Lunchtime Is For Suckers
Growing up in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains in Utah, some of my earliest childhood memories involved skiing at Snowbird. Every single weekend throughout the winter involved hours on the mountain testing our wits and skills against steep, rocky terrain, and our mettle against mother nature’s harshest elements. The first thing I learned about skiing is that ski days were not meant to be relaxing, at least not to my father. They were meant to be physically grueling days where we were the first skiers on the lift at 9:00 am and the last ones off at 4:30 pm.
Our Saturday ski days began early in the morning as we arose, ate breakfast, made a sack lunch, and assembled our gear. The ski suburban left promptly at 8:30 am. If you were not ready and in the car by 8:30, you would be left behind. Each of us five siblings learned this lesson the hard way on multiple occasions as my dad simply drove off without us. One sister didn’t care for skiing, and I think she purposefully delayed her preparations, so she wouldn’t have to endure the spartan Pingree approach to skiing.
Skiing at Snowbird was very much about quantity over quality and how many runs we could complete before the sun went down and we were forced off the hill by the ski patrol. This meant that we usually stayed on the groomed runs so we could attain maximum speed thereby increasing our run total for the day. Minimize your turns if possible as that would only slow you down. And no matter how cold, tired, or bruised we were, dad would insist that we stay for the entire hours of operation. “We must get our money’s worth,” he insisted.
Not only did this Mormon pioneer thrift mentality manifest itself in our approach to skiing, it also manifest itself in how he viewed meal and restroom breaks. Stopping for lunch was never an option nor was stopping at the lodge to warm up. Dad didn’t think much of ski resort concessions. “It’s highway robbery,” Dad would fume as he reflected on food markups. “Only suckers pay $8 for a cheeseburger!” Besides, we had already brown bagged our lunch and could devour it between runs on the ski lift. The problem was that in those early years, we fell a lot. And tuna sandwiches do not hold their form when they have been smashed into the snow under the blunt force of my body weight. By the time I took it out of the bag at noon, it had been completely flattened with the bread semi-liquified with the tuna leaking out of the saranwrap into my coat pocket. “Delicious,” dad would proclaim as he quickly consumed what only partly resembled a tuna sandwich next to me. We thought he was nuts.
When we were first learning to ski, Dad decided to teach us himself. But those lessons were very light on instruction and heavy on the “figure it out for yourself” method. One time when I was just learning to ski, he left me at the top of Big Emma, a somewhat challenging blue run with about 600 feet of vertical drop from top to bottom. We proceeded from the lift to the top of Big Emma at which point he casually mentioned to me, “turn if you need to slow down and I’ll see you at the bottom!” And he was gone. Down the hill. Without me. I didn’t like those lessons, and I really despised the liquid sandwiches.
As we grew into our teen and young adult years, we tried Dad’s patience. Sometimes we slept in on Saturday’s past the appointed 8:30 am departure time. Sometimes we saved our allowance and skied off into the lodge to buy some French fries or to get warm. Sometimes we skied a mogul run which slowed us down and ruined our run efficiency. And sometimes we dared to return to the car before resort close time and warm our bodies. All of this was very exasperating to him, but he was undeterred and continued finding joy in following his own approach to skiing, the kind where he wasn’t driving us home until the resort closed.
One Saturday when I was older, I became separated from my father. We had been skiing together on Big Emma, and I was slightly ahead of him. By the time I reached the bottom, I realized he was no longer with me. Perhaps I had adopted his own habit of not looking behind to see if the other person is keeping up. Just ski. Normally dad beat us all down the mountain; after all, he didn’t believe much in turning. Thirty minutes went by and still no sign of Dad. I began to worry. Had the lure of a hamburger finally overtaken him? Had he made too many turns? Had he finally succumbed to the temptation of skiing a hill of moguls?
Soon, I had my answer. I heard Dad faintly call out my name as the ski patrol member passed me dragging a toboggan behind him. In it, my dad had been safely secured after suffering a fall on Big Emma. The only exposed part of his body was a red, frosted face festooned with a large, toothy grin. He laughed and assured me he was ok and then demanded the ski patrol not air lift him from the resort, because only suckers rely on life flight. They examined him briefly and then turned him over to us, almost as if to say “we’ve done all we can for him — he’s all yours.” Dad had injured his leg but was still able to limp to our car. For the next two days, he limped on that leg until my mom made him get an x-ray, something that should have been top of mind being that he was a doctor himself. Diagnosis: broken leg. And thus ended that ski season for my dad. We had many ski days in subsequent years before my dad lost all mobility due to MS. And while I can’t say that I embraced every ski adventure with the same vigor and enthusiasm as my dad, I’ll always cherish the memories of spending time with him in the mountains even if his unique approach to skiing was entirely draconian. And now that he’s passed away, each time I return to Snowbird, I make sure I stop to pee, ski the mogul runs, eat a sucker’s lunch in the lodge, and leave when I’m tired. And, most importantly, I order and devour an overpriced, delicious cheeseburger in his honor.
