First Tracks

by Catherine O'Connell

  Joel had gotten divorced since Sam died and was living in Vail with his mother. When he reared his head in Aspen from time to time, he nearly always went out of his way to make me miserable, like it was my fault that Sam died and left me the house in the life estate. And it wasn’t like Sam had overlooked his kids entirely. He had socked away a few hundred thousand dollars in his eighty-five years and left both his son and his daughter a buck and a half. His daughter Josie, married and living in New York, had been fine with that. It hadn’t been enough for Joel and he’d sued me over the property a couple of times. He’d given up after losing the second time, but my victory was bittersweet since legal fees had set my Everest trip nest egg back considerably. The last two times I’d seen him, he’d changed his tactics from trying to get me out to trying to get me to sell the place to him. And you can see how far he’d got with that.

  I kept my head down in hopes he wouldn’t see me, but my bad luck was determined to prevail. He called out my name, which left me no option other than to turn and acknowledge him.

  ‘Greta,’ he said in the sort of voice you hear from a cop as you’re lowering the driver’s side window. ‘Taking a day off?’

  ‘Joel,’ I replied with equal enthusiasm. ‘Yah, even patrol takes a day from time to time. Now might be the time for you to straight-line S1.’ With a pitch around forty degrees, S1 is the steepest run on Aspen Mountain, I hasten to add.

  ‘Don’t ever let anyone tell you you’re not funny. Cuz you are. Really.’

  ‘Thanks. I’ll call you when I decide to do stand-up so you can come and harass me.’ I loaded my groceries into my canvas sack. Plastic bags are prohibited in Aspen grocery stores. That’s just another one of the cutting-edge things about the town. Aspen was one of the first cities in the country to prohibit smoking in restaurants, and it’s against the law to let a car idle more than a minute in town. After an ill-fated attempt to outlaw the sale of fur it only made sense that we’d attack the plastic bag. You only need to see the flotilla of them in the ocean to understand the rationale behind that. Patrons were obliged to bring their own bag to the store or shell out five cents for a paper one. And can you believe there were actually visitors who complained about paying five cents for a paper bag in a town where the average house price hovered around $3,000,000 and a day ski pass went for $180? I stuffed the last of my food into my reusable bag and slipped it on to my shoulder.

  ‘Adios,’ I said flippantly and headed for the door. He followed me out, close as an evening shadow.

  ‘Wait, I want to talk to you about the house.’ The fact that he hadn’t mentioned either the avalanche or my near death by asphyxiation told me he wasn’t aware of either. Which also told me he must have just arrived in town.

  ‘What about it?’ I asked, opening the car door and piling the groceries on to the back seat.

  ‘I want to make another offer.’

  This time I turned and faced him directly. He was a good-looking guy with dark curly hair and a mild cleft in his chin. There was a lot of Sam in his face, the determined mouth and stubborn brow knit over his transparent blue eyes. But the part of Sam he lacked was kindness in his eyes. His pupils were pinpricks riveted on me from above. He was also a tall man. I’m five eight and I stared back at him from the height of his shoulder. Which my gloved hand threatened to poke before its owner managed to restrain it. ‘You can just forget about me leaving that house, OK? I’m not going anywhere.’

  ‘Look, I’ve talked with Josie and we’re willing to give you a million bucks.’

  ‘Forget about it, Joel.’ I was smoking pissed. ‘Look, maybe we could have talked about this if you’d made an offer before suing my ass. Too late now. Subject closed.’ I slammed the heavy door shut and pulled out of the lot.

  As I drove up valley, the houses gave way to snow-covered meadows until I reached the pine-lined entrance to my road. The entire way I was wondering where Joel would ever come up with a million dollars. Then I realized he probably already had some developer lined up to buy the property off him for five times that. I let myself play around with the idea of having a million dollars. Anywhere else in the world it might be serious coinage. But in Aspen it was chump change. There was so much money in Aspen that you’d be hard-pressed to find someone who’d bend over to pick up one of the hundies that spit out of the cash station at the foot of the gondola. In Aspen a million bucks will barely buy you a one-bedroom in the local tenements and having that much money basically makes you ineligible for the subsidized employee housing.

