Falconer+-+John+Cheever

Falconer 67
took the funicular up, but even on the summit the snow was
warm, the day was disastrous, spiritually, financially, we were the
prisoners of our environment although if we had enough money
we could have flown to some other, colder part of the world. Even
on the summit of the mountain the snow was sticky, the day was
like spring, and I skied half-naked, but the wet trails were perilous,
swift in the shade, retarded in the sun, and in lower altitudes there
was an inch of water in every declivity. Then at about eleven the
wind changed and I had to get back into my underwear, my shirt,
whatever else I had, and just as suddenly the trails turned to ice
and one by one the rangers put up the CLOSED signs in seven
languages at the beginnings of the trails and there was first the
rumor and then the fact that the Italian prime minister had been
killed taking a last run down the Glokenschuss. Then no one was
coming up the lift, there was a line waiting to descend, and while
the lower trails were still not frozen and were negotiable that day,
that holiday, that climax of the year was ruined. But then, exactly
as the sun reached the zenith, snow began to fall. It was a very
heavy and beautiful snow that, like some juxtaposition of gravity,
seemed to set the mountain range free of the planet. We drank
some coffee or schnapps in a hut—waited twenty minutes or half
an hour—and then there was perfect cover on the lower trails and
after an hour there was perfect cover everywhere, perhaps four
inches that fanned like spume when we turned, a gift, an epiphany,
an unaccountable improvement on our mastery of those snowburied
slopes and falls. Then we went up and down, up and down,
our strength inexhaustible, our turns snug and accomplished. The
clinicians would say that we were skiing down every slope of our
lives back to the instant of our birth; and men of good will and
common sense would claim that we were skiing in every possible
direction toward some understanding of the triumph of our
beginnings and our ends. So when you ski you walk on beaches,
you swim, you sail, you carry the groceries up the steps to a lighted
house, you drop your pants on a large anatomical incongruity, you