Back in Granby, I straightened my legs and locked the braces on Mount Holyoke College’s red rubber track, three miles from our house. “How far do you want to go?” my father asked.

“I’d like to do a mile,” I said, “but let’s see.” Years earlier when I’d run on the newly installed track it felt more like bouncing, but now my sneakers seemed to stick to the surface, especially the right one, humidity greased the crutch handles, and mosquitoes whined into my hair and ears, biting the pad of my hand just above the bone as my father started the stopwatch. Fifteen feet and I had to stop, then another fifteen. The first turn seemed incomprehensibly far compared the end of the tiled hall at Shake-A-Leg.

“I can get your chair,” my father said.

“No, I want to make it,” reduced to one step then rest, but determined to complete one full lap, 400 meters, a quarter of a mile. He depressed the button on the stopwatch as I crossed the line.

“Forty-five minutes.”

“That’s not very functional. I don’t know how I can be up fifty percent of the time especially since I’ll have so many other responsibilities at school like just getting around.”

“I’m not sure, but I bet you’ll figure it out.”

Surrounded by books on my desk the ringing phone shook me out of concentration.

“Wadds, it’s Bart,” Middlebury College Ski Coach. “What’s going on?” Last fall I hadn’t thought I was good enough for him to even notice me.

“Not much. Just enjoying the warm day after class.” Spring might come late in Middlebury, but the Falls were spectacular.

“I’ve got this idea, come on down here. I want to run it by you,” he said.

“Alright. I’ll head right down.” I quickly changed into sweats and a t-shirt to go to his office in the Field House, next to the gym.

“Hey Wadds,” Bart said, getting up from the other side of the desk to shake my hand and clap me on the shoulder. “Nice, you’ve put some muscle on. Looking good. Alright.” Bart sat back in his chair propping crossed feet on the desk. “So, I was out at Hood this summer with one of those development camps and the disabled team skied next to us. Pretty fricking cool. They had these guys in the buckets. They were moving pretty good. So, I was wondering if you would want to do it.”

“Definitely. I told a friend that I would be in a movie about adaptive skiing when I was still in the hospital.”

“Alright. So, here’s my plan. I talked to the Development Office. The Friends of Middlebury Skiing will buy a monoski for you.”

“No way. Really?”

“Yep. And if you want you can stay a part of the team, come out and train with us, do whatever you want to do.”

“That would be really cool,” I said, “I’d love to stay as part of the team. I’ll work really hard.”

“We just want you to be a part of what we’re doing. I’ll order the monoski that most of the guys are using. One of my old athletes from UVM coaches them. She said it’s the best one. Boomer will give you skis and goggles and glasses. We’ll get you all hooked up.”

“Wow. Thanks Bart. This is great.”

And with that I had a plan, at least for part of my life, because the accident had made me a dating outcast. Shake-A-Leg’s magic represented my only potential lifeline. I thought if I could entice Sara to their Fall Gala maybe she would see me in my glory and accept me, yet fear that rejection meant a death sentence I waited until it was too late.

As I concentrated on lifting my foot on a walk behind the track, I asked, “Would you like to go to a fundraising event with me in Newport, Rhode Island? Black-tie at the Rosecliff Masion, where they shot The Great Gatsby. My acting friends Bernie and Bobby will be there. You’ll love them. Harry and Susie are amazing. We can stay at their place.”

“When is it?”

“This weekend.”

“This weekend? You can’t ask a girl to a black-tie event a few days before. I’d have to get a dress.”

“So, you don’t want to go?”

“I didn’t say that. Let me see if I can get a dress,” which she did leaving me one assignment: move beyond friendship.

I wore a tux and white sneakers to accommodate my braces like Harry. Pulling myself to standing with the open driver’s door and roof I noticed marble steps without a railing. Playing crutch climbing scenarios in my mind I fell. Attendants and valets lifted me from the ground and up the stairs to a room straight out of Cinderella. At the end of the night I wanted to kiss and hold Sara, but I crawled into bed and listened to her breathe across the room, unwilling to trade my secrets for what I really wanted. My Shake-A-Leg magic clock ticked, and the sky grew dark as we drove north.

“Do you want to drive?” I asked, searching for something to say, then morphed into my father teaching me to drive at sixteen: “You’re driving too close to that car … Did you look before you moved over? … You need to signal before you move … You’re going too slowly to be in the left lane.”

“Do you want to drive?” she retorted, winding down two-lane roads.

We fell into silence. Finally, I said, “I think that we should go out?”

“Are you kidding? You’ve picked the worst possible way to ask me.”

“Why?”

