“You okay?” Sandy said.
Foderman grunted.
“Hey! You okay?”
Foderman grunted again.
“I think he’s hurt,” David said.
Foderman shook his head.
“Get that ski from under him,” Sandy said.
“We’d better pull him out of the way here,” I said, and glanced anxiously toward the top of the chute.
“Loosen that strap, David.”
The safety strap was fastened around Foderman’s ankle with the usual push-clip, caked now with snow. David cleared the metal, snapped it open, and slid the ski out from under him.
“Let’s move him,” I said. “Before somebody else comes barreling down here.”
“Suppose he’s hurt?” David said. “You’re not supposed to move... ”
“Not hurt,” Foderman mumbled.
“It speaks,” Sandy said, and Foderman began laughing.
By actual count, Foderman fell twenty-seven times that afternoon. The man was indestructible. He fell on his back, his left side and right side, the front and rear of his head, his knees, his elbows, his behind, his chest, his ear, his nose, and probably his pecker. The falling got to be a habit. I think the son of a bitch was enjoying it. We were prepared for him to fall whenever the going got rough, of course, but now that Foderman had the hang of it, he fell at every conceivable opportunity. If the terrain was flat, Foderman fell. If it was gently rolling, he fell again. He fell in deep powder, he fell on packed surfaces, every time we turned around, bang! there was Foderman on the ground. It might have been comical if we hadn’t wasted half the day getting over to the north face and back again, and then wasted more time in the ski shop buying a new strap for Foderman’s left ski, and were now wasting the rest of the day getting him on his feet and helping him into his bindings and dusting him off and wiping his nose and pointing him down the mountain toward his next tumble.
It was Sandy who, leaning over Foderman after one of his more spectacular falls, suggested that his bindings were too loose. Foderman, lying flat on his back and out of breath, said, “No,” and shook his head.
“They’re too loose,” Sandy insisted. “That’s why you’re falling all the time.”
“Had them adjusted this morning,” Foderman said, panting.
“Well, whoever adjusted them did a lousy job.”
“The ski shop adjusted them.”
“Have you got a wrench, Peter?” Sandy asked.
“What are you going to do?”
“Tighten his bindings.”
“The bindings are all right,” Foderman said.
“Then why do you keep popping out of your skis?”
“How’s this?” David asked, and pulled a short stubby screwdriver from his pocket.
“Fine,” Sandy said, and accepted the screwdriver and then crouched over Foderman’s skis. “I think the left one’s okay,” she said. “It’s the right one that keeps releasing.”
“They were both adjusted this morning,” Foderman said, and sat up, knees bent, to watch Sandy as she brought the screwdriver to bear on the head of the binding’s turnscrew. I once told Dr. Krakauer that the moment someone invented a foolproof release binding, skiing would lose much of its excitement, my theory being that the inherent possibility of fracture was what attracted so many people to the slopes. Krakauer, as usual, missed the point. A binding, I went on to explain, held the boot rigidly fastened to the ski, a shotgun-wedding essential to the translation of leg motion into ski motion. If the binding was too loose, the spring mechanism could be triggered by the slightest bump or turn, and the ski would release prematurely. If, on the other hand, the binding was too tight, there would be no release at all, even in the worst spill. Since something’s got to give in a bad fall, the leg (being merely flesh, bone, and blood) has priority over most of the skis on today’s market (they being constructed of plastic, metal, laminated wood, and what-have-you). There are machines that “scientifically” adjust the settings on release bindings according to the weight of the skier, and presumably these machines guarantee maximum maneuverability and safety — you come out of your bindings only when the pressure is severe enough, but not before.
Sandy did not have a machine on the mountain. All Sandy had was a screwdriver. It occurred to me (but fleetingly) that she was now adjusting only the binding on Foderman’s right ski, and I recalled (but fleetingly) that we’d done a lot of joking about Foderman breaking the leg opposite Schwartz’s. The right leg. Her face was intent as she twisted the screw.
“Not too tight now,” Foderman said.
“Just a half turn,” Sandy answered.
But she had already turned the screw a full three hundred and sixty degrees.
“Not too tight,” I warned.
“He keeps falling out,” Sandy answered. “It’s more dangerous that way.”
“Yes, but... ”
“Shut up, Peter,” she said, and turned the screw another full circle. “There,” she said. “That ought to do it.”
“I hope so,” Foderman said, and clambered to his feet. He looked down at his skis, nodded, said, “Thank you,” to Sandy, and then brushed off his pants.
“Straight to the bottom, okay?” Sandy said. “Last run. And no falling, Seymour.”
“No falling,” he promised, and grinned broadly.
He kept his promise. He did not fall again. I kept waiting for him to fall because I was certain the binding would not release. I was positive he would break his right leg. Sandy, skiing in the lead, kept glancing back over her shoulder, anticipating, I am sure, the same thing I was. But he did not fall, and when we reached the bottom I sighed in relief, I think.
In the lodge that night, Hans Bittner announced that four inches of fresh powder were expected before morning. “And that’s only fitting, my friends,” he said, “because this, as you know, is December twenty-one, and that’s the first day of winter.”
Two
Mary Margaret
Semanee Valley was an island.
Not too distant from that sophisticated urban center from which Sandy had stolen the parka, it was nonetheless totally removed from it in tone and style. The area had been conceived of and designed as a self-contained town, a decision undoubtedly arrived at after taking one look at the existing shamble of buildings not thirty-seven miles away. Unlike many ski areas, there was no base lodge as such, but rather a collection of tastefully executed hotels and inns clustered about the highest mountain in the range, the mother of a family of lesser hills that surrounded it. Semanee Lodge was the biggest hotel in the valley, but the others were equally well-designed and excellently managed. The planners of the valley had connected the hotels, shops, restaurants, and discotheques with a simple grid arrangement of wooden sidewalks, redwood two-by-fours spaced to swallow the falling snow, illuminated by lamps that flickered with imitation gaslight. At night, the valley looked like the opening shot of the village in Walt Disney’s Pinocchio. During the day, its architecture snuggled harmoniously against the spectacular background of Semanee Peak and its suckling brood — wood, stone, glass, nature in realized fantasy.