my first ski memories...nostalgic ruminations

February 13, 2007

Marc Peruzzi - I echo your words. This editorial brought back a flood of similar memories of my own first days on the ski hill...memories of the Franklin Junior High School ski program that took us up to the Pebble Creek ski hill during that blessed and yet extremely awkward year of 7th grade...introducing me and countless other insecure 7th graders to the exhiliration of being in the moment...the freedom of the hill. And as Marc put it so well - maybe the Pebble Creek hill was a little "pathetic by today's standard's...[maybe not quite as low-key as Peruzzi's Mount Tom]...but it was enough to make me and every other middle-schooler on that bus a skier for life."

This is beautiful:

"It was before the dream heli trips in Alaska or powder days in Vail's Back Bowls or ski tours in Utah's Wastch range. Before smacking slush bumps in t-shirts on Killington's Outer Limits. Before loading my college schedule with only Tuesday/Thursday classes. Before high school road trips to Vermont in a '77 Pontiac LeMans. Before dating, before puberty. Before any of that there was a ski bus, and night skiing, and a ski hill on a quarry in Massachussett's Pioneer Valley. A ski area called Mount Tom.

There were jumps x-ed off with bamboo. Friends. The taste of freedom. An expert run called Waterfall. Perspiring Catholic girls in waffle-weave cotton long underwear with floral prints. Speed. Repetition. Instruction. Improvement. Leg burn. The high-voltage buzzing of a seventh-grade mind. A rare smile on the dour face of an overly introspective kid.

Six after-school bus trips a winter. A program that cost 60 dollars total - fries and hot chocolate not included. Some crummy yellow lights. Snowmaking with what looked like a fire hose. A pitch like a bowling alley. Maybe 13 runs.

Pathetic by today's standards. But it was enough to make me and every other middle-schooler on that bus a skier for life. Mount Tom, all 680 vertical feet of it, was simply massive.

Mount Tom is dead, along with hundreds of local hills like it that have disappeared over the last 25 years. Mount Tom lived from 1962-1998. It was the only convenient skiing in that part of the state. And cheap. No one really seems to know why it closed. It certainly wasn't making anybody rich, but it must have been sustainable.

I want to think back fondly on my Mount Tom nights, the nights that formed a skier, but I can't right now. The warmth has been taken from me. If skiing isn't convenient and cheap, then only privileged kids get to ski. So when I think of Mount Tom, I think of all the kids who will never know the place. All the kids who will never know skiing. Never know powder, first chair, shattering surface hoar, or counting the minutes until Saturday morning for something other than the cartoons.

We can do better than that."
~Marc Peruzzi, Editor-in-Chief SKIING magazine (February 2007, vol. 59, no. 6)