We had not died on the drive there, which felt like a small victory. When we woke up, it was raining in town, freezing a quarter-inch thick on every flat surface, including the street in front of our house, which I’d tentatively tried to walk on and pronounced it a skating rink. People on our local subreddit said it was treacherous out there, stay home.
We discussed our options, wasting time and building an anxious feeling that maybe we wouldn’t get to ski at all that day, which would be a huge bummer for my niece Mary, who had traveled all the way from Wisconsin for two days of skiing in Montana. And we’d told Jay we were going skiing, but at two and a half years old, his expectations are pretty malleable.
I checked some highway web cams, which were not helpful. We talked some more, and then finally saw our neighbors across the street slowly walk to their pickup and carefully drive away without incident. That did it. We jumped into our already-mostly-packed car and hit the road. Hit the road, but like quite tenuously, teeth clenched, hands clenched, butt clenched.
The roads were terrible, covered in ice, and the rain had started to turn to snow. The first 15 miles or so were not confidence-inspiring, snow and ice plus the windshield covered by spray off vehicle tires every time someone passed us, very “skiing is great but not really worth running your car off the road with your whole family in it on the way there” vibes. I was happy my friend Mike had talked me into finally buying snow tires for the car a few weeks earlier.
After a final last few miles up a winding two-lane mountain road, we arrived at the ski area parking lot. I popped open the hatchback to put on my boots and discuss strategy with Hilary: Who should buy the lift tickets, who should wrangle Jay, who should ski with Mary first and who should take Jay for his first-ever magic carpet laps. I looked down at our pile of boots, Jay’s hand-me-down boots and skis, our helmets, a couple backpacks, and—fuuuuuuuuck.
“Did you pack his jacket and snow pants?” I asked, which is also saying, “I didn’t put his jacket and snow pants in the car, did you?” Which is also saying, “fuuuuuuuuck.”
I’m not a parent who is going to demand that his kid love skiing, or a parent who wants to live his unrealized skiing/athletic dreams through his child, but I do aspire to be a parent who remembers to bring his toddler’s jacket on said kid’s first-ever day of skiing after driving an hour and a half on pretty hairy roads.
Alas.
Skiing is absurd. Skiing with a toddler is absurd and inefficient. Surely one of us sitting in the lodge with a toddler all day because we forgot his jacket (and pants and mittens) would not be the end of the world. Maybe it just wasn’t in the cards, and Jay probably wouldn’t care anyway. Was it even worth it to buy lift tickets when we wouldn’t get started skiing until almost noon and the ski area closed at 4:00?
I hustled up the hill to the small ski shop on the bottom floor of the only building at the ski area, pretty sure our day was over before it began. I sheepishly asked the manager, “You don’t happen to have ski pants that would fit a toddler, do you?”
It is hard to understate the joy that this man saying “I do” brought me in that moment. Probably the second-best “I do” I have ever received, next to my wedding day? Anyway, I bought a pair of slightly large bibs (he’ll grow into them), and get the hell out of here, you have toddler-sized mittens? I’ll take these too.
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