Have you ever had one of those days, or weeks, when you feel like you are constantly brushing up against a version of your former life? I had a Saturday like that recently. I was on my way up to Mazama to ski and as I passed the Winthrop Barn, I noticed that the parking lot was full of cars — volunteers setting up for a performance that evening. I knew that scene well, having done it myself for many years.
As I drove out past Big Valley, a long line of vehicles stretched out in the lane going the toward town, each one filled with people dressed in ski gear. No one seemed to be driving like a maniac, but they all conveyed a sense of urgency. I’d been in that line myself in previous years as part of the Ski to the Sun relay parent shuttle, picking up kids from various legs of the relay and trying to ferry them to the next transition station before their teammates arrived.
During my ski in Mazama I encountered several parties that echoed phases of my former self.
First, a mother skiing with a floppy sleeping baby strapped to her back, only its little rosy face visible within the puffy hood. I even recognized the snowsuit as one that had made its rounds through half a dozen Methow families when my kids were young, although there’s no way of knowing if it was the same snowsuit or just its twin.
Next, I came across a father pulling two toddlers in a chariot and from the snippets of repetitive conversation I overheard as I passed, I recalled similar keep-the-kids-entertained call and response dialogues from my own past. “See the helicopter?” “Heh-copper! Heh-copper!’ “What is it doing?” “Fy-ing! Fy-ing!”
At the farthest reaches of the trail, I encountered a young couple with two sobbing youngsters. The parents’ desperate optimism was so naked on their faces that I almost called out “Hang in there, it’ll get better,” which a stranger on the ski trail said to me about 15 years ago and it buoyed me through the early years of taking kids skiing.
But luckily I didn’t, because just then one of the kids fell down, and although I knew things would indeed get better for that family on the ski trails, that one day their kids would be waiting for the parents at junctions, having long ago outstripped the parents’ skiing ability, at that moment things were decidedly not better. To those parents it probably seemed like they never would be. I hope the parents had candy in their pockets — another piece of stellar early parenting advice, for which I have one of the valley’s Olympian parents to thank.
Having passed through a day so filled with shadows of yesterday Ashley, it was disconcerting to return home to present-day Ashley and to remember that I had to turn in my newspaper column the next day. But to paraphrase one of my daughter’s friends, who said something similar in reference to a big math assignment she had due two days hence, that would be tomorrow Ashley’s problem.
