I woke
slowly, face down on the itchy burlap of the back compartment of the
59 VW Bug we
rode in, the ‘way back’ as we called it in my family. It was a small, crescent-shaped compartment, less
than 2 feet wide, 3 feet deep and 4 feet long below the cold back window but
above the warm engine of the small car.
It was a prized, cushy-cozy-comfortable, womb/tomb like place I fought my
brother for, especially on long winter trips, and we claimed it and ‘called it’
hours or even days before the trips began.
My five and a-half year-old face was swollen red from the deep sleep of
mindless-youth and imprinted with a waffle pattern from the burlap mesh as I poked
my head over the back seat and asked my Mom, ‘are we there yet?’
The small, black German car with a
sporty red Naugahyde interior, probed its way down a snowy two-lane highway
like an Olympic bobsled between high imposing snowbanks, somewhere in western
Massachusetts. In the early 1960s the
new freeways were contemplated but not completed and the local roads were not
effectively plowed or maintained, especially at night. Heading north out of New York City was still
an adventure into the wilderness and the great unknown. From the cozy confines of suburban Long
Island this was a big step out of our comfort zone, but we were a brave new
modern family that made up with rugged resolve for what we lacked in real resources. There was fear but we had courage.
Dad drove slowly but steadily into
the night as Mom death-gripped the dashboard handle with two hands and stared intensely
into the night, looking for cars, deer or Big Foot on the edge of the highway. ‘Turn your bright lights on Arty,’ she
snipped nervously, looking down , on the gauges but he only quipped ‘Nancy, they
are on’ as he pounded the floor button twice with his left boot to show her the
vague difference. Mom, a school teacher
who was always teaching, fancied herself as the better driver, being a
liberated, new-age woman of the 60’s, but Dad drove snowplows at his job in
Public Works and he relished this kind of blind-braille driving and the
imperceptible contrasts of white-on-white as we almost floated down the
road.
My seven-year-old brother and
nemesis Mark was asleep in the back seat under a pile of blankets and coats,
stretched out the full length of the small seat, until I snapped him in the ear
with my little finger. ‘Maaaaa’ he
moaned instinctively to no one listening in the dark. Our baby sister Mary was at grandma’s house,
safe, warm and dry but too young for this winter adventure.
The cramped car smelled like Old
Spice, McDonalds and wet wool, and the side windows were iced up but
translucent. The 56-horse-power air-cooled
engine did not have much oomph and the little heat it gave off was directed to
the window defroster, but the engine was in the back over the drive wheels and we
plowed on relentlessly through the night.
‘Almost there Ginty, can you hold it’, Dad asked optimistically
as we passed the striped concrete retaining wall that indicated our turn on to
a snow-packed dirt road. ‘Maybe,’ I said
semi-courageously as we bounced and jostled onto the rural road. It became even darker as we headed up the
hill making random left and right turns on smaller roads based on my mother’s
instructions and intuition. We finally pulled
up in front of a small dumpy farm house with peeling yellow paint and several
non-descript outbuildings behind it with a small sign over the barn in the
distance that announced alliteratively, ‘Herman Harris Horse Hotel’.
Dad
hopped out and banged on the front door in the driving snow. A barefooted man answered, clothed only in
his waffle long johns, with a large pot belly and an unshaven face. Herman Harris was a local here in Northern Massachusetts,
born and raised in this house, and he had just finished his daily multi-tasking
schedule of; driving the school bus and snow plow, feeding horses and shearing
sheep, fixing snow-mobiles and harvesting maple syrup, chopping wood and
poaching deer. It was an increasingly
specialized world in the 60’s but Herman hadn’t gotten the memo yet.
Scratching himself quizzically in the
doorway, backlit by the changing light of a black-and-white TV in a living room
cluttered with cheap beer cans and dirty dishes, Herman tried to figure out who
this stranger was and what we wanted.
‘The key, the key – to The Farm up the hill,’ I overheard my Dad shout
several times as he stomped his cold feet, until an actual light bulb of
recognition went on over the Herman’s head and he invited my Dad in heartily while
he searched for the key. Herman dwarfed my
Dad when he put his arm around him to lead him inside. Dad is not a small man by any means, but
Herman enveloped him and we wondered if he would ever return. After an interminable delay, Dad finally came
out and vigorously shook Herman’s large gnarled hand several times, thanking
him profusely, and ran back to the car.
Dad had no key but only the hope and a prayer
that one would be cleverly hidden under the Welcome mat. He dropped the parking brake excitedly and
gunned the VW up the hill to a quick hairpin turn and up a final steep stretch
to a ghost-white house that emerged slowly from the snowy mist. The lights were on but no one was home. Dad kept it floored until we crested the sill
of the unplowed driveway, rammed into a snow bank and crunched to a stop. We had arrived.
The
Farm, as our family called it, was a regal 100-year-old Colonial farm house
with barns and breezeways, mud rooms and garages, that my uncle had bought in
the late forties, for a song and a prayer - we imagined. It was very rough for the first few decades
with a stream-fed cistern water supply, a leach field in the lower pasture and
an actual ice-box to keep food fresh.
