Away We Go: The Helper Triumverate

There's a certain reassurance in numbering the occurrences of daily life. I find myself counting when I feel I can't take another step on a run or when the anger is so fierce there's firelight blocking my vision.

It is said that bad things come in threes, but it turns out the good ones do too. A lesson well learned on a party cloudy January day.

It began with the improper placement of the ninja mask balaclava that served as a face warmer and complied with the mask mandate at the ski area. It simply would not sit to his liking on either the nose or the eyes at the same time. Repeated attempts to adjust were met with no avail. Unfortunate particularly since the mask is almost the last piece of the twenty five pieces of equipment to be put on: long underwear tops and bottoms, bib, jacket, socks, gloves, boots, lift pass, Clif Bars. We had been clotheslined in sight of the finish line.

But finally, finally, we found ourselves at the lift. My patience gauge was at a solid 40%. Not ideal since it takes a certain amount of energy to continue talking myself into being very very high with little between me, the wiggly children, and the not so soft ground below. While also recognizing often how insanely lucky we are to be here. That these views are the kind I would hike hours to experience under any other circumstance and right now all I have to do it sit on a chair that whisks me aloft.

It's in the midst of one of the grateful-for-the-present thoughts (about which I have an outsized pride in having to begin with) that I hear an "uh-oh" to my left. An object falls past my periphery as I hear him whisper "my pole."

So, we're down one of fourty-eight pieces of equipment. You'd think this would be a relief. And yet, panicking on a ski lift is something I'm prepared to deal with in regards to myself but not me plus this six year old sitting next to me. "I'll never find it, it's gone", his volume rises with each syllable and although I can't see a thing under his layers I can easily picture the sad boy face occurring behind the visor. His assessment of the possibilities is accurate assessment so it's a relief that the pole is lying on a run that we can have done. Whew.

The next eight minutes are spent coming up with increasingly complicated reassurances and admonitions not to look back. I urge anyone not to feel a stab of terror seeing their child twist to look down from a lift chair while wearing slippery ski pants and weights on their feet. The tears are still fogging his goggles when we get off the lift.

I'm bent down wiping condensation from his face when I hear an "excuse me," from behind and turn carefully to not disrupt my balance on these silly things strapped to my feet. Here begins the countdown of Good Things Instance #1. "It was Pole 18," says the gentleman who just got off the lift behind us. I must have sported an arrangement of limbs that looked confused under all my layers because he clarified, "You dropped a ski pole back there. It's at the base of the lift pole 18." "Oh my goodness, thank you so much," I say. I had noted where I thought we dropped it but to have it confirmed by someone totally unrelated to us and who could have been looking the other way, or could have just thought hey look at that kid dropping his stuff. But he thought to remember and stop and tell us where it was.

We ski on our way. Thankfully he had only been using poles for a few days but he still had to orient himself on a particularly steep slope. I'm aiming us down the hill, trying to get quickly to the spot, trying to look at the pole numbers. It had fallen at the junction of two trails - one groomed and one powder. This means, to my inexperienced legs, a fairly substantial shift in technique. The boys are susceptible to this too and the one without poles goes down 30 feet downslope from me.

Kid down, off balance, navigating traffic. I fly right by it. If I had a rear view that damn pole would be in it.

I skid to a stop. Good gravy. It's only a few hundred feet away but it's uphill. In normal times I could just frame it as a good workout, a few extra steps for the daily count, a touch of extra cardio (extra extra because, hello 10,000 feet). I'm rapidly doing the calculations on the energy expenditure to climb up and get it or to try and convince both children to go up the lift again and return just north of this spot. It's a zero sum game. I slowly, so slowly, inch up the hill on the sides of my skis, screaming down to the fallen kid that I'll be there in a minute. Because if I go down to him, we definitely have to go back up the lift and I know all the way from here that he's blaming the fall on not having his pole. Pole it is.

Good Thing #2 arrives behind me and I'm breathing so heavily I almost miss her. I see a black pole sticking out beside me and think grumpily, how could anyone miss my slow ass climbing this !$*% ski slope? Why come so close? Gah. "Here you go," she says, holding his pole out to me. "I’ve been there. A long time ago," she has the weathered face of a very cool grandma. "Oh my goodness, thank you," comes out of my mouth for the second time inside five minutes. "Thank. You. So. Much." My flatlander status is confirmed with each gasp. She skis off with a enviable form. I wish I could be her or follow her.

Pole retrieved, I head down to the fallen child. Here we round out the countdown with Good Thing #3. A guy about my age is kneeling beside my boy, struggling to get his ski back on. I skid to a stop once again. This run is turning out to be a baseball game-like situation with all the starting and stopping. I opened with my patented catchphrase. "Oh my goodness. Thank you," which just barely pierced the wails that began as soon as I came into view. "I can't get it on" and "I hate skiing" and "I'm cold" etc. "No problem," he says. I have one about that age too." I wonder how he engineered being by himself right now. I wonder if it would be bad to ask for tips. "He's doing well," says the guy although I can't imagine how he sees how since the child has fallen and done nothing but yell. "I needed to hear that," I said and he skiied off.

I wish I could say at this point I was glowing with the generous and unsolicited assistance of three separate strangers in the space of half an hour. But in service of the truth, I wasn't. I was irritated and angry as I tried to shove the ski on his boot, then removed all the sticky powder from the bottoms of each foot twice after he kept putting his foot back down. I wish I could say that my patience was restored and we glided back down now complete with the required gear.

Only after we were back up on the lift and passed Pole 18 did I realize what had just happened. A trio of helpers. Three humans who had no need to notice or do anything about what was going on with us but they chose to act, assist, and connect.

Goodness came to us in threes that morning. Oh the goodness, indeed.

Thank you to them and to the universe for the reminder. And may the countdown continue tomorrow.

This story based on an experience in Crested Butte, Colorado.