At two on the dot I pack up my camera and tripod and ski down.
I drop off the day’s roll of film with Alice at the resort office.
She asks me how many photos I took. I tell her ten or so. She asks if I think anyone will buy any of them and I tell her definitely the guy who proposed to his girlfriend, but that’s probably it.
She keeps asking questions and I keep giving short answers.
She asks me if I want to get burgers later and I tell her I think I’m just going to take it easy and watch a movie.
Then she tells me Socko’s in town, and now I’m the one asking questions. I ask her where she heard that and whether she knows for sure. She says everybody’s been talking about it since someone saw his old orange and brown Dodge Tradesman in the resort’s general parking lot this morning.
I run into Derek on my way home, and he convinces me to join him and some of the guys for beers. I get water.
Alice is here. We make eye contact but that’s it.
I tell everyone Socko’s in town. Most of them have already heard, but Ryan doesn’t even know who Socko is, so we make him pay for that with a lot of razzing.
Eventually we tell him.
We tell him Socko is one of those mythical figures. We tell him how nobody knows his real name or where he’s from, how they started calling him Socko because he used to be so broke he couldn’t afford mittens, so he cut and sewed a few pairs of old socks together to make some.
We tell him Socko must be close to fifty, maybe older, but he’s still drifting from one mountain town to the next, skiing the most dangerous terrain.
I say Socko’s kind of like an inkblot test.
Nobody knows what I mean, so I explain that Socko reflects back whatever anyone wants to see in him, like hero, villain, vagabond, and so on.
Derek says Socko knows weather patterns. Derek says if Socko’s here, snow is coming.
~
I go back to my studio apartment in what is basically a long-stay motel called the New Halcyon, a poorly renovated miners’ boarding house where I can hear the water rush and the pipes bang every time someone flushes the toilet in the shared bathroom down the hall.
I take Bogus, the big Rottweiler, out for a walk.
I have rice and beans with hot sauce for dinner.
I can hear my neighbors through the walls talking about how Socko’s in town while I do my pushups and sit-ups.
I find the number Alice wrote down for me a few weeks ago.
She comes over with a six-pack and a joint and I tell her it’s all hers.
We make out almost immediately. Alice stops now and then to take sips from her beer.
We have sex with Bogus watching.
Alice sits up naked in my bed drinking another beer and smoking the joint by herself. She keeps calling me Scotty. She asks me who the other guy is in the picture of me and my friend sitting on the roof of my AMC Spirit with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s flipping off the camera. I unpin the picture from the wall above my mattress and tell her that’s my friend Ricky. She asks me about him.
I tell her how I met Ricky in Vail after we got into a fist fight at a bar over some girl who wasn’t interested in either of us, how we ended up laughing about her goggle tan, how a few weeks later me and Ricky moved into an apartment and got Bogus.
I tell her how we had this chip on our shoulders, how we could tell whose parents paid their rent because they always had new gear and never asked anyone to pick up their tab. How we couldn’t always get in on the action because we didn’t have any money, so we made our own action by finding creative ways to put our bodies at risk. How we bombed it down the mountain as tight to the fall line as possible.
I tell her how we used to film each other skiing off thirty-foot cliffs, skiing in ridiculous costumes, skiing naked, and how we’d throw these big screening parties where everyone would get fucked up, cheer and laugh at our videos, puke, then stumble home. Alice asks me if I still have the videos, and I tell her I don’t. She asks me where Ricky is now.
I tell her he’s still in Vail.
~
It snows all night.
It’s still snowing when I get up to let Bogus out for a quick shit.
I go over to the resort office to ask Helen if I have to take photos in this weather, and she says no. I ask her if I can still get paid for the day, and she says I can get paid for a half-day.
I get over to the lift line early. I catch a chair with some of the ski-school guys who don’t have any clients until the afternoon. They say they’re going to do laps on Lift 7 and ask me if I want to come, but I tell them I want to do my own thing.
I think about ducking the ropes to get to the really good stuff, but the visibility is too low.
I ski all morning. I stop only to sit in the powder under the trees and eat the peanut butter and jelly sandwich that got mushed in the Ziploc bag in my jacket pocket. Then I ski the rest of the afternoon until the last bell.
I go to the resort office and ask Alice if anyone bought the photos from yesterday.
She tells me just the guy who proposed to his girlfriend. She hands me five dollars and sixty-five cents.
She asks me how the powder was, and I tell her it was the best day so far this season.
She asks me what I’m doing later, and I tell her I’m so tired from skiing I’m going straight home to take a nap.
I walk through a big crowd in the plaza. I see lots of people I know. We all talk about how great of a day it was.
When I get back to the New Halcyon, there’s a girl sitting in the hallway with her back against the wall, hugging her knees with her face between them. Two others, a guy and another girl, are standing next to her. The guy is touching her shoulder. The other girl has her arms folded.
I ask if everything’s OK and they tell me Wendy Sturdevant didn’t come down after dropping into the out-of-bounds area I skipped earlier, and they still haven’t heard from her.
