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  So now as we zoom through Ketchum, the Idaho town that’s both home to Sun Valley and reknown for its famous former resident, Ernest Hemingway—he now buried in its cemetery—I worry, what if…. Dad? Finished?

  All my life, never a ski season did pass that our dad of derring-do didn’t base his entire self-perception (it seemed) on the state of his skiing. From “the steep” he reached via helicopter in the Canadian Bugaboos to “the deep” of the powder in Utah, from the Sierra’s spring slush to the wide open bowls of Colorado, no snow or slope was beyond his ability or out of the bounds of his ardor. I cannot even imagine it, our all-terrain Dad slow-poking down the bunny hill or, worse, rotting in the day lodge where non-skiers and the injured sit around waiting—and waiting—for their friends or family to come in.

  And yet: After a couple more miles we motor up to the door of the Sun Valley Lodge and two young doormen in uniform unload our skis and bags, bags that in the swank of the surroundings look especially old and sad and as down at the heels as we now feel. Compared with the hunky, handsome doormen Dad appears particularly wobbly and gray—almost Angie-like in posture—but he strides into the lobby like he’s Averell Harriman himself and charms the check-in girl with his signature suavity. Mr. Harriman, the Union Pacific Railroad chairman who in 1935 purchased the 4,300 acres of Sawtooth Mountain marvel that was to become the resort, at the time said “When you get to Sun Valley, your eyes should pop open.” Mine certainly do at the lodge’s enduring allure. No wonder Hollywood legends like Clark Gable and Errol Flynn made the place their winter favorite. No wonder alpine Olympians like Picabo Street and Cristin Cooper did, too. The lodge is so old-school beautiful with its glass-enclosed pool, ice-rink view and wood-beam, flower-frilled rooms that of course Hemingway in the fall of ’39 chose to finish For Whom the Bell Tolls in suite 206. The place reeks of history, elegance, class. Never mind how hard times have rooms, including lift ticket, going for $100 a night per person; this means riff-raff now slump in the lobby in rude attitudes, their feet on the furniture, their cell phones in use. We are riff-raff, too, alas. But at least we have Dad, who knows well enough that when staying in the Sun Valley Lodge, one does not après-ski wander the halls on the way to the pool (heated to 103 degrees) without first donning the white spa robe and slippers supplied. This we do straightaway to revive from our drive. And as the cocktail server circles the pool in which hotel guests bob (or is it imbibe?) their way to a Sun Valley high, I notice Dad soaks with an air of tense apprehension.

  “Are you O.K., Dad?” asks Camille. He paddles due north away from her voice, not hearing.

  “Dad?” now louder. “DAD!”

  He paddles back, not hearing.

  “Listen,” he says, “tomorrow I want you girls to leave me at the base of Warm Springs. I’m going to take it easy. I’m just not sure about my shoulder.” He wings his right arm this way and that, testing, splashing. The same ski fall that blackened his eye and gouged his nose with his glasses also did a thing to his shoulder. And now the bitch of it will nix him from riding the gondola to Baldy’s 9,150-foot elevation where the upper runs and chutes and bowls offer skiing supreme in a sprawl of challenging terrain that not that many years ago Dad would never have found beneath him.

  When he rises from the pool, pale and dripping, Dad’s spindly chicken legs look like they couldn’t handle even the gentle, smooth slope of lower Warm Springs. And when he stumbles over a poolside chaise to retrieve his robe and nearly mows over a trio of spa-robed people dipping their toes in the pool, I wonder if he has any business on skis at all. My heart so sinks me in the water I hardly can rise myself, but still: There is something fierce in Dad’s refusal to believe he’s eighty-three, something hell-bent on sharing the Sun Valley experience with Camille and me like he’s the same skier he was back in the day he’d hike a whole mountain, skis on his shoulder, because, really, what did it matter that they hardly had yet invented the chairlift?

  What I mean is here he is next morning, knocking on the door of our room before breakfast, before coffee, and standing there in parka and pants and helmet with goggles, standing there in ski boots, if you can believe. We cannot.

  “I’m ready,” slurs a still-sleeping Camille from somewhere deep, deep within the strange luxury and unaccustomed comfort of the lodge’s sheets, sheets whose thread count surely is in the tens of thousands. “I’ll only be a sec.”

