how to pronounce it. (I have a whole book on the subject. You can borrow it someday.)
You also knew who Penny Pitou was. You worshiped her, too. (If you think Penny Pitou is to a travel agency the way Joe DiMaggio is to Mister Coffee, then we have ample evidence, along with the very existence of Deer Valley, that the apocalypse is upon us.)
I remember well my first days on skis, and the torture I felt among the ski scholars at the Arthur Doucette Ski School over by the J-Bar at Black Mountain, and of telling my father, who knew better, that the little slope on Whitney’s Hill was so steep that I couldn’t conceive of conquering it. I drove by it last year and thought: Even after heart surgery and severely restricted lung capacity, I could drive my bike up that pimple. Later, I would come to know Arthur Doucette and come to love the stories he would tell, some of which were actually true, and to appreciate the ancient skis he gave me after one long night of storytelling in Jackson and which I cherish today.
I remember the old names of the slopes at Cranmore, before anyone heard of the Hurricane Trail, and marvel that I knew the meaning of the word Kandahar (one of the great trails on that old hill) before Americans would fight a war there in that province of Afghanistan. I would come to believe that there is no better view on earth than the glimpse of Mount Washington from Cranmore’s Rattlesnake Trail or the full-frontal bang of a view of the great peak you got coming across that bend in the Polecat Trail at Wildcat. And I would conclude that there is no better statement of the ethos of our kind of skiing than the fact that when my wife asked whether our little girl should ski on a particularly windy day at Wildcat (and I write that with the full knowledge that the phrase is redundant) she was told by the woman at the ski school desk that if only she would put rocks in our daughter’s pockets, Elizabeth Shribman would not blow away.
One more point to seal the argument. My grandmother and mother both skied in Canada’s Laurentians, which are the first cousin to our White Mountains, and my own girls are fourth-generation skiers on the fabled Hill 69 of Quebec. I am the son of a Dartmouth man, the father of a Dartmouth woman, the nephew of a Dartmouth man and the uncle of two recent Dartmouth graduates. All were, or are, skiers of the most accomplished and romantic types. For us, they are the very same thing.
My father, Dartmouth ’47, skied in his undergraduate days but abandoned the sport, reluctantly, after having been stricken with polio. What more eloquent statement of our values can there be than this:
When Dick Shribman, for whom memory of skiing would forever have to substitute for experience of skiing, got together a few dollars, he took his young family skiing. It was Jan. 2, 1964, that I entered my name in the guest book at the Christmas Farm Inn.
In some very beautiful ways, my life has been all Downhill since then.
This article originally appeared in the November 2011 issue of New England Ski Journal.
David M. Shribman, a native of Salem, Mass., is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and the executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Mr. Shribman also has written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Boston Globe. He can be reached at feedback@skijournal.com
