Our first full day in Wengen, everyone else made their plans and went off without me. I wrote all morning in my hotel room and finished the difficult chapter. I could go snowshoeing the next day, I was thinking. I put on my hiking boots and walked the wrong way—to the gondola lift station, not the train station. Then I had trouble understanding the stationmaster; either my German was awful or his Swiss German was hard for me, or both. I was hiking “oben”—if nothing else, the above word was understood. I would not walk on the train track but beside it. There were two stations between Wengen and the Kleine Scheidegg station. The stationmaster seemed to doubt I would get as far as Kleine Scheidegg—it was already the early afternoon. I think it was clear that I intended to take the train back to Wengen, but the reason why was beyond my bad German. At one or another station above Wengen, I would take the train down. You’re not doing your knees a favor by hiking or snowshoeing down a mountain, but I couldn’t explain this in German.

It was my first day hiking at altitude—I took it easy. What would be the harm of skiing with my mother? I was thinking. My determination not to ski was waning. Weren’t the necessary rebellions of childhood and adolescence behind us? I’d asked the snowshoer. We could make my mom and the little Barlows so happy, if we skied with them. And the way ski resorts were treating snowshoers, it would be less of a hassle to go skiing. “I know, I know—and, in spite of ourselves, we do know how to ski,” Elliot Barlow had said, sighing.

“It’s your parents’ genre you don’t like, not their skiing—not anymore,” I reminded the pretty Mr. Barlow. She really did love her parents—just not their writing—but it wasn’t my intention to make her feel guilty for not skiing. It was something the snowshoer and I kept talking about. We’d made our point about the kind of exercise we preferred, but it wouldn’t kill us to ski occasionally—would it?