  “Don’t hurry,” says Dad and clomps awkwardly in. I hold the door open dressed in shower cap and towel. “When you’re ready you girls can get the bus to River Run. I’ll see you for lunch.”

  “Dad,” I say, “the lifts don’t open for a few hours. You’ve got your boots on?”

  “I don’t want to push it and try to keep up with you girls,” he says. “I’m concerned…”

  “About your shoulder?”

  About his shoulder, his balance, his eyesight, his hearing, his strength, his speed and, not least, his very essence as a skier. Should bad falls or, worse, bad form on even Baldy’s beginner runs cut into his confidence or take him off the hill for good, what then? For a brave millisecond I go there, to the fright-filled place I don’t normally dare: No Sun Valley with Dad? Ever again?

  No more lunches at Ketchum’s Cristina’s, where the homemade soups and thick Idaho fries are killer delicious? No more dinners of fresh-caught fish from famous Silver Creek River savored at the homey Ketchum Grill? And—too, too tragic!—no more après-ski evenings watching the people and loving the mood, the food and the music of the legendary local restaurant, The Pioneer? These are a few of Dad’s Sun Valley favorites, pleasures he will share with my sister and me this weekend. So though he is in his element, and (honestly!) in his boots well before breakfast, eager and energetic, I ache to protect my dad from cruel reality, to blurt through tears I think he’s the best skier in the world, the best Dad, and that every year, always, there will be for us, Sun Valley.

  Instead I send him off with a scolding. “Dad,” I say, my tone snippy, “Please don’t run to try and get the bus, and please will you watch the ice on the stairs, and please please if you…”

  “Now, I want you girls to dress extra warmly,” he interrupts, entirely missing the gist of my admonishment. “It might be cold up there.” He starts to clomp awkwardly out.

  “Have a wonderful morning, Dad,” I say and intercept him long enough to peck his cheek with a subzero kiss, icy with the worry we are sending him off to an uncertain fate at Warm Springs. “We’ll ski together after lunch.” He lurches a little after a few clompy steps down the hall, and coming upon the maids’ cart catches the buckle of his stiff, bulky boot. It is a maneuver that nearly topples him. Suddenly, I feel naked in my helplessness before time, horribly vulnerable to what? I don’t know.

  Maybe it’s the shower cap and towel.

  “You girls be sure you have your mittens,” he calls back after righting himself and clomping on. My sister and I are in our fifties and yet Dad still refers to our ski gloves as mittens, same as when we were six and he sent us off to ski school so he and Mom, giddy, could flee (fairly screaming) to the slopes sans kids.

  “It’s O.K., Dad,” calls Camille, now roused from her swoon. “We’ve got our mittens.”

  From the top of Baldy the Pioneer Mountains to the east and the Sawtooths to the north envelop us in peaks of thrilling skiing promise. Snow! The gondola has dropped Camille and me sky-high and below, the Seattle Ridge runs unfurl in a fun I can’t wait to have embrace us. Said by Sun Valley hype to be greatest single ski mountain in the world for its absence of wind, substantial vertical drop and abundance of varied terrain, Baldy beckons and baby, ain’t nobody going to take exception to that. We’re off. My sister and I? Well, we ski and ski and ski still more until…well, until our legs can’t take it. Or maybe it’s until one chair ride up the Blue Grouse run Camille asks, “Do you think we should check on Dad?”

  We race a winding way down to Warm Springs, unsure of what we’ll find and there he is, kicking
back on the sun-soaked terrace of the day lodge, his cup of tea hot, his mood, inscrutable.

  “How did it go, Dad?” I tense for his answer, for if he says not bad or O.K. or pretty well, it means his skiing was awful.

  “How is it?” he says, leaping up in greeting and suddenly as animated as Molly might have been to see us after a morning’s separation. “Did you girls find Limelight? Was it great? How is the snow?” We had, indeed, found his favorite black diamond, hence most difficult run, and Dad’s happy, eager expression tells me he wants to hang on our every word—if only he could. I hope our excitement alone tells well our Limelight tale. Somehow.

  “No, you,” says Camille, exaggerating her mouth and pointing at Dad. “How did it go for you?”

  He looks off toward the band, now warming up to serenade sunning skiers with peppy retro renditions of Loggins and Messina.

  “I’m giving it time to soften up,” he says, sobering. He does not meet our eyes. “Maybe after lunch.”

