I mean when my mom and I first saw Shane together—in 1953, I would have been eleven or twelve—and my mother remarked that Stein Eriksen looked like Van Heflin. “But Stein is handsomer,” she confided to me, taking my hand. “And you’re going to look like Alan Ladd,” she assured me in a whisper, because we were in the movie theater—the Ioka, in downtown Exeter—with the pending violence of Shane unfolding before us.

I later pointed out to her that Alan Ladd was blond; whichever movie star I might resemble when I grew up, surely I would remain brown-haired. “I meant you’re going to be handsome, in the same way Alan Ladd is handsome—good-looking and small,” my mom replied, squeezing my hand when she emphasized the word small.

My aunts and my grandmother complained that my mother didn’t weigh enough to be competitive in a ski race, but I believed she cherished her smallness. My being small was an attractive trait to her. Thus, before my teens, I evaluated Alan Ladd—the solitary but romantic gunfighter in Shane—and I imagined I might become a hero, or at least look like one.

Did my mom have an encounter (of any kind) with Stein Eriksen in Aspen? Did she even shake his hand? I know she made the trip; she saved the bus tickets, if only the New-York-to-Denver part. I don’t doubt that she was there—in Aspen, in 1950—but she finished nowhere near the podium. Two Austrian skiers, Dagmar Rom and Trude Jochum-Beiser, won the women’s events. Stein Eriksen, not yet a household name in international skiing, placed third in the men’s slalom. The American racers won no medals. It’s verifiable that the FIS Alpine World Ski Championships in 1950 were held in Aspen, but that wasn’t the first time my mother was in town.

4. DETERMINED NOT TO LEARN

The U.S. National Downhill and Slalom Championships were held in Aspen in 1941. It was the weekend of March 8 and 9, only a month before my mother’s nineteenth birthday. She kept no bus tickets from that trip—if there were buses from New York to Denver back then. She said she got to Denver on her own; she told me she “hitched a ride the rest of the way with a bunch of Vermonters.”

A few members of the Mount Mansfield Ski Club, maybe? Friends she’d skied with at Stowe, most likely. My mom was already a college dropout; she didn’t last a semester. “I tried Bennington,” as she put it; when the snow came, she went skiing instead.

My mother would have gone skiing at Bromley Mountain. It was close to Bennington. A son in the Pabst Brewing Company family had opened the ski area in 1938. When my mom first skied there, there might have been only one trail—on the west side of the mountain—and I have no idea what Bromley had for a tow.