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nosing around.

3
R OUND ON THE E NDS AND “H I !” IN THE M IDDLE
    Ohio Skiing, February 2005

    T ime for a family ski vacation. “How about Gstaad?” said Mrs. O., grabbing a Bogner catalog.
    â€œHow about Aspen?” said I, having an inappropriate “single-in-the-1970s” flashback.
    â€œHow about Disney World?” said Poppet, age four.
    â€œThere’s no skiing at Disney World,” I said.
    â€œWhatever,” said Poppet.
    When it’s time for a family ski vacation, you have to be honest about your family. Mrs. O. has been on skis about once since our eldest child, Muffin, age seven, made her sonogram debut. “I love skiing,” says Mrs. O. And she does, except for getting cold, being outdoors, and sliding around on skis.
    â€œI like the hot chocolate,” says Poppet.
    And our youngest, Buster, is thirteen months. There are really only two skiers in the family, and only one is any good. I didn’t learn to ski until I was thirty. And when and where I learned (see flashback above), the powder was mostly on glass-topped coffee tables and “downhill” was a description of character tendencies.
    I have reformed my personal life but not my ski technique. I’m a bunny-slope Sonny Bono. Muffin, on the other hand, was skiing before she could count to her boot size. Her turns and runs are quicker than the French army’s. She whips through moguls that give me knee surgery just looking at them. But Muffin has a problem. It’s not exactly fear of heights; she takes the most Himalayan chairlift rides as complacently as if she were in a car seat. Rather, she has “ski agoraphobia.” When she gets to the top of a hill and sees more than forty-five degrees of the horizon revealed, she defaults into snowplow lockdown and starts missing her mom in the lodge. Muffin hates vistas.
    I surveyed our family ski vacation needs: For Muffin, not too much scenery. For the rest, not too much skiing. I peeked into the bank account. Not too much money. I had an inspiration. There’s a place that gets snow almost every day of winter, and it has the added advantage that I’m from there.
    â€œOhio! Hooray!” said Muffin. “Aunt Loulou let my cousin Tiffany get pierced ears in first grade!”
    â€œWe are not staying with your relatives,” said Mrs. O.
    â€œWhat’s round on the ends and high in the middle?” I quizzed the girls. “O-
hi
-O.” They looked puzzled. As well they might, since the maximum elevation in the state is 1,549 feet. Notthat the Alpine Valley ski area, east of Cleveland, is anywhere near so dizzying. It has 230 feet of vertical drop. When Muffin and I stood on the peak of Exhibition, Alpine’s black diamond, mmm . . . cubic zirconium run, we were pretty much level with the ski lodge’s chimney top. I gave Muffin my Ohio avalanche safety lecture: “You are so safe from avalanches.” And I told her not to ski out of bounds.
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œBecause it’s completely flat.”
    I’m almost certain—although I got a D in high school physics—that somebody on stubby super sidecuts with no poles who weighs less than a down comforter is slower than a fifty-seven-year-old wide load on early 1990s Rossignols the length of
War and Peace
. But a view from the summit that was as exciting as standing on a footstool had reassured Muffin. Before I could say, “Follow me and watch how I turn,” she was back in the lift line. So I put her in a private lesson. Doubtless there’s much I could still teach Muffin, but I’d have to catch her first.
    I put Poppet in a lesson as well. Poppet is that child who already knows as much as she cares to know about whatever you want to teach her. “Whatever,” in fact, is her particular favorite word. “I know the alphabet—A, B, G, D, whatever.”
    Alpine Valley’s ski school director Rich Cunningham assigned