Electric Josh

On Saturday we learned that our local (mini-) ski area was open. There isn't a trace of natural snow, even in the shadows, but they have apparently been running their snow guns constantly, as evidenced by the several feet of man made snow on the trails. (They must make it in one large pile that they then grade out over the trails: the snow's edge is steep, looking pretty much exactly like freshly graded dirt at a construction site, but white.) I carried Sophie over to the base area in one arm and proceeded to get her all geared up to try skiing herself, pointing out with my other arm the big kids on snowboards and skis, some other kids her age just learning how to ski, and the fancy orange handles on the rope tow. Getting her all geared up proved not to be all that hard. "Can I try this when I get bigger than you?" she kept asking, as she tends to nowadays.

So I ended up taking her skiing on Sunday morning, and we lasted about two solid hours before my back and her whole body were all done. We took many trips up the magic carpet (a little conveyor belt on which one stands and is transported about a hundred feet up a slight hill) and, when that broke, a couple of trips up the rope tow. She had started the day completely unable to stand upright even for a moment and ended the day able to glide in a straight line, completely out of (her own) control, loving it. For my part, I discovered that teaching a three-year-old to ski—lifting a heavy kid with heavy skis, pointing her down the hill, arranging her skis into a snowplow, skiing backwards ahead of her and then catching her—is much, much harder on the back than mogul skiing.

At any rate, we drove eleven minutes back to the house to get lunch and take a nap, at which point I realized that I still had about an hour on my lift ticket, so the lovely wife sent me back for what proved to be six solo runs in the space of 45 minutes. As you might expect for a ski area whose trails extend only about 500 vertical feet, it doesn't take an experienced skier long to get to the bottom. As you might also expect, the trails described on the trail map as black (expert) runs would more aptly be labelled blue (intermediate) anywhere else, especially given the perfectly smooth groomed surface, but what do you want for skiing that's less than fifteen minutes from the house?

Finally, it was completely bizarre to be skiing at all in view of the Boston skyline (as seen from my crappy cell phone camera).
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