Parked

9

As it had always been during my life, we had a ski area. Actually, it was just a loaner as we didn't actually own it, but my father was the manager of it during my childhood and into my mid-twenties. As such, family members and the very rare friend would have all the free skiing they could want. Before I was born, my family had a home within a stone's throw of the ski area. A year after I was born, we moved to the home by the hayfield. While I had grown up with the Giacomo hayfield and surrounding woods as my backyard, my siblings had the ski area and its surrounding territory as their childhood backyard. I never remembered being taught to ski by my family, I just did, mostly tagging along the slopes with my sister, occasionally with one or both of my brothers.

While limitless skiing had its charm, I also loved the off season. You could hike the grounds in Spring, Summer and Fall. In fact, summertime had lift rides to the summit for tourists, sometimes with an art fair as an added draw. The lower slopes would be used for hang glider training. Other times, the buildings would be leased out for Gem Fairs, occasional Weddings, and other private functions. But the thing I loved most was the off season days when nothing was happening.

As my siblings grew-up and moved away there came the question of what to do with me on the days with no school, but when both parents were working. The answer was to have me either tag along to the grocery store where my mother worked, or to the ski area where my father would work. On those off season days with my father, he would first walk the premisses to inspect for vandalism, I guess. Mid-morning he would make the run to the combination post office and general store to pick up the park's mail, and for the rest of the time he would sit in the office and do paperwork. This was when I'd be left to my own entertainment.

The ski area buildings, when empty, were a ghostly place that would call to me. There was that combination thrill and chill of large empty spaces where people had once been but were now missing. Just me, alone. The vast outdoor area to walk and hike around with stilled ski lifts, occasionally swaying and creaking in breeze. Echoey interiors with locked doors, forgotten corners, some lit by lights, though most bathed only in limited light from windows. That limited light would approach a twilight during rainy days adding to the spooky atmosphere. I ate it up. In fact all my life I've been drawn to empty buildings just to again soak-up that vibe it gave me during childhood.

And then, of course, there was the ski season. Buildings packed with skiers, seasonal workers filling the previously empty back rooms.

In the early years, ticket girls would stand at various places around the park with a work apron which included many pockets for various types of ski tickets, each with the day stamped on them, limitless twisty ties to secure them to skier zipper tabs and a pocket for cash and a coin changer made up of metal tubes, each with a single denomination of coin in them that would be spat out by a little lever as needed to make change. While this method worked for the mythic Norman Rockwell era of America where everyone was polite and friendly, by the more jaded nineteen seventies, a ticket selling wall was made with little windows behind which sat the ticket girls with cash registers. The register receipts were the lift tickets, each day printed on a different color striped paper that would then be folded around a metal hook through the zipper tab and stapled in place. While the new ticket selling technique safeguarded against girls in the open being harassed or robbed, it also meant that all skiers now had to come to a common part of the ski area, regardless of where they found parking, and wait in lines as the girls worked through the confining windows. Soon after, the ticket girl aprons got a partial reprieve on busy days as it would allow the tickets to be purchased through the window, then stapled by cashless girls standing outside the ticket windows to save time.

The ski lifts were diesel engines with electric starting motors, sometimes in partial basements of the lift buildings, often with submerged metal housings next to the lifts. They typically had to be warmed up for a time before they could be operated to run the chairs. The Summit Lift was started earlier than the rest to first ferry-up the people that worked in the Summit Building, and the Ski Patrol who would check out the slopes and settle into smaller buildings around the ski area to be on the ready should they be needed. Once in a while my father would reach the park early in the morning to get a phone call that a lift operator would be in late and my father would do the duty of starting a lift engine or two himself. Sometimes, a little bored with skiing or a bit too cold, I would lie on the partially submerged engine housings to soak-up the radiating heat of the motors and let the vibration from the engine soften and sooth my back, and legs.

Grooming machines would run up and down the slopes during the morning hours to break-up any icy spots into little bits of ice that would be safer to ski upon, or pack down fresh snow into smoother surfaces so skis wouldn't sink down and be caught by the fluffier flakes. By late morning they were all back to the maintenance shop that served as their garage and also housed the tools and provided work spaces for the other mechanical items at the ski area that needed repair or routine review. All of these lift operators, ticket girls, ski patrolmen and slope groomsmen served as an extended family for me and my siblings.

Then there was the food staff. My father had first started out working at the ski area as the food stand manager, but as more slopes were added and more buildings built, father had become the park manager and the cafeteria had become its own enterprise. When fully operating during the busiest times of year, there were two fully fledged cafeterias, one at the first floor of the main building and one at the summit building, two smaller sandwich and snack lines on the second floor of the main building and the smaller original main building, and once in a great while a snack stand at the mid mountain building built on its own lower peak of the ski area. In the earliest years of the park, there was just the one lift that went from the original main building to the mid mountain building, but once the whole ski area had been developed and opened up, the smaller peak building was often simply forgotten about and served only as a warm place for some of the ski patrol people to be stationed.

And this was my home away from home...

The problem is, after a childhood of limitless free skiing, I could never imaging paying for it as an adult and haven't been skiing since!

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