  I thought back to the housing shuffle I’d endured in the years prior to taking up residence in the A-frame with Sam. Air mattresses in basement dormitories and futons in entry halls. Often three or more to a room. Sometimes you scored with housesitting at one of the big houses in the off season, which made going back to cramped living quarters even more distasteful. I’d lasted through those years despite the inconvenience. We all did. Those of us who loved Aspen were stuck to it like flies on a glue strip, and there was no way of shaking us loose.

  Selling to Joel would mean I would have to move someplace else for a million bucks to seem like a million bucks. And since I had little interest in money anyway, except to get to Everest, a million bucks held little appeal to me. Even if Joel offered me five million dollars, there was no way I was selling my home to him. And so any thought of leaving Aspen was put to rest for the time being.

  Joel had gotten me so aggravated that it wasn’t until I pulled on to my road that the coincidence of the bird’s nest in my chimney and Joel’s presence two days later occurred to me. Maybe it wasn’t a coincidence after all.

  It was an incredibly lonely night, my only company Ovid and his whimsical gods. We were three weeks into the winter term, and since I’d already missed a class because of my various pitfalls of the prior week, disturbing as they were, I had some catching up to do. As far as I could tell, the Greeks had it all over us when it came to violence and debauchery. Take Jupiter for example, or Zeus as the Romans called him. He was always turning himself into one animal or another so he could have his way with various women without his wife, who also happened to be his sister, catching on. One time he actually changed himself into a swan so he could screw a woman named Leda. Try wrapping your brain around that image. What’s more, Leda then went on to give birth to Helen of Troy, the most beautiful woman in the world. Jeez, you can’t make this stuff up.

  I fell asleep with the light on and the book on my chest and woke to the sound of something rattling below my window. I swiftly turned out the light and waited for my eyes to adjust to the dark. My heart was beating in an erratic manner that told me I was frightened. I’d been living alone in the house for two years now and had never been fearful before. Then I realized that my life had changed a lot in the last two weeks. Two weeks ago Kayla had been around to notify me of anything lurking in the dark; one week ago I’d never been in an avalanche; two days ago I’d given no thought to carbon monoxide poisoning. I was rightfully skittish. Once I could see, I pushed my face against the window. A thick snow was falling, drawing a white curtain across my yard. But through the white I could make out a dark figure moving low to the ground, skittering across the yard. It was a raccoon in retreat, its attempt to access my trash can thwarted by a bear-proof lock. This is the nature that I live in and love.

  I put Ovid on the nightstand and pulled the down comforter tight around my neck. I thought of the gods and their whimsical nature and wondered if I was victim of their whimsy as of late. For the hundredth time I tried to reconstruct the afternoon of the avalanche. I remembered Neverman telling me to clean out the ski patrol shack at the top of Ruthie’s. Then there was my glimpse of Warren getting off the chair. The urge to follow him. Once again, my memory remained shuttered from there no matter how hard I mentally banged the lock.

  I stared at the ceiling in the dark for a long time before finally going back to sleep.

  NINE

  Neverman had told me to come back to w
ork when I was ready and the next morning I was. It had snowed all night and there was about a foot and a half of fresh snow outside, the entire world layered in white as the snow continued to fall. There was no sense spending one more day as a shut-in while the rest of my world was enjoying God’s bequest. I climbed down from the loft, got dressed and took my patrol jacket off the hook for the first time in nearly a week.

  When I went outside the Wagoneer looked like a long, square igloo parked at the side of the building. I dug her out, tossed my ski boots into the back and fired her up. It was still snowing as we turned on to Highway 82. As usual, this high up the valley there were no other vehicles in sight. The road had already been plowed, but a good amount of new snow had already accumulated, turning the surface into a frosted white pancake.