  Later in the gondola Camille and I go over how bad it is that Dad is thinking he might be finished. And how we will handle it if the afternoon goes like the morning and he sits it out on the terrace, not even trying out his chicken legs, letting his black eye and bum shoulder and balance on the skids hold him back from being so much of who he is. A skier. What will we do with him? What will he do with himself? What if. What then.

  After lunch, however, the Sun Valley slopes seduce us into our own love affair with brilliant Idaho sun, fantastic, well-groomed snow, and run after run—after run—of simply sensational skiing. The afternoon passes in a bliss as big as the burn in our thighs. Then, too soon, a few late afternoon clouds gather to flatten the light and tell us it’s time to go in. It’s our last run down when I develop a foreboding ugh in my gut that when we catch up with Dad, it will be back at the lodge. He’ll be working the crossword between cat naps, his shoulder on ice or his strained knee bandaged. Or worse.

  Over. It will be over and the spell of Sun Valley with its special tradition of showing Dad to his best advantage—he is, after all, one of its longest-running and most ardent acts—will be poof! broken. And the magic of this day, this place, will be gone for Camille and me as skiers, daughters, who, because of Dad alone, in our lives always remember our mittens.

  We schuss down Flying Squirrel, down and down. We arrive at the Warm Springs base and, as expected, don’t see Dad.

  “He probably got an early bus back to the lodge,” says Camille.

  “Or he could be still on the hill,” I offer, hopeful. I imagine him on the hill, weighting and unweighting his skis with excellent technique; turning left, turning right with his athletic grace intact and his famous rhythm, undiminished. I imagine his thrill and his pride and his smile when he sums up his run for us later. “It was great!” he’ll say, his passion for the umpteen millionth descent of his skiing career as fresh and fierce as it was for his first as a child in the ’30s.

  “Well, I don’t know,” says Camille.

  We both without thinking look to the mountain, and not on lower but upper Warm Springs, steep and moguled, there is, by God, a dot of red on the move. Dad. It’s not his ruby parka but rather his form that positively ID’s him for us—that particular Dad-stance and telling Dad-style Camille and I have known all our lives. The dot is moving—it’s moving fast!—and as it descends something dying in me somersaults into joy. Dad? Finished? The dot grows larger, and as it comes closer and closer and Dad himself into focus, I can see that who he is in shoes, or even barefoot by the pool, is not at all who he is on skis. His stance solid, his posture tall, with turns that neither wobble nor fall, Dad skis his way to us free of any giveaway age and as strong and fluid as any Sun Valley punk parading his arrogant youth.

  “Dad!” I fairly yelp when he swishes to a stop and flips up his goggles to greet us. “You look great! You were amazing! You’re the best…the best….” My voice gets strangled by emotion.

  “Are you proud of your old Dad?” His breath comes hard and his cheeks look rouged, but his smile, just as I imagined, is huge.

  “YES,” gush my sister and I together, in unison.

  “You know, you just might be the best skier in the whole world!” I manage to squeak through my shyness; it’s a mouse-peep I eke through my tears.

  “Horseshit,” says Dad, somehow having heard. He laughs. “I’m just the best skier in Sun Valley.”

  Colette O’Connor lives and works around the Monterey Bay area of California. Her lifestyle features and travel essays have appeared in many publications including the Los Angeles Times, France magazine, Travelers’ Tales Paris, Sand in My Bra, Whose Panties Are These?, The Best Women’s Travel Writing (2005 and 2010) and The Best Travel Writing 2010.

  KATE CRAWFORD

  Alone in India—But Not for Long

  The subcontinent is not for the claustrophobic.

  THE NEW DELHI TRAIN STATION SEEMED LIKE A CROSS between a medieval army bivouac and a state park campground. It was after midnight. Family bands crouched around cooking fires or, curled in wool shawls, slept against mounds of luggage. People ate, bathed, brushed their teeth.

  Traveling alone, I attracted a small band of followers as soon as I arrived at the station. The first enlistees, two red-smocked, officially badged suitcase wallahs, boarded my train before it stopped moving. Completely unbidden, one grabbed my suitcase, the other my tote. To carry the bags, they balanced them on their turban-wrapped heads like wacky hats.

  The next enlistee, a slick dude, fell in with several young followers the minute I stepped from the train.

