Free The Body in the Snowdrift by Katherine Hall Page Page B

The voice was coming from the adjoining game room.
    After last night’s party, everyone had slept in. Ophelia’s dramatic exit hadn’t produced the effect she had no doubt desired. There had been a moment of shocked silence, true—with steam coming out of Fred’s ears and tears moistening Naomi’s eyes—but the party didn’t end. Dick had clapped Fred on the shoulder, patted Naomi’s arm, and called for more champagne. “I wish I had a nickel for every time a door got slammed in our house,” he’d said.
    Clearly feeling his friend and mentor’s pain, Craig had almost spoiled the moment by pointing out that if any of them had used the f word or spoken in that tone of voice to either parent, they’d have been booted off to military school—or in Betsey’s case, a convent with ten-foot walls—faster than a speeding bullet. He’d been about to continue in this vein, when Tom had intervened. “Yeah, we were paragons all right. Not like today’s kids.” He winked at the four cousins, who had turned to stone the moment after Ophelia opened her mouth. “We owe you a nickel for every slammed door, Pop, and how about a dime for every bike and then car tearing out of the driveway faster than a speeding bullet?” Everybody had laughed, including Craig, and the party went on longer and took on an even warmer tone than it would have without the theatrical interlude. Faith watched the Fairchilds spin a cocoon of comfort around the Staffords, who had lost their closest friend only that morning and were, it was now clear, dealing with the teen from hell, or just your average adolescent, depending on one’s point of view.
    Harold and Dick had regaled them with a nostalgic look back at ski history, starting with a paean to the Scandinavians. “The earliest-known record of skiing dates back to 2000 B.C. —petroglyphs etched on a rock wall on an island off the coast of Norway,” Harold told them. “One pictures a person on long narrow skis twice his height. Norway’s Telemark region gave its name to the low, deep-kneed turn, skiing’s oldest method of turning, and also produced the ‘father of modern skiing’—Sondre Nordheim, who had the brilliant idea of adding a birch heel strap to the leather toestrap for greater control when descending. Skis were shortened and the lone pole used as a kind of outrigger was replaced by two shorter poles. From a method of transportation across the snowy wilds, skiing emerged as a major sport, a national pastime.
    â€œOf course, it took awhile to catch on here,” Harold had went on. “Scandinavian immigrants brought the sport with them. There was one guy, called ‘Snowshoe Thompson,’ who skied to deliver the mail to the mining towns in the Rockies. The mining companies even had racing teams. Imagine those logos! But Vermont is the cradle of U.S. skiing. Don’t you ever forget that! Around 1900, a bunch of Norwegians or Swedes—can’t remember which—were living near Stowe and started using skis to get around in the winter. It took awhile for people to stop laughing, but it caught on, and the very first ski race was held here at Mount Mansfield in 1934. Then Woodstock’s Bunny Bertram invented the first rope tow in the United States—powered by a good old Model T engine—around the same time. It was kind of tiring hiking up all that way. Fred Pabst came up with the J-bar lift in ’36. My dad was one of the first to try it out. First ski patrol started then, too, over in Stowe.”
    Dick had continued the saga. “It seemed like everywhere you looked, there was someplace to ski in these mountains. Maybe just a rope tow or maybe something more complicated. After the war, there were the ‘snow trains’ leaving from New York City and Boston for Vermont. The army veterans of the Tenth Mountain Division were like gods to us.