The Best Travel Writing 2011 - James O'Reilly [79]
No more lunches at Ketchum’s Cristina’s, where the homemade soups and thick Idaho fries are killer delicious? No more dinners of fresh-caught fish from famous Silver Creek River savored at the homey Ketchum Grill? And—too, too tragic!—no more après-ski evenings watching the people and loving the mood, the food and the music of the legendary local restaurant, The Pioneer? These are a few of Dad’s Sun Valley favorites, pleasures he will share with my sister and me this weekend. So though he is in his element, and (honestly!) in his boots well before breakfast, eager and energetic, I ache to protect my dad from cruel reality, to blurt through tears I think he’s the best skier in the world, the best Dad, and that every year, always, there will be for us, Sun Valley.
Instead I send him off with a scolding. “Dad,” I say, my tone snippy, “Please don’t run to try and get the bus, and please will you watch the ice on the stairs, and please please if you…”
“Now, I want you girls to dress extra warmly,” he interrupts, entirely missing the gist of my admonishment. “It might be cold up there.” He starts to clomp awkwardly out.
“Have a wonderful morning, Dad,” I say and intercept him long enough to peck his cheek with a subzero kiss, icy with the worry we are sending him off to an uncertain fate at Warm Springs. “We’ll ski together after lunch.” He lurches a little after a few clompy steps down the hall, and coming upon the maids’ cart catches the buckle of his stiff, bulky boot. It is a maneuver that nearly topples him. Suddenly, I feel naked in my helplessness before time, horribly vulnerable to what? I don’t know.
Maybe it’s the shower cap and towel.
“You girls be sure you have your mittens,” he calls back after righting himself and clomping on. My sister and I are in our fifties and yet Dad still refers to our ski gloves as mittens, same as when we were six and he sent us off to ski school so he and Mom, giddy, could flee (fairly screaming) to the slopes sans kids.
“It’s O.K., Dad,” calls Camille, now roused from her swoon. “We’ve got our mittens.”
From the top of Baldy the Pioneer Mountains to the east and the Sawtooths to the north envelop us in peaks of thrilling skiing promise. Snow! The gondola has dropped Camille and me sky-high and below, the Seattle Ridge runs unfurl in a fun I can’t wait to have embrace us. Said by Sun Valley hype to be greatest single ski mountain in the world for its absence of wind, substantial vertical drop and abundance of varied terrain, Baldy beckons and baby, ain’t nobody going to take exception to that. We’re off. My sister and I? Well, we ski and ski and ski still more until…well, until our legs can’t take it. Or maybe it’s until one chair ride up the Blue Grouse run Camille asks, “Do you think we should check on Dad?”
We race a winding way down to Warm Springs, unsure of what we’ll find and there he is, kicking back on the sun-soaked terrace of the day lodge, his cup of tea hot, his mood, inscrutable.
“How did it go, Dad?” I tense for his answer, for if he says not bad or O.K. or pretty well, it means his skiing was awful.
“How is it?” he says, leaping up in greeting and suddenly as animated as Molly might have been to see us after a morning’s separation. “Did you girls find Limelight? Was it great? How is the snow?” We had, indeed, found his favorite black diamond, hence most difficult run, and Dad’s happy, eager expression tells me he wants to hang on our every word—if only he could. I hope our excitement alone tells well our Limelight tale. Somehow.
“No, you,” says Camille, exaggerating her mouth and pointing at Dad. “How did it go for you?”
He looks off toward the band, now warming up to serenade sunning skiers with peppy retro renditions of Loggins and Messina.
“I’m giving it time to soften up,” he says, sobering. He does not meet our eyes. “Maybe after lunch.”
Later in the gondola Camille and I go over how bad it is that Dad is thinking he might be finished. And how