The conditions that morning were ideal for skiing. The temperature was about ten degrees above zero. It was clear and windless. Several inches of new snow covered the dooryard, glowing with a lovely bluish tint in the dawn light. Having finally finished a draft of our landlady’s story and another story besides, I thought I’d celebrate by taking a day to go skiing. I slid my skis into our beat-up station wagon and drove to a resort a couple of hours away. I bought my lift ticket, then waited a few minutes for the chairlift to start operating. I was the first and, so far, the only customer.
I’d chosen a medium-length trail, somewhere between half and three-quarters of a mile long, and it appeared that I’d have it entirely to myself, at least for the first run down. Though noticeably colder here on the mountain, it was a splendid morning. As I rose, effortlessly, up the slope, I counted more than twenty other peaks, their snowy tops glowing as pink as strawberry ice cream in the sunrise. Already I was anticipating the matchless exhilaration of a clean, swooping downhill run on brand-new powdery snow.
Floating up the mountain fifteen to twenty feet over the tops of snow-laden evergreens, I shivered slightly. Like many local skiers, I scorned fashionable ski wear, and instead was dressed in long johns, wool pants, a couple of flannel shirts under a sweater, a red-and-black-checked hunting jacket, and a red wool hunting cap with earflaps. A breeze had come up, and the air sparkled with crystalline flakes of ice, like hoar frost. Each time the chair rolled under a lift tower, it made a small thud, like a kiddie ride at a fair. Riding a chairlift is like going up in a safe and stable Ferris wheel at an innocent country carnival.
The lift line inclined at a steeper slant. My chair stopped. All the chairs on the lift stopped. It was totally silent. Alone in midair, I was out of sight of the ski lodge below and the landing deck on the mountaintop above.
Of course, this had happened to me before. All ski lifts stop occasionally, usually for reasons obscure to their riders. Soon enough the chairs would start to move again, and I’d be on my way. They didn’t, though, and I wasn’t. I sat waiting in that big wooden-and-steel contraption, swaying in the gathering breeze, and nothing happened at all. What was I supposed to do? Call for help on my cell phone? This was 1964. My feet were getting cold. So were my mittened hands. I stamped one foot, then the other, on the metal ski rest, rattling my wooden skis like deer antlers. There was no response, just the enveloping, now vaguely unsettling, silence. I noticed that it had begun to snow. The breeze had picked up into a gusting wind.
Higher up the slope, a grooming machine on caterpillar treads emerged from the thickening snowflakes. I waved my hunting cap at the driver, who looked warm and content inside his glass-enclosed cab. He took a sip from a large blue thermos as I signaled frantically. He glanced up at me, smiled, and waved back. Then he swung off onto a parallel trail for advanced skiers and started back up the mountainside.
In no particular order, I began to catalog the things I had not done in my twenty-one short years. Fish the rivers of Labrador. Have kids with Phillis. Publish a story. God in heaven, right now I’d settle for getting my stiffening feet back on terra firma again.
I swore, swore, that if the powers that be would let me live to revise Verna’s moonshining story (yes, and publish it), I would never again waste a precious morning in such a frivolous way. What the hell was the matter with me? This wasn’t a life-or-death situation. Was it? It was getting colder by the minute. And exactly who was I beseeching to come to my rescue? In the King James Bible, God is recorded as laughing just once. I could see the old boy we’d been teaching our Sunday school kids about, with His fiery punishments and stern injunctions, laughing again this morning. Laughing at me, stuck up here freezing to death on a goddamn chairlift.
A desperate strategy occurred to me. It was hard to estimate, but I guessed I was suspended thirty-five to forty feet above the ground. Itinerant roofers I’d worked with in college—a hard-bitten outfit, if I do say so—had a grim adage. With luck, they liked to say, a man might survive a twenty- or even a twenty-five-foot fall. Thirty feet was considered the cutoff point, the gateway to that bourne from which few men, even hard-bitten roofers, return. But if I unclasped my bindings, kicked out of my skis, and hung from the footrest by my hands, I could perhaps get into that thirty- to thirty-five-foot range where survival was still an outside possibility. There were, after all, less yielding surfaces than snow to fall on.
It was storming harder. The narrow corridor of trail through the woods below was filling up with new snow. Whose woods they were I knew very well—they belonged to the Christly corporation that owned the resort and the mountain, whose lift operators were even now drinking coffee, gabbing, checking the scores of last night’s high school basketball games in the morning paper. That was it! No other skiers had shown up yet, so in the absence of customers, they had shut off the lift and forgotten all about me. Enough. I’d give the doughnut-eating bastards five minutes, not a second more. Then, while I still had some faint sensation left in my hands, I’d make the plunge. Maybe I was only thirty feet off the ground, which did seem closer in the snow squall, didn’t it? No, it did not. Was this pickle I was in a metaphor for my first year as a teacher? Or for the apprenticeship of an aspiring novelist? I didn’t know or care. I just wanted to get off that chairlift, and off that mountain, alive.
“Wouldn’t you?” I said to the West Texas Jesus, on the outskirts of Austin, forty-some years later.
Nothing. I repeated the question. No response. What a comedown. The guy had fallen asleep right in the middle of my story, leaving me hanging up there in the wind and snow, at the mercy of the elements and our heavenly father.