With an anticlimactic jerk, as I was telling the West Texas Jesus the next morning somewhere between Tucumcari and Albuquerque, the chairlift started again. Up the mountain I went, too numb to feel anything more than relief. Ahead, on a jagged outcropping of granite above the treeline, perched the operator’s booth. Uncertain whether I could even stand up, I motioned for the attendant to slow down the lift. Maybe I could warm up in his booth, then catch a ride down to the lodge in the groomer. I called out for the guy to stop the chairs. He was bent over a paperback book and didn’t seem to hear me. At the far end of the landing, the empty chairs were whipping around an elevated bull wheel before starting back down the mountainside. Perhaps I could just stay aboard, ride back to the lodge, have a cup of coffee, and reconnoiter. But to judge from the way the chairs were snapping past that wheel, at the very least I’d get whiplash and be out of commission for weeks. “Whiplash?” said the counsel for the ski resort, all but winking at the jury of frowning Vermont working men and working women, all twelve of whom would know better than to get on a chairlift in the first place. This was how young teachers and would-be writers spent their time? Paying cash money to ride uphill in order to slide back down again? Damages of $0 awarded. Court costs assigned to the plaintiff.
Touchdown was now scant seconds away. I flipped up the bar, stood, and let the seat shove me along over the snowy landing by the backs of my half-frozen legs—which promptly gave way beneath me. Down I went, ass over teakettle. Luckily, the chair passed harmlessly above me, but before I could crawdad my way to safety, the next one whanged hard, really hard, into my back and shoulders. Still wearing my skis, I rolled straight into the path of the next chair. I tried to fend it off with my left ski pole, which snapped neatly in two. What if one of those eighty-pound conveyances whapped me a good one in the head? How many novels would I write then? And why didn’t the kid in the booth shut down the lift? They hadn’t hesitated to stop it when I was dangling thirty-five feet up in the air in a whiteout.
“Turn it off!” I bellowed.
The operator looked up from his book. Instead of shutting off the lift, he rushed out of the booth and screamed, “What are you doing, you dumb son of a bitch?”
His response was of a piece with everything else that had happened to me in the last twenty minutes. After all, I wasn’t supposed to be flopping around on the mountaintop dodging chairs. I was supposed to be dead, frozen stiff as a human icicle, from my little airing-out high above the mountainside. The next chair cracked into my right ski as I tried again to flip out of the way. I felt like a snapping turtle on its back in the middle of a busy freeway. What if my collar or belt got caught on a bar and drew me into the bull wheel to be pulled limb from limb like a victim of the Inquisition? Would that satisfy them?
“Turn it off!” I brayed.
The operator stood glaring down at me. I had assumed a semifetal position with my arms protecting my head. “Why didn’t you say you didn’t know how to dismount properly?” he shouted.
Apparently we were to debate the issue while I was being mauled to death by chairs. At that point, my survival instincts kicked in.
“I’ll get you!” I yelled insanely, lashing out at him with the stump of my broken ski pole.
Miraculously, I managed to scuttle out of the way of the chairs. I staggered to my feet and made a last, ineffectual lunge at the operator with my good pole as he fled into his booth. Where, at last, he saw fit to press the shut-off button.
Not one thing that had happened after the lift stopped, stranding me halfway up the mountain, made a particle of sense to me. What I did next, however, did. Without further ado, I hobbled over to one of the trails, shoved off with my unbroken pole, and started down the mountainside.
The trackless new snow was as light and fine as confectioner’s sugar. The lift overhead was running smoothly. A middle-aged couple riding up the mountain in identical red parkas waved, a ski bum dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt gave me a thumbs-up. In the freshly groomed snow, I turned sharply in little upflung flurries, sped grandly around sweeping curves, traversed long, steep pitches as if I were a truly expert skier. Even with just one functional pole, it was the most glorious downhill run of my life. And the last.
At the bottom of the hill I executed a neat turn-stop. I unbuckled my bindings, shouldered my battered skis, and made straight for the ski shop in the basement of the lodge. “I’d like to trade these in on a new pair of cross-country skis,” I told the guy at the counter. “Don’t ask me why.”