This was how the Brewster girls—my mom, who was the youngest, included—learned to ski. Abigail and Martha met the young Norwegian teachers on the Exeter faculty, and they took my mom with them on the Boston & Maine—“the ski train,” my cousin Nora called it. They all went on winter weekends from Exeter to North Conway, where they would be met by carloads of Vinters at the train station. (My mother always referred to the North Conway Norwegians as “carloads of winters.”)

Thus did downhill skiing gain a foothold in the town of Exeter—in the seacoast area of New Hampshire, where there are no mountains. Skiing was what the Brewster girls did with their Norwegian relatives on winter weekends. “We went up north,” as my mother put it. By the time I was born, the ski season was already my mom’s winter job. From the age of four, every year I would be given brand-new skis and boots and poles. Yet no amount of new equipment—not to mention the private lessons my mother gave me—would do the trick.

At an early age, in my most formative years, I had decided to hate skiing. I would have preferred a mom who stayed at home with me to one who went skiing from the middle of November to the middle of April every year. I wanted my mother to be around, more than I wanted her to teach me to ski. As a child and a teenager, how else could I have made my point? I was determined not to learn to ski.

As the youngest in an extended family of expert skiers, how could I not have learned? It was impossible not to learn a little. I do know how to ski but I managed to learn to ski pretty badly. No one in the Brewster or Vinter family would call me an expert. I’m a purposely intermediate skier.

5. BUT WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED IN ASPEN?

My mother must have known the seventeen-year-old girl who won the Women’s National Slalom Championship on Aspen Mountain in March 1941. Young as she was, Marilyn Shaw was no newcomer; Stowe’s “Snow Baby,” as she was called, Marilyn Shaw was the youngest downhill skier who ever made the U.S. Women’s Olympic Team. It wasn’t Marilyn’s fault that the 1940 Olympics were canceled because of the war in Europe. Yet my mom, who surely would have skied at Stowe with Marilyn Shaw, was not on a first-name basis with Marilyn—“the Shaw kid,” was how my mother referred to her, when she mentioned Marilyn at all, which was rarely.

They were both Vermont skiers; they had to have known each other. And there was more than the Mount Mansfield connection. According to my mom, they’d both been coached by Sepp Ruschp—an Austrian ski instructor. My mother adored Sepp Ruschp. “He took his exam at St. Christoph, under Hannes Schneider,” she told me.