“Why? Because you’re being a complete twit.”

“A complete twit? Really a twit? A twit?”

“Yes, a complete twit and you’re continuing to be one.”

“Seriously, I think that we should go out.”

“Seriously, I think you’re being a twit.”

We fell silent. Dashboard green illuminated our faces as shapes of trees caught in the headlights against the black sky. As we passed the Middlebury Snow Bowl, I only had twenty minutes left so I touched her lightly on the back of the head.

“You can’t touch me,” she said.

“Why not?”

“Because I said you can’t.”

“What’s this really about?” I asked, “I guess I really want to know.”

“I just can’t date you,”

“I know you said that, but don’t you feel anything?”

“I do and that’s what scares me. I’m worried that I could fall in love with you.”

“Isn’t that a good thing?”

“Yes, but not right now. It’s because you’re like this.”

“Like what? Like this song?” REM’s Superman had been playing.

“I am, I am Superman and I know what’s happening,

I am, I am Superman and I can do anything,”

“Like you know everything, and you can do anything”

As much as I wanted her to know all of my secrets, I couldn’t admit that I didn’t know anything, and that what I couldn’t do, would leave me separate and alone, and that the more I pushed, the further I veered from letting anyone see my vulnerability. So I didn’t say anything.

November stripped the trees bare, leaving naked skeletons. Angry winds whipped, but a December snow highlighted the branches and returned the mountains to life almost a year after my accident—the end of the semester—exams—Christmas.

Bart called, “Wadds, your ski is here. We’ll put it together and mount it up. Can you go out tomorrow?”

I had an open French Grammar book on my lap, a dictionary flanking one side of my desktop and Madame Bovary topping handwritten notes on the other. Dirty clothes, books, notebooks and loose papers covered floor.

“Definitely.”

“Good. A photographer wants to take some shots for the magazine so come down to the field house at about 8:30,” no one had wanted to photograph me before.

“I’ll be there,”

Sun bounced off the snow like millions of diamonds, fresh and clean as I parked in front of the ski room and Bart’s office.

“Check this thing out. It’s got a shock. You sit here and your feet in front of you.” Bart said.

“Wow. Very cool. It looks like a motorcycle without the wheels, motor and handlebars.” I said.

“This lever raises the seat to get onto the chair.”

Bart carried it to the circle beside the glass-walled fitness center. Sun splashed the snow-covered playing fields and Green Mountain backdrop. He held the seat and I lifted myself onto its nylon sling. We maneuvered my feet to the footrest so that my legs were bent at a forty-five-degree angle, the motorcycle shock just below my knees.

Using outriggers, half-sized crutches with ski tips on the end, to balance on the monoski felt like trying to stand one-legged on a ball, especially perched on a snow bank for the photos. The outriggers kept sinking into the soft snow.

December 17th, three days short of the first anniversary of the accident, everyone who worked at the Middlebury College Snow Bowl watched me strap into monoski. No one other than Bart had seen one.

He asked, “So what do you want to do?”

“We go to the top, don’t we?” They stopped the Sheehan Lift to load me. I sat next to Bart six inches higher than I used to because of the seat and held on as hard as I could. At the top they stopped it again and I squirted out of control down the ramp like Bambi on ice falling and sliding to a stop. Bart wedged his ski sideways against mine and pulled me upright. On the flat, wide trail I thought, “Just stay in the middle. It’s like making a slalom turn,” and I fell over. My body felt cut in half: the lower part wobbling in whichever direction it wanted. Bart picked me up again.

“Sorry, I’ll get this,” I said.

“Don’t worry about it. We’ve got all day,” but when I couldn’t even balance, he said, “Alright, let’s try something else.” He clicked out of his skis, giving them to Darb, Tom Buchanan, the assistant coach. “I’ll slide behind you and keep you upright so you can get the feeling of making a turn.” He grabbed onto my seat and slid behind me on his boots helping guide me in and out of the turns to the bottom.

“How about if we push you up a bit and you can try to make some turns down here,” Bart said.

“I’m game.” On the flat piece in front of the lodge I couldn’t get going fast enough to be out of control. Still I didn’t make a turn just pushed two direction changes with the outriggers making my arms burn.

In the van Bart said, “We’ll call Jim Martinson when we get back. He owns the company that makes the monoski.”

Bart handed the phone to me. “Hi Jim, this is Chris Waddell. I tried your ski today. How do you make it turn?”

“To start the turn, you kind of drag the inside outrigger to move the ski in that direction.”

“Okay, that kind of makes sense. I’ll try it next time and let you know. I really thought I was going to get it today,” I said.

