Holidays in Heck (5 page)

Speaking of sacrifices, the Veterans of Domestic Disorders Memorial should be engraved with names of those who perished in order that the world might be, you know, groovy. Several prominent rock musicians come to mind, although celebrity drug overdoses could send the wrong message to our own kids who are under the impression that, yes, Dad did have funny hair in the 1960s, but he spent the entire decade singing “Kumbaya” at folk Mass.

There were those poor students who died at Kent State, except I can't remember their names. That's a problem with engraving names on a 1960s monument. What with the ingestion of this and that and people giving themselves monikers like “Windflower,” it's hard to remember anyone's name from back then. But this is a detail. The important question is the concept and design of the memorial.

My wife, a member of Generation X (and I'm betting that
their
monument will consist of a Prada backpack with a
Brady Bunch
CD inside), thinks the 1960s memorial should be something that would allow members of my generation to contemplate the driving force behind the era. She suggests a mirror. I'd like it to be slightly concave to produce an image that is slimming. My uncle Mike (Marine Corps, Iwo) proposes a large ditch with a donkey in it, although he puts that in somewhat different words. But the donkey might be misconstrued—many Veterans of Domestic Disorders being, these days, Republicans. A competition should be opened, with invitations extended to the most talented architects and artists born from 1946 to 1964. (No burnouts who live in yurts or belong to crafts collectives, please.) I trust this competition will produce something with dignity, grandeur, and a place to stash a roach if the park police come nosing around.

Ohio Skiing, February 2005

T
ime for a family ski vacation. “How about Gstaad?” said Mrs. O., grabbing a Bogner catalog.

“How about Aspen?” said I, having an inappropriate “single-in-the-1970s” flashback.

“How about Disney World?” said Poppet, age four.

“There's no skiing at Disney World,” I said.

“Whatever,” 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.

“I 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.

“Ohio! Hooray!” said Muffin. “Aunt Loulou let my cousin Tiffany get pierced ears in first grade!”

“We are not staying with your relatives,” said Mrs. O.

“What'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. Not
that 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.

“Why?”

“Because 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 instructor Joe Cooper to deal with whatever, and he put instructor Dave Hall in charge of Muffin. Alpine's marketing director Jodi Tusik found a quiet spot in a function room for Buster and our family babysitter. The babysitter had trepidations about the trip. She comes from a part of the world with indoor temperatures outdoors. But then she realized—what with the jolly bustle in Alpine Valley's lodge
and the uncrowded nature of Alpine Valley's slopes—a lot of Ohio skiing is done indoors.

Dave and Joe would return with glowing reports of Muffin's and Poppet's behavior. This leads me to suspect that Dave couldn't catch Muffin either and that Joe was being diplomatic or, as we call it at our house, lying. More to the point, Muffin and Poppet were themselves aglow and full of hints that adoption by the Alpine Valley ski school would be a parental upgrade. I gather Alpine does not use the “damn-it-listen-to-me” instructional method favored by Dad.

Meanwhile, Mrs. O. and I had our first chance to spend the day skiing together since 1997. Being diplomatic, I'd say she was a little rusty. While “damn-it-listen-to-me” may dampen relations with your children, it produces a tsunami in relations with your spouse. A good family ski experience depends on an adept movement with one part of the body. Shutting the mouth.

Once I clammed up, Alpine Valley was a swell family ski area. This was Tuckerman Ravine as far as Poppet was concerned. There was enough challenge for Muffin and little enough worry for her parents. On seventy-two well-supervised acres, Muffin couldn't get much more lost than we want her to be.

The snowboard park was around a corner so Muffin need not see that cousin Tiffany's earrings are the least of Mom's worries in the piercings department. Employees and customers were possessed of a downright, fundamental Red State friendliness as if they were made from John Kerry antimatter. We were happy at Alpine Valley. I can prove it mathematically:

You might think Alpine Valley lacked thrills for me. You'd be wrong. There was one run that took my breath away and transported me to that near weightless sense of bliss, a giddy marriage of flight and free fall, where I was beyond command yet not out of control. This was the tube ride I took with Muffin.

The line for the inner tubes was much longer than the lines for the chairlifts. Come to that, so was the line for lunch. Ohio exposes the id of winter sports. Secretly we'd all rather be sitting down.

