When I was falling asleep at night, trying not to think about sex, I would envision myself in the “Let me buy you a drink” scene in Shane—that moment when the handsome but small Alan Ladd slugs the bigger Ben Johnson, knocking him through the saloon’s swinging doors.

When I was still awake, and my thoughts were all about sex, I would think instead of the “lowdown Yankee liar” scene—the shoot-out, when Jack Palance gets gunned down and is buried by the falling barrels.

“Shane, look out!” I could hear Brandon De Wilde calling. In the darkness of my bedroom, I could hear the ensuing gunfire, followed by silence, then the music rising. My thoughts, of course, were still all about sex—as if the sex were what Brandon De Wilde should have been warning Shane about.

8. HAVE YOU SEEN THEM?

A small geography lesson might help. Stowe is in northern Vermont, closer to Montreal than to Exeter. North Conway is in northern New Hampshire, closer to Maine than to Vermont. And Exeter is in southeastern New Hampshire—Exeter is nearer to the seacoast, even nearer to Boston than it is to Vermont. In New England, the roads running north or south are slightly better than the ones going east or west, but in the 1950s and the 1960s, the roads in New Hampshire and Vermont weren’t very good at all. “And if it’s snowing,” my grandmother used to say, “you can’t get anywhere from somewhere else.”

In the ski season, this was why my mom never came home to see me. Stowe to Exeter and back was a long drive, and it would be snowing somewhere along the way. But my mother did drive from Stowe to North Conway and back—in those days, not an easy drive but a more manageable trip. The way this worked was my mom would trade places with one of the ski instructors at Cranmore Mountain. The Cranmore ski instructor got a change of scenery (and a chance to ski some new runs) at Mount Mansfield, while my mother gave ski lessons at Cranmore. This way, in the two busiest weeks of the ski season, neither ski area was missing a ski instructor. And this meant my mom had two weeks every winter to teach me to ski.

In elementary school, in junior high school, and in prep school at Exeter, I managed to remain a beginner as a skier. In those holiday weeks, there were mostly little children in my mother’s ski lessons for beginners—even after I’d started shaving and had already learned to drive.