“Don’t worry. You’ll be great. I’ve heard about you from a few different people. You’re going to be great.”

“You heard about me from a few different people?”

“They told me to treat you well because you were going to be really good.” That made the falling a little easier to take.

The first day of Christmas vacation, my family returned to tiny Mt Tom, something we’d do for three successive days. Ten minutes from the house, nothing had changed in seven years since my last visit. Mountain Manager Dave Moore said, “Here are tickets. Whatever you need, please ask.”

My father answered, “We don’t know what we’re doing, so we don’t know what we need.”

The place was deserted in the midst of a cold snap before the holiday rush, but the whole mountain was open. My father lobbied to start on the J-bar beginner area, but I wanted to take the old, fire engine red, double chairlift with wooden slats and barely enough room for two people let alone a monoski to the top. The kid lift attendant said we couldn’t get on with “that thing.” He’d never seen one, no one had. My father told him Dave Moore had approved it. The kid stopped the lift to load me and then stopped it again when we reached the top.

That’s when my world warped—not Dali with melted clocks and butterflies for sails, but Escher—unable to differentiate up from down, left from right. My parents and Matt tracked off the lift and slid to a stop, but I felt like I was translating a foreign language, parking a trailer in reverse and walking through a house of mirrors. Only the space immediately in front of me stayed in focus and only for moment. I couldn’t make it from the off-load ramp to the place to start my run.

When I finally reached them, I said, “Let’s go to the upper-T. Bart took his skis off and held onto the seat. We’re going to have to do that until we get to an open space, where I can try to make some turns.” The Upper and Lower T-Bars were wide, moderately pitched trails with no turns. A few years earlier, I’d learned to ride a unicycle by riding as far as I could before falling, a strategy I planned to repeat.

My father gave his skis to Matt, who said, “You mean that you ski on these,” inspecting the rusted edges and pockmarked, bone dry bases.

“Just carry the skis. I don’t need any commentary from you.”

“When was the last time you waxed them? I’m surprised they even move.”

“I’ve been too busy driving you two to races all these years.”

“Still, you’d think you’d take care of your equipment.”

“Just carry the skis.”

Matt hoisted them over his shoulder, exaggerating delicate movements and implying he could slash his jacket or jugular. “You should slide faster on your boots.”

“Who invited him?”

“You did.”

“I shouldn’t have.”

My father grabbed the back of the seat. Matt, legs plastered together, and skis suspended above his shoulder, skied in front mocking my father.

“Pain in the ass,” my father said smiling but loudly enough for Matt, who laughed with the rest of us, to hear. Then he fell to his knees crossing the T-bar track.

My mother watched in horror sure that we were both going straight into woods, but somehow, he pulled it out.

“That was almost it for both of us. My boots completely stopped when I hit the track. I was on my knees,” he said as we stopped on the open trail.

Because I only have control of the stomach, and corresponding back, muscles just below my sternum, my balance is poor. If I’d learned at a program, they would have supported me with straps or pads, but since we didn’t, I rested my chest on my knees to steady myself. If I’d sat up straight, I would have fallen forwards, backwards or to either side, reminding me of bamboo poles that broke during training, the red or blue tape on the outside providing the only structure when I’d first started to race. I flopped like that broken bamboo pole. As a result, I skied in a forward position, unlike anyone in the world, my entire career.

I fell every possible way: the fly swatter, where I slid on a flat ski until my outside edge caught, stopping me short and slamming me down the hill; the backwards fall, where I tried so hard to slow myself that my tip pointed up the hill and I started going backwards in the opposite direction; the wobble, where I toppled before I even started; and the brake, where I threw myself to the ground before going into a fence or the woods.

Mentally exhausted at the bottom of my first run I realized I’d thought myself down every inch of the mountain. I could barely speak the rest of the night, but my body had learned things for the second day when I took two runs, both about an hour long. By the third day, I linked turns and made it all the way down without falling, readying me to return to my ski racing friends at Berkshire East.

The reception couldn’t have been warmer. Jim Schaefer, my rival and the first guy to me after the crash, said, “It’s really good to have you back here. This is where you’re supposed to be.” He hadn’t visited me in the hospital because he hadn’t wanted to see me like that. Later he told me that he’d prayed for me and supported me the best he knew believing that we would resume our relationship and rivalry when we were equals. “Now, you’re back.”

As I pushed backwards toward the lift Frank Roberts said, “Does that thing flip around like a Starsky and Hutch Gran Torino?”