They tell me Ski Patrol sent a couple guys down to find her, but the snow had already filled in any tracks she might have left. They tell me the clouds are still too thick for a rescue chopper even though it’s not snowing anymore and it’s getting dark.
I go into my apartment and get into bed with Bogus, but I can’t fall asleep.
I call Alice, but she’s not home.
I put on a movie, but I keep losing track of the story.
I play Zelda on my Game Boy for a while.
Alice calls me back.
She comes over again and starts making out with me right away, but I tell her I don’t want to have sex.
We sit on the bed, and I tell her about the morning two seasons ago when Ricky and I hiked up to this chute called Questions Later way out in the backcountry after it dumped almost fifteen inches the night before. I tell her how it took us three hours to reach the summit and how we almost turned back at the top, how I said if we didn’t do it now, we never will, how we did rock-paper-scissors to see who would go first.
I tell her I won.
I tell her how I was out of the chute three turns ahead of Ricky when the snowpack released. How I broke downhill faster than I’d ever skied in my life and how my legs burned like they were about to disintegrate and how I could barely breathe and how I knew Ricky had no chance, but I couldn’t look back. I tell her how I just made it down to where it was level enough that I could let the wave overtake me without getting covered.
I tell her how quiet and calm it was after. How I sat in the snow looking around and calling out as if I might be able to find him.
I tell her how they never recovered his body.
I ask her if she knows how an avalanche happens.
She says no.
I tell her an avalanche happens when layers of ice and different kinds of snow build over each other. I tell her how some layers are more stable than others. How when one of the layers comes loose, everything above it goes. How it’s impossible to tell just by looking at the surface how the layers are arranged or what might trigger the slide.
I tell her how sometimes I have this dream where I’m digging in the snow.
~
The next day is clear and cool.
I get a few laps in before my shift starts.
At ten, I set up my tripod and camera at the shoulder near the top of Lift 4 that overlooks the town and the mountains behind it.
I take pictures as the avalanche cannons go off in the distance.
I photograph a family with two kids who don’t want to sit still, an older lady by herself who keeps trying to balance on one ski, a bunch of guys in their early twenties bending each other over and making sexual gestures.
A middle-aged guy tells me I’m taking too long to shoot the people ahead of him, so I wait until he gets to the front of the line to plant the sign that says “Be Right Back! Hold Those Smiles!” in the snow and tell him he can wait for me to finish my burrito.
I catch bits and pieces of rumors from other locals about Wendy. They tell me there’s still no official word from Patrol.
I go a bit past two to make sure everyone who lined up gets a chance. I go through two rolls for the first time all season.
I duck the rope at two-thirty and coast over to the unmapped side of the mountain. I notice boot tracks going up a rock face where I’ve never seen them before.
I pop out of my Rossignols, strap them to my back, and test the bootpack. It takes me ten minutes, and I lose my footing a few times, but I make it to the top.
The wind almost knocks me over and I can see for over a hundred miles in every direction.
There’s Socko. His back is to me. His jacket and ski pants are baggy on his scrawny frame, held together in some places by duct tape. His toothpick-thin skis are planted upright in the snow beside him.
He’s pissing over the ledge with the wind blowing silty frost all around him. I go for my camera just as he turns to look at me over his shoulder.
His face is completely sunburned.
He has no helmet, just a black bandana to hold back the shaggy mess of graying reddish hair. His wiry reddish beard is studded with bits of snow that have chunked together, and his beard and eyebrows and eyelashes are dusted with powder crystals that sparkle as he smirks at me.
I struggle to get the lens cap off with my gloves on as he zips up, picks up his tin plate, throws the food scraps from it over the ledge, shoves the plate into his rucksack, and tosses the rucksack over his shoulder.
He pulls down his goggles, yanks his skis out of the snow, flops them down, and clicks in.
I put the camera back in my bag, get into my skis as quickly as possible, and follow him out onto a three-foot-wide ridge with a straight drop to either side. We’re going too fast with no room to brake, and I can feel my heartbeat in my throat, but I keep up with the weirdly-bent figure in front of me as he yips and howls like a Wild West outlaw. He jump-swerves into a near-vertical cirque I’ve seen in aerial photos but never thought was possible to access without a helicopter, and I do the same thing he does and then we’re cutting braided curves in the virgin, waist-high snow.
His back is rounded and his shoulders are stooped and his elbows are out like chicken wings, but his turns are effortless.
My legs are on fire and my chest is exploding.
After ten or eleven turns I’ll think about for the rest of my life, the headwall chokes off into a narrow couloir that can barely fit a human body. Socko shouts Free ride! and hits it without even slowing down. I waffle for a split-second too long and lock into the hardest controlled slide I’ve ever made, kicking up clouds of snow all around me until I come to a stop just above the entry.
I fall back and sink into the powder, gasping, sweating bullets under my gear.
I catch my breath and lift my goggles to wipe my eyes.
I get back up on my skis and ease my way to the edge to look down into the ravine. The most perfect line ever carved into snow.