  When I got to town, I pulled into my regular parking place at a condominium complex near the mountain. I was lucky to have the spot; the manager was a friend. Otherwise getting in from the A-frame for work would have been problematic. Paid parking was not only expensive, it was practically non-existent. At the early-morning hour, the three-block walk to the gondola from my car was as deserted as the highway had been. Aspen Mountain wouldn’t open to the public for another couple of hours, but the lift was already running to shuttle staff up the hill.

  With my best powder skis buried on the west side of the mountain, I went into my storage locker at the base to retrieve another pair. Our equipment is our stock in trade and we patrollers all have several pairs of skis – some all-round skis, some for icy conditions, some for powder. I grabbed my second-best pair of powder skis and climbed the stairs to the gondola. I jumped into an empty cabin, relieved to see no one else waiting to board. I really wasn’t in the mood for talking. Snow had blown in through an open vent, so I brushed off the seat and settled in for the fifteen-minute ride to the top.

  In the Rockies the weather can change in an instant, and the clouds parted the very moment the gondola car left the terminal, although tufts of deep metal gray looming on the horizon forewarned of another storm. The clearing sky afforded me views to the east toward Independence Pass near where I lived and west toward the airport where the valley flattens out. My eyes turned downward to the confluence of ski runs flowing down the mountain below. To me they represented an artistic sort of beauty. To my way of thinking, Aspen Mountain, sometimes called Ajax after one of the mines that operated here, is as near to skiing perfection as you can get.

  The ski area encompasses a pair of ridges covering some of the best inbounds ski terrain in the country. There are expert and intermediate runs, but nothing for the beginner. For that we send skiers off to Buttermilk or Snowmass. Aspen can be a tricky mountain to ski if you don’t know it. Locals have secret routes replete with powder stashes that the less informed skier might miss. If you understood the mountain, you could take run after run on only one chairlift ride, working with gravity to pull you up the side of the mountain again and again like a sailboat tacking into the wind.

  Gazing down at nature’s amusement park, I was struck by the irony that the slopes we so enjoyed basically existed because of the town’s mining history. When silver miners seeking their fortune came to the valley in the 1880s, they denuded the mountain of trees, using the lumber to line the mine shafts below. The irony was that in doing so, they carved out perfect ski runs set smack atop a Swiss-cheese maze of underground shafts and stopes.

  I was startled back to the present by an explosion, the concussion displacing the airwaves in the gondola like an extra heartbeat. Patrol was at work. An important part of our job was doing avalanche control to make the area safe for skiers, setting off bombs in areas that had accumulated snow that could slide. The explosion prompted yet another recall of the slide outside Ruthie’s, and my eyes swelled with tears of frustration, both for the loss of Warren and from my ignorance of what we were doing there in the first place. More than anything in this world I wanted to know why, not knowing if the answer would put me out of this agony or make it worse.

  The gondola reached the sheltered terminal at the top of the mountain and the doors slid open. I grabbed my skis from the rack and walked along the front of the Sundeck restaurant where the employees were prepping for the morning breakfast crush. The patrol hut was situated directly across from the Sundeck, a two-story building little changed from when it was built in the early years of skiing in Aspen, when super-long wooden skis ruled and spiral fractures caused by wind-milling skis attached to safety straps were as common as breaks from smacking into trees.

  There were about a dozen patrollers in the hut if you didn’t count Neverman, who was tuning his skis on a table in the workshop with his back to the door. I slipped past him into the main room where a fire was roaring in the old stone fireplace and the other patrollers sat on sixties-era furniture, chatting and drinking coffee. A profound silence fell over the room when everyone saw me. Meghan slipped me a sympathetic smile and came over to give me a hug. There was a momentary lull and then the others followed suit, Stu Reininger and Darren Cole giving me slaps on the shoulder, Rob Winter cuffing my gloves in a sign of solidarity. Singh was the last, wrapping his arms around me and holding me tight, his gesture nearly suffocating. Lucy, as always, kept to herself, giving me a subtle flick of her hand.

