The remoteness of the United States Military Academy at West Point on the Hudson makes a visitor feel isolated there. The river and the surrounding trees were dark gray in February; winter looked as constant as the soldiers guarding the entrance gate. The buildings were austere—beginning with the bad-smelling, overheated barracks, where the visiting teams slept. In the vast dining hall, the uniformed cadets seemed to size up the traveling wrestlers as if we were a military enemy. In the huge gym, with a wooden running track above—like an elongated version of the pit at Exeter—they were posting the brackets for the tournament weight classes on the walls. My two Pitt teammates and I were looking over the matchups, as were most of the other wrestlers.

Not Matthew Zimmermann; he had found my mother in the bleacher seats and was sitting next to her. “It doesn’t matter who I draw in the preliminary round—I’m going to get killed,” Zim told her. “It doesn’t matter that I’m still growing—I’ll never be big enough.”

“I love how small you are, Zim—if you come to Vermont, I’ll teach you how to ski. You don’t have to be big to have fun skiing,” my mom told him. “Just look at me!” Naturally, Zimmer needed no encouragement to look at my mother; he couldn’t stop looking at her, though his pride in being taller than her was short-lived. It clearly confounded him to hear that my mom loved how small he was; it might have made Zim wish he would stop growing.

As the snowshoer later observed, the Freshman Eastern Intercollegiates was a tough tournament; the small shred of Matthew Zimmermann’s confidence in himself as a wrestler was undermined by my mother’s tempting offer to teach him to ski. Zimmer was pinned so quickly—in the opening period of his first match—I missed the move that led to the fall. I didn’t even notice which college or university his opponent wrestled for. Zim didn’t notice, either; he couldn’t even remember how he’d been pinned.

“The guy had me in a three-quarter nelson, then he switched to a kind of front headlock, then he switched to something else,” Zimmermann explained. He was wearing his warm-ups, and he’d curled up in the bleacher seats with his head in my mother’s lap.

“The guy hurt Zim’s neck,” my mom told me. Zim made a painful effort to nod, slightly. “Don’t move,” my mother said, hugging him.