At the end of the day my parents and I rode to the top of the mountain. The light had gone grey. The snow on Big Chief, where the accident had happened, had been scraped into a skating rink dotted with square moguls. I slid until I hit the first one, changed direction and slid into the next. Occasionally, I looked up like a swimmer wanting to see how much further I had to go, then returned to an inch at a time. Emerging onto the bottom of the race hill I realized that I’d skied past the spot and it held no power over me.

The partially subterranean first floor hallway and stairwell of Milliken served as my social reintroduction at a time when a keg of cheap beer and couple of sleeves of Solo cups constituted a party. In the hospital, I’d imagined scooting up those cement steps to my fifth-floor room the way that I’d hopped on one leg when I’d broken my ankle at nine or blown out my knee in high school. That Friday night, friends lifted me Cleopatra style to descend the half-flight. Parked in a corner, I became a stop on people’s trip to the keg.

“It’s really good to have you back. I could never do what you’ve done. You’re amazing.”

“Want a beer?” It might have been my roommate Ian or Frank.

“Sure?” I said, scared. One sip elicited a grimace and shudder. Tears moistened my eyelashes, but I didn’t get instantly drunk. Half beer in hand, I brushed my crotch and felt something wet on my jeans—a bullseye, dark circle just below my fly. No, no, no, I thought, not here, inhaling hard through my nose. The itchy smell of urine confirmed it and Ian and Frank had disappeared into the crush of people that bulged over and around me, down a half flight of stairs.

“Hey Wadds,” Sara said. Everyday pearl necklace, big smile and dark brown eyes that bore deep into mine the way they had when Brown Eyed Girl played the first week that Fall, just after Steph and I had broken up on the way to the movie. We’d kissed. I’d said something about my children’s book version of love—what I wanted, thought I needed or imagined I had had with Stephanie—and that stopped us. Sara was dating someone, which made it easier for me. I wouldn’t have a girlfriend for the next three years of college.

“Have you seen Ian?” hoping the dark circle wasn’t visible and contemplating spilling beer on myself to mask sight and smell. “I need to get going.”

“The party is just starting.”

“I know. I’m still pretty weak.” Finally, Ian and Frank came back. I convinced them to carry me up the stairs, an act equivalent to turning on all the lights. Everyone stopped and half of them had to move. I worried about the wafting smell. They pushed me across campus to my dorm room.

In my lock and key bathroom, I lifted myself by the wheelchair’s armrests, struggling against the bulky, plastic, turtle shell, body cast, hooked the top of my pants with my thumbs and pulled, but suction stuck them to my legs as pee flowed through the cushion collecting in yellow puddles. As my eyes drooped and energy ebbed, I thought of a childhood racetrack Christmas present. Matt’s blue car had lapped my yellow one every other turn of the track until its charge died commencing the agonizingly slow countdown of recovered ground. Mine always saved just enough to poke ahead. In real life, I was the blue car, but I had to become the yellow one.

Still I whined, “Come on. Let’s just get these off.” The suction broke. I wrestled the wet pile to a corner for the morning, gave myself a sponge bath and snuck down the hall with just a towel over my naked crotch hoping I didn’t trail those yellow puddles directly to my door and that the adhesive condom would stick this time. I released the Velcro clasps on the turtle shell and sunk into the waterbed.

On Monday morning, Susie, Katie and Amanda collected me for French, one of three, instead of the customary four classes, along with Micro Economics and Far Eastern Art. They took turns pushing me up the hills. My fraternity brothers stopped at my room to bring me to meals. They built a ramp for the one step into the front door of the Sig Ep house. Kate grabbed me for Far Eastern Art, but at 8:15 I didn’t go to that one unless there was a test.

After two months’ struggle to leave the hospital, recovery continued to take precedence over school. If I didn’t recover, I had no future. I would end up with an A and two B’s, but prioritized sending energy to my legs as I lay in bed. Effervescence bubbled in my feet, toes and legs if I really concentrated. Trying to move, they felt trapped in cottony casts. I imagined building those bubbles to strength to break those casts—because I was different from the other people in the hospital—because this was my opportunity to prove I was exemplary. Recovery—walking, skiing, returning to equality, being whole—that was my priority.

My parents knew, after a week apiece on campus, that I had to be on my own. I’m sure they left reluctantly, hoping that I’d be okay and wishing they didn’t have to relinquish control. One night, as I undressed for bed in my chair, I leaned vulnerably forward to grab my leg under the knee to swing it so that my ankle crossed the opposite knee, allowing me to take my shoe, sock, pants and underwear off that leg, but my leg spasmed, yanking and catapulting me face first to the floor, which I heard more than saw. Bones banged cement. The crunch traveled through my head. My chair piled on top, tangling my legs, which kicked out in spasm, pinning me to the ground.