Ohio's skiers do a lot of their sitting down on the slopes. The Boston Mills ski area is southeast of Cleveland and very similar to Alpine Valley in size, bargain value, solicitousness, and pleasant company. A sunny forty-degree day had brought out large numbers of that pleasant company. Their skiing explained how Ohio has produced seven presidents and no Bode Millers. The problem is one that's not addressed by instruction books, instruction videos, or instructors. Ohioans, with no point of reference for skiing except what they do in the summer at the lake, are trying to water-ski. They carefully distribute their weight on both skis and hunch to compensate for the pulling power of gravity, which they picture as a metaphorical 100-horsepower Evinrude. A special form of Ohio ski teaching is needed. Most Ohioans know how to ice-skate. A video called “Playing Hockey with Planks on
Your Feet” would be invaluable, although this might cause Ohioans to start high-sticking with their poles and thereby spoil the atmosphere at Boston Mills.

Alternatively, Ohioans could spell our babysitter and watch Buster toddle. He does fine as long as he's shifting from foot to foot and maintaining forward progress. But when he tries to plant himself firmly on two feet, he sits down.

Boston Mills' marketing manager Kim Laubenthal helped us sit Buster down with our babysitter in the clean, cheerful cafeteria. Even the undersides of the tables were clean, our babysitter remarked, having seen all of them while chasing Buster. We foisted off Poppet on an amiable certified kids' instructor, Herta Schwaiger. Mrs. O. went to ski somewhere out of the range of advice from me. Or she said she did. (Several malls are nearby.) And I took Muffin on the Boson Mills expert run.

This turned out to
be
an expert run. Or sixty yards of it was. A landfill ramp had been bulldozed out from the modest natural slope of the hill. Beyond the lip of this ramp was the closest thing Ohio has to a headwall. Muffin went right over the edge. My heart pumped, but not as fast as her knees. She went down in half a dozen perfect little parallels with daylight beneath her skis on every one. She did this another fifteen times. It is impossible for a child to be bored by anything that scares a parent.

Alongside the headwall run was a genuine, if abbreviated, mogul field. Here Daddy messed up. I swear I can turn once as well as anyone. It's just that before I can turn again, I—to judge by my mogul performance—need to sit down. Muffin skied the bumps with the special grace of a seven-year-old girl, part ballerina and part frog. The head-wall and mogul field shared a chairlift with the snowboard
park. The teenage snowboarders were much better than the adult skiers. Summers on a skateboard give you moves you don't get being dragged behind a Correct Craft. Plus, no Alps or Rockies are needed for snowboarding. You can just neglect to shovel wheelchair access ramps and slide the railings. But these were Ohio snowboarders, with no tattoos. As for piercing, only the high school girls' giggles were that. They were all wearing the requisite bag-it-came-in clothing, but the snowboarder attitude eluded Ohio youngsters. They fussed over Muffin. It will be a shock to the sport when the Greater Cleveland Style hits snowboarding at the X-treme Yes Ma'am No Ma'am games with Hilary Duff blasting from the speakers during the half-pipe competition.

I lured Muffin back to the cafeteria with a promise that she could try snowboarding just as soon as the College of Orthopedic Surgeons and her mom say it is OK. Herta Schwaiger gave an upbeat assessment of Poppet's skiing progress.

“She's very sweet, and she can do almost everything now.”

“Everything but stop,” said Poppet.

“Well, yes,” Herta said, “her stopping needs some work.”

“I stopped for hot chocolate,” Poppet said.

Mrs. O. returned from skiing suspiciously un-snow-encrusted. Buster was retrieved from under a table. And we all went back to our superluxury spa resort off Interstate 90 in Concord, Ohio.

If you don't think there's a superluxury spa resort off Interstate 90 in Concord, Ohio, it's because you don't travel with three small children and don't know the meaning of superluxury. It means connecting rooms with doors that can be opened only from the parents' side; PBS Kids and no Jerry Springer on the cable TV; speedy room service specializing
in shocking-colored, fudge-flavored breakfast cereals and chicken fingers; patient, forgiving housekeepers who can erect a portable crib and are handy with a mop; and a really shallow indoor pool where air and water temperatures are slightly too high for humans and thus perfect for Muffin, Poppet, and Buster. Of such is the luxury at Renaissance Quail Hollow Resort, which also has a steak house worthy of a state full of cows (serving chicken fingers, too) with patient, forgiving waitresses who are handy with a mop. As for the spa part, a cigar bar serves single-malt Scotch as old as I felt when the kids got their second wind and began doing cordless bungee jumps on the king-size bed.