All That Distance Traveled

Photo credit: me

My daughter’s eleventh year has been jam-packed with milestones. With each one, I try not to think too long about the things that have slowly fallen by the wayside the past few years. Waiting for the school bus with her on foggy mornings. Packing her lunches. Singing silly, made-up bedtime songs together.

But it’s also been a time of recovering things that had been set-aside during parenting’s heavy lifting years. This was especially in my thoughts a couple weeks ago when bitter cold temperatures had us setting up for a weekend indoors rather than heading to Stowe where we would otherwise be skiing on a blue-sky, nearly-fresh powder day.  

Instead, that morning we were finishing up a lazy breakfast, figuring on a lazy afternoon when my daughter said, “You and Dad should go for a backcountry ski. I can stay home.” I nearly did a coffee spit-take. 

Without pausing to wonder about her ulterior motives, my husband and I sprang into action, piling on layers, packing snacks and a hot toddy thermos, loading the gear in the car. In 30 minutes we were on our way to an area of Vermont’s mountain woods, affectionately (if somewhat secretly) dubbed “Comfortably Numb.” 

It wasn’t the getting out on a couples ski day that sparked that déjà vu feeling of freedom and youthfulness. We generally went out by ourselves a few times a year on ski tours, rugged hikes, or mountain biking excursions, but they always required a certain choreography—lining up a play date or a sitter a week or more in advance. Instead, this kind of pure spontaneity was reminiscent of a time—roughly 11 years and a few months ago—when a weekend day offered hours’ worth of unscripted time available for pretty much anything we were interested in exploring. 

That afternoon, with the cold chasing away the humidity, the sky was a bold, unblemished blue (rare in Vermont) and the trees were especially vivid and sharp as we switchbacked our way up the mountain. Despite the 5 meager degrees, we had quickly worked up a sweat, shedding our top layer and opening our jacket “pit-zips.”  

There was no one in the woods but the two of us, talking about nothing in particular, enjoying the meditative pace of our ski trek and the sweet and easy comfort of a couple that has been together the vast majority of days for the last (dare I write it?) 22 years. We have moved, changed jobs, had a child. We’ve had amazing travels, bought cars, seen our favorite bands; we have shared books, meals, and stomach bugs. We’ve had tons of spectacular fights and sweet reconciliations.  

All that distance traveled. And yet, there was something in the cast of light through the trees, the stillness of the air—or maybe it was the gentle bobbing chickadee that had landed on a nearby scrubby branch—that collapsed time and brought me back to when we were still new. Strangers that had found something so comforting in being together that we decided to permanently entangle our lives.  

It was a bittersweet moment because to live again in that time was to be in a world in which my daughter didn’t yet exist. But fully sweet, too, because there was so much my past self had to look forward to.  

We crested the ridge and paused to admire the sweeping valley on the other side, frosty and white as a snow globe scene. The moment was brief. No longer sheltered, the wind instantly chilled our sweaty shirts. As we layered up again and stripped the climbing skins from our skis, I was still stuck in a time-warp lens, transported now to the Wallowa Mountains in eastern Oregon, almost 12 years to the day on our first major backcountry ski excursion together, a 5-day trip into the wilderness with a handful of friends and three host guides. It was the kind of multi-day adventure that had brought us together, having met on a whitewater rafting trip my first year as a grad student at the University of Utah. These were the kinds of trips I would always feel like an imposter on, continually out of my comfort zone but so desperately wanting to be an upbeat partner, game for anything. In the case of the Wallowas, the experience was made even more uncomfortable for still having been a relatively inexperienced skier.  

Since then, I’ve logged hundreds of thousands more feet of vertical. I am a far more competent skier at 48 than I was at 36, despite my knees being creakier, my back complainier. I have also mellowed personally, finding ways to co-exist with my insecurities as one begrudgingly does with the scratching mice that live in the walls.  

Back at Comfortably Numb, I heard a ping on my phone alerting me to a text. “Are you coming home soon?” And just like that, the spell was broken. But in a good way.

We kicked off and began our descent, threading the trees and letting out little whoops of delight for the dips and rolls through powder, just like we had at a time that now felt like a lifetime ago and just barely yesterday.