  “Where to?” he asked in TV English.

  My hotel had told me to meet its driver at the train station’s restaurant. So, like a savvy sahib, I commanded, “To the restaurant.”

  “Wimpy’s?” asked the dude.

  Wimpy’s didn’t seem enough like a restaurant, so I suggested one where people sat down. Our band of six embarked on a ten-minute march through the station’s cavernous overpasses and out-of-the-way corridors. I wasn’t worried, because my attention was fixed on the rapid growth of my retinue. Next, four rogue taxi wallahs, to whom I explained I already had a ride, joined our ranks. Each was followed by more tag-along boys—a touts-in-training program, I guessed.

  When the slick dude began to tell me how old my hotel was, I caught on. He was a go-to-another-hotel-where-he-collects-a-commission wallah.

  My ride was not at the restaurant. Back we all trudged to our starting point. There a long wait at the booking service elicited only a “Sorry, Madame.”

  Call me crazy, but I was having a great time. I figured this was the closest I would ever come to having my own entourage. Seven days had passed of my three-week India trip, and so far, exemplary ground arrangements by my tour operator had deprived me of this quintessential Indian travel experience.

  A handsome, turbaned Sikh had met me at the airport. We’d eased down New Delhi’s wide avenues, enjoying the lemon trees and sweet peas flowering in the roundabouts. Then an uneventful van ride on a smooth toll road had led me to Jaipur, from where I’d just returned.

  Very nice, but this was India, land of the epic journey. India, where a seventy-eight-part TV series enacting the Ramayan—which, along with the Mahabharat, is the Hindi Iliad and Odyssey—drew 40 million viewers in the late 1980s. The India of the Mughal sultan’s mobile palaces: dozens of tents, with silk-embroidered walls and Persian rugs, powered by hundreds of men, elephants, and camels. And Mahatma Gandhi’s epic political journey, in which he walked 240 miles to collect sea salt to avoid paying the British tax.

  Now, at the train station, my journey was about to attain epic quality. I was no longer taking it; it was taking me. My people—I’d come to think of them that way—decided I must call my hotel. We deployed to the fire-engine-red booth staffed by people who make calls for you, the public call office (PCO). My suitcase wallahs, however, nixed the PCO in favor of a cheaper pay phone nearby. I did not have the correct change, so my p
eople enlisted a tag-along boy who disappeared with my ten-rupee note. When he returned with the change, I realized I had lost my hotel’s phone number.

  So, we returned to the PCO, where I shouted my hotel’s name at the official telephoner who could barely hear over the other shrieking telephone users. The telephoner put through a call and handed me the phone, but after a half-understood conversation, I gathered that I had not reached my hotel. I wrote out the hotel’s name. The telephoner recognized it right off and gave me one of those pity-the-verbally-challenged looks.

  I was having trouble with English. The elegant, lyrical English spoken by many Indians bears little resemblance to my Midwestern twang. My last name, Crawford, is quite common, but at each hotel, the desk clerk would look at his reservations book with puzzlement and say, “Sorry, Madame.”

  I’d point to my name and repeat, “Crawford.”

  “Ah, Crawford,” they would say.

  I started saying, “Crawford, as in Cindy, only shorter.” In India, everyone knows Cindy Crawford.

  Finally, I connected with my hotel. The driver, who had been waiting at Wimpy’s, was coming back to the train station for me. PCO telephoner paid, suitcases aloft and ranks reduced by one hotel tout and his followers, we returned to where we had begun. More calls, waiting and trekking and still no hotel driver, so I decided to grab a cab. With hotel name written down, I headed for the prepaid taxi kiosk across from Wimpy’s to purchase a set-fee voucher for a legal cab.

  A feeding frenzy among the so-far-well-behaved rogue taxi wallahs began. They blocked my path, shouting, “I give you better price,” “It’s only for taxis to distant places like Agra,” and the oh-so-Indian, “It’s not working.” Stunned, I froze. Then a man in a three-piece suit and matching turban broke through the swarm. He took my money, bought a taxi voucher, saw me into my cab and admonished me not to give the suitcase wallahs 200 rupees (about $4.50). He said fifty rupees was sufficient. I gave them 200 anyway; I’d promised it to them. Later, however, I realized that holding up two fingers meant they wanted to bum a cigarette, not negotiate a price.