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By Root 949 0

Harriman himself and charms the check-in girl with his signature suavity. Mr. Harriman, the Union Pacific Railroad chairman who in 1935 purchased the 4,300 acres of Sawtooth Mountain marvel that was to become the resort, at the time said “When you get to Sun Valley, your eyes should pop open.” Mine certainly do at the lodge’s enduring allure. No wonder Hollywood legends like Clark Gable and Errol Flynn made the place their winter favorite. No wonder alpine Olympians like Picabo Street and Cristin Cooper did, too. The lodge is so old-school beautiful with its glass-enclosed pool, ice-rink view and wood-beam, flower-frilled rooms that of course Hemingway in the fall of ’39 chose to finish For Whom the Bell Tolls in suite 206. The place reeks of history, elegance, class. Never mind how hard times have rooms, including lift ticket, going for $100 a night per person; this means riff-raff now slump in the lobby in rude attitudes, their feet on the furniture, their cell phones in use. We are riff-raff, too, alas. But at least we have Dad, who knows well enough that when staying in the Sun Valley Lodge, one does not après-ski wander the halls on the way to the pool (heated to 103 degrees) without first donning the white spa robe and slippers supplied. This we do straightaway to revive from our drive. And as the cocktail server circles the pool in which hotel guests bob (or is it imbibe?) their way to a Sun Valley high, I notice Dad soaks with an air of tense apprehension.

“Are you O.K., Dad?” asks Camille. He paddles due north away from her voice, not hearing.

“Dad?” now louder. “DAD!”

He paddles back, not hearing.

“Listen,” he says, “tomorrow I want you girls to leave me at the base of Warm Springs. I’m going to take it easy. I’m just not sure about my shoulder.” He wings his right arm this way and that, testing, splashing. The same ski fall that blackened his eye and gouged his nose with his glasses also did a thing to his shoulder. And now the bitch of it will nix him from riding the gondola to Baldy’s 9,150-foot elevation where the upper runs and chutes and bowls offer skiing supreme in a sprawl of challenging terrain that not that many years ago Dad would never have found beneath him.

When he rises from the pool, pale and dripping, Dad’s spindly chicken legs look like they couldn’t handle even the gentle, smooth slope of lower Warm Springs. And when he stumbles over a poolside chaise to retrieve his robe and nearly mows over a trio of spa-robed people dipping their toes in the pool, I wonder if he has any business on skis at all. My heart so sinks me in the water I hardly can rise myself, but still: There is something fierce in Dad’s refusal to believe he’s eighty-three, something hell-bent on sharing the Sun Valley experience with Camille and me like he’s the same skier he was back in the day he’d hike a whole mountain, skis on his shoulder, because, really, what did it matter that they hardly had yet invented the chairlift?

What I mean is here he is next morning, knocking on the door of our room before breakfast, before coffee, and standing there in parka and pants and helmet with goggles, standing there in ski boots, if you can believe. We cannot.

“I’m ready,” slurs a still-sleeping Camille from somewhere deep, deep within the strange luxury and unaccustomed comfort of the lodge’s sheets, sheets whose thread count surely is in the tens of thousands. “I’ll only be a sec.”

“Don’t hurry,” says Dad and clomps awkwardly in. I hold the door open dressed in shower cap and towel. “When you’re ready you girls can get the bus to River Run. I’ll see you for lunch.”

“Dad,” I say, “the lifts don’t open for a few hours. You’ve got your boots on?”

“I don’t want to push it and try to keep up with you girls,” he says. “I’m concerned…”

“About your shoulder?”

About his shoulder, his balance, his eyesight, his hearing, his strength, his speed and, not least, his very essence as a skier. Should bad falls or, worse, bad form on even Baldy’s beginner runs cut into his confidence or take him off the hill for good, what then? For a brave