Fall-Away

Peg schofield went up to watch the ski race because she wanted to see the children. She went every year. They weren't her children, but it didn't matter: she loved seeing them ski down the mountain; loved seeing their skinny bodies against the white snow as they swooped back and forth between red and blue gates; loved the dramatic way they hurled themselves through the finish line, and how some of the younger ones would proudly smile and wave to their parents once they'd completed their runs. Watching all this helped Peg access some locked box of nostalgia that lay otherwise dormant inside her throughout the rest of the year.

Besides, what else was there to do? It was a quiet Sunday in mid-March, winter basically over, the resort all but empty for the season. Peg didn't ski anymore, her knees would never allow it, and even if she still skied the season's conditions were no longer good enough to warrant schlepping all that gear up to the mountain. Already, bare patches of dirt blistered some of the ski slopes, streaking them like picked scabs. Spring had come early this year and the snow was suffering. To Peg, it seemed that the winters up in New Hampshire had become shorter and shorter. She supposed it was just another one of those things you had to accept when the world no longer resembled the one you knew.

Peg rode the complimentary resort shuttle from where it had picked her up outside her condominium down in the valley. The shuttle was an old Blue Bird school bus painted red, and it dropped her and a few skiers off in front of the stone steps that led to the base lodge. Peg wore a teal-colored jacket with a waterproof shell and fleece lining, some unstylish but functional thing that was both a concession to her age and the day's damp weather, and a pair of black corduroys layered over long johns. With a small rucksack strapped to her back and a ski pole in each hand—she found them sportier than a cane and twice as effective—Peg walked up the gentle slope to the bottom of the race hill, as she'd done so many times before. Her knees felt tender and unsteady, like a decaying tooth one avoids chewing with, and she was careful where she stepped. But if my knees give out and I fall, she thought, so what? You couldn't avoid those things forever. The snow was wet and sugary, and it squished with a rubbery sound under the soles of her hiking boots.

Once she made it to the finish line, Peg took a seat in a short stand of metal bleachers among a scattering of young parents, all of whom waited to watch their children. They must've thought Peg was someone's grandmother. It was the first of two runs—one would be held in the morning, one in the afternoon, and the children's times would be combined for the final results. The children ran the course at one-minute intervals. Peg could spot each child as they crested the last pitch of the trail and ticked their way between the final ten gates.

In front of her, the dark mountain rose up with slender pines studding it like quills standing on end, and ski trails streaked its wooded face in strips of white. The race hill was steep, and it undulated in a series of rolls, like swells on a sea, which made it difficult to ski precisely and quickly. Skiers couldn't see what was on the other side of each roll. The children had to memorize the rhythm of the course—at least in theory—because every time they crested one of these rolls they came upon the next gate as if momentarily blind. Then the terrain dropped. Nearly every turn was what one called a fall-away, meaning skiers had to battle gravity while traversing the steeply pitched slope from one gate to the next. It was difficult to dig in your edges...