JULY 21, 2023 – (Cont.) We would also move on from Hogback—one day at Mt. Snow and another at Haystack. The day at Mt. Snow[1] was marked by . . . snow . . . but also sleet and unfriendly winds. I don’t remember much about the skiing, probably because pretty much all day long, it was hard to see anything, but I do remember the start of one ride up the gondola. Uncle Bruce and I had just sat down, when the attendant closed the frosted doors—prematurely, as it turned out. They snapped shut on Uncle Bruce’s hand, eliciting a sharp “Goddamnit!” from his mouth. No “owie, owie, owie!” (See 7/12 post) I had never heard him swear before. In fact, I don’t think I’d ever heard him say even a pseudo swear word like “darn” or “heck.” And over the next 40 years, I would never hear him utter another swear word—or pseudo swear word. No, he could do much worse than that, and as a matter of fact, he would. In any event, whether it was for good reason or not, his “Goddamnit” on that occasion revealed something about him that I had not expected.
The next day, for our outing at Haystack[2], the weather was just the opposite—sunny and bright—and the view atop that place confirmed that Vermont was one of the most beautiful places on earth. Yet if Uncle Bruce was not in danger of having his hand squeezed between doors to a gondola, he remained vulnerable to ski lift-related mishaps. As we edged forward on the chairlift seat, preparing to alight from it at the top of the mountain, something on Uncle Bruce’s ski clothes—his parka belt, perhaps—got tangled up with the chair, and while I slipped off the chair and glided down the off-ramp, Uncle Bruce wound up dangling like a cartoon character and losing his beanie. The lift stopped abruptly, and he managed to extricate himself with relative ease. He laughed, so I laughed. Together we laughed. The vomit splashing into the toilet three days and four nights before seemed to have been jettisoned into the distant past.
At the end of that last day of skiing, before getting under way back to New Jersey, we stopped at Hogback one more time to say good-bye to the Whites and Hamiltons. Everyone shook my hand and told me to come back soon. Then Mr. White stepped forward and handed me a Hogback patch.
“Heah,” he said. “Somethin’ tah remind yah of us friends back in Vahmont.”
I was moved, though it was the patch with the same big, upright, smiling, ski-clutching pig that charmed the sides of Mr. White’s pick-up truck. I would have much preferred the patch I had seen earlier in the gift shop—the patch bearing a generic mountain peak, with “Vermont” appearing boldly above the peak and “Hogback Mt.” in far less conspicuous lettering on the face of the mountain[3].
My parka already sported a “Trollhaugen” patch and one from “Afton Alps” (the small but crowded ski areas that were the sorry choices back home), both of which patches Mother had so painstakingly stitched onto a sleeve. I had looked forward to adding a “Mt. Snow” patch, a “Haystack” patch and, of course, a “Hogback” patch, except I didn’t want the one with the pig, because the whole point of the Vermont patches was to impress the kids back home who had never skied anywhere outside of Minnesota and Wisconsin, and a patch with a pig would likely have just the opposite effect. What would Jenny Johnson, herself a skier and my heart-throb—and the heart-throb of every eighth-grade boy back at Anoka Junior High—think if she saw a pig patch on my parka? What level of derision would occur when I boarded the school bus with the other ski club members for the long, slow, rowdy trip to Afton Alps? No one back home would take me seriously as a skier if I had Mother sew the pig patch on. I would have to tack the patch to my bedroom wall or something.
But on the ride home, while Uncle Bruce listened to talk radio, I had a little talk with myself. I had a choice: I could honor or I could dishonor Uncle Bruce and his warm-hearted friends. I could dishonor them by leaving the pig patch off my parka, or I could honor them by doing just the opposite. And besides, I convinced myself, Jenny Johnson would be impressed by the marked improvement in my skiing, thanks to private lessons with Erik Hammerlund, paid for by Uncle Bruce. Furthermore, she didn’t have an uncle who was part owner of a ski area in the (exotic) state of Vermont—a state with far more rugged ski terrain than Minnesota had. She didn’t have an uncle who was rich and who had been to Europe. In fact, no one in my school could match what I had in the way of close relative like Uncle Bruce. I would wear that pig patch proudly, and if anyone dared to belittle it, well, I would simply find satisfaction in knowing that the belittler was ignorant and not nearly as fortunate as I.
On the flight home to Minnesota, I pulled out the spiral notebook I had brought on the ski trip and wrote the longest thank-you note I think I’ve ever written. For the first time, I mimicked the closing that Uncle Bruce had used for years in his cards and letters to me: “Best Wishes.”
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© 2023 by Eric Nilsson