When
my aunt insisted that they move the family out of gentrified suburbia to the
country for a few years of ‘perspective’, my uncle had The Farm fixed up with
modern conveniences such as a cozy white-oak library, a wine cellar, a washer
and dryer and a good heater. It was all
done with such style and class that complimented the historic house so well that
we couldn’t wait for our each invitation to visit. To us it represented an escape from suburbia to
a rural life that we never knew and a gateway to the New England wilderness of
Emerson and Thoreau[1]
The subtleties and luxuries of this place were not lost on my five-year-old
sensibilities. I loved it.
We
dug out the door mat, found the key underneath and let ourselves in. It was freezing cold out, not the Long Island
dreary-damp, build a droopy-dirty-snowman kind of cold, but a dangerous artic clean-clear
cold with a biting wind that put it well below zero. Mom found the thermostat and turned the heat
on while Dad and I went down some spooky stairs to check the water. The cistern was flowing and ice free but my Dad
plucked a dead mouse off the surface and threw in some chlorine while he winked
at my astonishment and said ‘Don’t tell your mother.’ We came upstairs laughing and helped unpack
food and tons of frozen luggage that emerged from the front boot of the VW like
clowns from a circus car. We waited for Dad
to take us upstairs because there was that scary picture of an emaciated woman
with bug eyes over the steep stairs. We
found our new separate bedrooms to share and my brother and I bounced on the beds
with delight as we unpacked our plaid flannel pajamas.
After
a snack and a story, we went to bed but not to sleep as we heard the large
maple tree howling in the wind and scraping the window with an errant
branch. Every hour or so a snowplow
would scream up or down the hill next to the house and it sounded like it was
going to take the living-room wing off during its next pass. The house was full of creaks and groans that
we imagined were benign spirits in the night, or at least secretly hoped so.
We
woke at first light to a blinding blizzard outside, the smell of fresh coffee
and bacon cooking downstairs, the sound of my Dad tinker-fixing something in
the library and my Mom singing along with Petula Clark’s ‘Downtown’, the only
record in the house. I jumped up and put
on my waffle-white cotton long johns, dungarees and red, white and blue
scratchy-wool Olympic ski sweater with matching hats that my Mom had knitted
for my brother and I for Christmas for when we learned how to ski. Today was the day.
After
breakfast we drove down to a local Ma-and-Pa ski hill on the Deerfield River
called Thunder Mountain that made up in quintessential New England beauty for
what it lacked in size and sophistication.
There were incredible vistas in every direction but snow-making hoses
and lift cables were scattered in the snow in the foreground. After endless delays sizing rental skis[2]
tying our boots and adjusting our cable bindings, we were ready to shred. Mom
applied some yucky waxy Chap Stick lipstick[3]
to our lips and they sent us ski school.
My brother and I skied down to the Thunder Bunny hill, unsure at first
but fully competent after 100 yards. ‘I got this’ I thought as we were
introduced to our ski instructor, Pierre Hiver, from Montreal. Peter Winters.
I
didn’t need lessons but this guy was so handsome and slick and had such a cool French
accent that I thought I’d humor him for a while. He taught us left and right turns, Pizza and
French fry, how not to get killed on a rope tow and we were off. I had a bomber-proof snowplow in no time that
I employed at high speeds for the next five years. I didn’t want to parallel yet and that Stem-Christy
turn was just plain silly. The weather
was howling and we were sopping wet but we didn’t notice until it was time for
lunch and hot cocoa.
In the afternoon I skied with my family and
they gave us horse blankets to keep us warm on the slow lifts. My Mom and brother eventually went in for
more mocha but my Dad and I braved the storm all afternoon while he continually
shivered and asked me if I was warm enough.
I don’t know if he was staying out there for me or I for him but we were
having a great time. The chair lift usually
hit me in between my shoulder blades so Dad had to lift and stuff me into the
chair. At one point he dangled from the
chair precariously just to fix my loosened binding on a hanging ski. This is true love, I thought.
By the end of the day we were wet,
cold and exhausted as we piled into the cold bug to head back up the hill to
The Farm. The gas pedal was frozen down so
my brother had to crawl behind the shifter and pull it up repeatedly when my Dad
told him to as we negotiated the hills and the hair pin turns. Back in the warm house we lit a fire and
danced around in our long underwear, just like Herman Harris, as the cold outdoor
winter scene in the large kitchen window turned to a dark reflection of the warm,
raucous family meal at the long kitchen table.
We ate ravenously, joshing and
telling stories, bonding closer than we had ever been in the humdrum, everyday Massapequa
life that seemed so far away. Not long
after dinner we went to bed early and slept the sleep of those who had just
been reborn. I dreamt of Pizza and
French Fries, hot chocolate and snow, endless snow. I had no idea that winter was so fun and so
wild and that it led to activities and adventures that were so invigorating and
liberating. I was so glad that my family
had made the herculean effort to introduce us to this new season, sport, experience
and lifestyle, that I swore on the spot, I would embrace for my entire
life.
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