  Neverman came out to see what all the fuss was about and upon seeing me went right back into the workshop, back to tuning his skis as if nothing had changed. As expected, my name was nowhere on the day’s roster, which was no surprise because I hadn’t alerted anyone that I was coming back. I poured myself a cup of coffee and grabbed a muffin from the perpetual stack piled on the table and plopped down on a bench to wait for my boss to come back.

  The others finished what they were doing and, as if by mandate, one by one they buckled up their boots and evacuated the hut, leaving Neverman and me alone. I sat waiting while he used an iron to melt hot wax on to his skis to ensure they were just right for the day’s conditions. He brushed a ski with a rag, tested the sharpness of the edge with a fingernail, and wiped his hands off on his ski pants. He turned to face me, taking in my uniform as if it were a surprise.

  ‘Sure you’re OK to work?’ he asked simply.

  ‘I’m a little banged up. Some bruises. Nothing like the time I bounced face first down Elevator Shaft.’

  ‘I’m not talking about the slide. I’m talking about that other thing.’ Even Neverman read the local papers.

  ‘Oh, you mean the carbon monoxide?’

  ‘That’s right. How’s your mental acuity?’

  ‘No dumber than before,’ I acquiesced, wondering if he would have asked one of the guys the same thing.

  He took a deep breath and sized me up like a physician deciding whether or not to share the diagnosis. Finally, he shrugged and said, ‘Go with Singh.’

  I put on my helmet, grabbed my fanny pack filled with supplies and was out the door before he could change his mind.

  Singh was just stepping into his skis. His name tag read A. Singh, but while I called Reininger Stu or Neverman Mike on occasion, no one ever called Singh anything other than Singh. I don’t even know if anyone really knew Singh’s first name. He’d told me once, but it was so unpronounceable I just continued calling him Singh. ‘Sing with an h’ he was always quick to say when asked his name.

  Born in Delhi, Singh came to the US to do his graduate studies at Stanford. That was before having the bad or good luck, depending on how you viewed it, to come to Aspen on spring break his first year. It was his first time on skis, first time seeing snow for that matter, and the love affair was so immediate that all thought of becoming an engineer was shot to hell. He quit school and moved to Aspen. Eighteen years later, Singh was not only one of the most beautiful skiers on patrol, but definitely the smartest.

  He was tall with dark hair and dark eyes, his creamy brown skin a nod to some European intervention into his gene pool. It bordered on comical to see the look on some victims’ faces when Singh came skiing up. I guess they
didn’t think of Indians as ski pros. But that look changed when he started attending to them. Maybe they thought they had an educated doctor taking care of them instead of a ski bum.

  ‘It’s me and you today if you’re down with that,’ I probed.

  ‘You and I?’ he replied. He could be a grammatical stickler at times. ‘Westerlind, you can have my back any time.’

  His response took one layer off the fog and I immediately felt lighter. We skied over to Walsh’s through thigh-deep powder and started down the steep slope. As my skis parted the snow every fiber of me was alive, the crisp air fresh on my face, my muscles alternately tensed and relieved as gravity drew me toward her bosom. My turns were perfectly carved Ss, linked curves along the fall line, the weight of the snow putting natural brakes on my speed. My mind was completely in the moment, in the motion, in the snow.

  All problems ceased to exist. Skiing does that to you. The marriage of body and mind against ground and gravity takes you to a higher plane, focusing all thought, commanding all concentration on the physical action, not allowing room for other concerns.

  We raced around the corner to the chair lift. There was a sort of redemption in being back in my element and, for the first time in days, I felt like things might start to get better. That thought turned out to be premature.

  TEN

  The morning was uneventful, or as uneventful as far as accidents in eighteen inches of new powder can be. It’s totally counterintuitive, but there seem to be fewer serious accidents on deep-snow days than on other days. I think it’s because the good skiers know how to handle powder and the intermediates get intimidated when their skis bog down and they can’t turn. They tire out early and pack it in. Which doesn’t stop them from going back to Dallas or Atlanta or wherever and raving about the fantastic powder they skied in Aspen. Which is as it should be, a win-win for all. They get bragging rights and we get the mountain to ourselves.