On Thursdays Pippa and I go skiing. I pick her up early from preschool, after lunch but before nap. Not that she鈥檚 napping anymore. She resists it daily, with the cheerful, determined air of a four-and-half-year-old who has better things to do. Like ski.
Raising Rippers
Katie Arnold on family adventure and bringing up active kids.
Ski time is quality time; the author and Pippa.We鈥檙e lucky. Our local mountain, the Santa Fe Ski Basin, is only 30 minutes up the road. We can leave her school at 1 p.m. and be geared up and on the lift an hour later. On the weekends, we ski as a family, a more complicated undertaking. There are two sets of miniature skis to lug around, two little bodies to monitor for signs of meltdown, one of whom is a two-and-a-half-year-old who usually refuses to lurch in clunky ski boots from car to lift and is still too little to ski anything but the bunny slope.
By comparison, Thursdays with Pippa feel like a breeze, almost as easy as skiing solo before kids, when a powder day was an excuse to sneak up to the mountain for a couple of runs before work. Unless it鈥檚 been snowing, there鈥檚 almost no one on the mountain. You can almost always score a prime parking spot, right next to the lift, and the slopes are empty, not like the Jersey-mall-on-snow they are during weekends, especially holidays.
Pippa has been skiing since she was 19 months old, when we put her on 70cm Atomics on a lark one weekend at Telluride. She stood up, pacifier in her mouth, bent her knees, and proceeded to ski, unassisted and weirdly in control, down a tiny slope. From then on, she鈥攁nd we鈥攚ere hooked.
This is her fourth season on the slopes, but I鈥檓 not entirely convinced the early start has given her a technical advantage over other kids her age who started skiing at the more normal age of, say, three. In her first couple of winters, when she was too little to overthink things, she skied purely on instinct: lean forward, look ahead, point 鈥榚m. Now that鈥檚 she older and more self-aware and has taken lessons, I can see her brain working overtime to remember the right technique. She鈥檚 skiing as much with her head as she is with her body.
Six weeks ago, her signature technique was an aggressive snowplow straight down the mountain. Her legs flailed out in a wide and wobbly 鈥減izza鈥 wedge, despite our imploring pleas to 鈥渕ake French fries.鈥 One day last month she fell off the lift while riding with my husband. She was only a couple of feet off the ground, and a ski instructor scooped her up and gave her the best tip she鈥檚 gotten so far this season: As soon as you sit down, grab the back of the chair with your hand. Bomber pro move. On the upside, because she鈥檚 never worn a harness, she has learned to stop (cue the pizza) and seems to mostly abide the #1 rule of skiing: stay in control. Still, what she needed鈥攚hat we both needed, it seemed鈥攚as a little extra time on the slopes.
This is Pippa鈥檚 last year before kindergarten. Everyone always says that time with young children goes by so quickly, but until recently I never really believed them. There are those long, tedious days when you鈥檙e imprisoned in twice-a-day nap jail with newborns, the endless afternoons held hostage by demanding toddlers. Wasn鈥檛 that just yesterday? Now we seem to be on fast forward, hurtling toward real life and public school five days a week. Stop time, please.
Since the fall, I鈥檝e been trying to figure out how to get Pippa to myself, so that I might somehow imprint the image of my wild, four-year-old child in my brain forever, and stitch her into my skin exactly as she is: zany, unpredictable, silly, willful, strong. I鈥檓 a self-employed writer with flexible hours, but it鈥檚 still hard to carve out free time just for her. That鈥檚 when it hit me: Skiing is the answer.
Most Thursdays, we go with my friend Kate and her four-year-old son, Rohan. Rohan and Pippa have grown up outside together, strapped to our chests in baby carriers when they were three months old to hike, riding bikes, camping, climbing, hiking, rafting. But when it comes to skiing, it鈥檚 pretty clear this will be their breakout season, when they go from being little and wobbly to big-kid material. After just three Thursdays, they鈥檙e actually turning, leaving faint French fry tracks across the slope. We take one warm-up run on the beginner lift, and then ride the quad. 鈥淲e only ski circles,鈥 Pippa declared last week, but by the end of the day, she was already wavering, pointing to a blue-squared intermediate run called J.C. Soon, we told them. Maybe next week.
Halfway down, our usual route takes us into 国产吃瓜黑料 Land, a twisty, skinny beginners鈥 trail with an obligatory stop at a jumble of rocks called the Bear鈥檚 Cave. From there the trail splits around a funky little A-frame structure. In better snow years, you can shoot right through the middle in a glorified snow tunnel (it鈥檚 still too patchy this season). You can arc wide to the left, or go to the right over a series of mini bumps between spindly aspen trees. This is the scene of my weekly heart attack. Pippa and Rohan always choose the right fork, bouncing across lumpy, slick moguls, inches away from trees on both sides.
Last week, I saw it coming. 鈥淣oooo, Pippa, watch the trees!鈥 I yelled from above as she beelined for the bumps. It was the kind of desperate, instinctual yell that sounds so wrong coming out of your mouth. Sure enough, she was so startled she veered off into the powder and fell in a heap at the base of an aspen. My heart was knocking in my chest as I skied down to where she lay. She wasn鈥檛 hurt, but I was shaken. A door had cracked open and I could see ahead into a very long tunnel, and I understood: Not now, but soon, as she becomes a more capable skier, I will have a choice: I can either rein her in or let her go.
Of course, I don鈥檛 want to do either. I want to hold onto this winter, and our Thursday afternoons together鈥攏o sisters, no fathers, just the two of us riding the lifts, belting out songs as we make big looping turns down the mountain, skiing on instinct and joy. I want to freeze her exactly as she is, with a whipped-cream mustache in the lodge after the lifts close, hair matted from her helmet, a pine bough sticking out of her goggle strap like a little ripper. First the blue runs, then kindergarten. Little by little I鈥檓 going to have to let go.