Sure I’d broken a leg, and that I’d be stuck naked on the floor until someone found me, I asked, “Do you think you can get up?” In the hospital, I had been too fragile to learn floor to chair transfers. Reaching my left hand through the gauntlet of spasms to the padded side of the waterbed, I fumbled my chair upright with my free hand then pulled and pushed on it and the bedrail lofting myself from the ground and into bed. In my mind it was the equivalent of a mother lifting a car off her baby. My broken legs could wait for morning. With new daylight filling my room I pulled back the covers expecting the worst, but they weren’t hot, swollen or discolored so I got up and didn’t tell anyone.

Then I got angry blisters on each heel from borrowing a friend’s shoes for a fraternity semi-formal. Dr. Freed had warned me. I didn’t know how fragile I was. Now, he was right. They’d get infected and probably amputated. At the very least, the blisters meant my ticket back to the hospital. I’d fought and blown it. I called my nurse Jim, knowing that I’d be one of those guys who returned to the hospital because he couldn’t cut it, but he said, “You’ll be fine.” For the next two weeks I looked ridiculous in open-toed, egg-crate lined, foam boots lashed with Velcro, but I didn’t return to the hospital.

Then my phone rang. “Hi, my name is Craig, I’m a lacrosse player and my best friend in high school had a spinal cord injury. I’d love to help. Would you like to go to the gym sometime?”

“That would be great. I’m going crazy because I haven’t done any therapy.”

After my first set of bench presses I transferred back to my chair and a flash flood of electrical energy rushed through my legs. “I think they’re waking up,” I said.

“That’s great,” he looked a little stunned, “You should meet my friend Chris. He’s been getting a bunch of return working with the Miami Project.”

“Return, that’s the key. They told me in the hospital that it’s the first year when your body settles down and you figure out if you’re going to get anything back. If he’s still getting return years afterwards that’s amazing. It was great for me to come back here, but I’m worried that I’m wasting opportunities to get better.”

“I’m definitely not an expert, but I bet being back has helped you become healthier.”

“Definitely. It’s just the recovery part seems like the most important part right now.”

“I’ll give you Chris’ number. Give him a call. Maybe you can visit the Project.

“I would love that. Thanks.”

I opened the door to my two-door, white Honda Accord, purchased with money donated by friends and family, to return to my dorm room, but couldn’t budge the manual seat to pull my chair behind me. Each attempt toward the steering wheel slid back. Finally, someone walked by. I had to force myself to ask, “Could you push my seat forward?” My car stayed in the parking space next to my dorm for the rest of the semester.

When the doctors finally freed me of the turtle shell body jacket, I wondered when I got fat. I’d lost fifty pounds, yet I had a beer gut—an old man gut—a skinny, fat gut. The injury meant that I only had movement and sensation in the muscles just below my sternum. The rest sagged to my crotch.

The day before Spring Break felt like water dripping from snow banks, growing mud that would last until the week of exams. At Eaglebrook and Deerfield, Spring Break lasted most of March. While friends vacationed in the Virgin Islands, Florida, Arizona, Hawaii we skied. Sometimes Paul, our coach, would drive us to the top of the course on the four-wheeler when the lifts had closed. At the Waterville Valley Eastern Cup races the year before, it had rained so much they’d had to set the course around a mini-river at the bottom. Ski racing was our vacation, but this year I would get warm and see the Miami Project in Florida.

At the airport my forty-one-year-old mother juggled so much luggage she looked as though she were traveling with an infant. A cardboard box, fourteen inches wide and six inches deep, carrying a travel bench seat for the shower, rested against her sternum. At her feet sprawled a garbage bag, the yellow ties pulled into a handle, which covered the padded toilet seat. A box of catheter kits and a bag with a rolled foam egg-crate for the length of my bed so that I wouldn’t get pressure sores hung off her shoulder as she negotiated the excess baggage with the agent.

In Miami, as the automatic doors opened, unaccustomed soft, warm air slid across my skin. White lights illuminated palm trees from below, a reverse silhouette against the dark sky. I’d never seen a palm tree. Pat Lucas joined us at her aunt’s high-rise apartment on the beach in Hollywood, Florida. She and Tom had gone to Merrimack with my parents and had been at the hospital from the beginning.

The next day when we parked in front of Chris’ white stucco, red roofed Spanish style house, he bounced down the tile steps in a wheelie.

“He has mountain bike tires on his wheelchair,” I noted to my mother.

Dark hair, dark skinned like he spent a lot of time in the sun, fit, wearing a soccer jersey before they were popular, he said, “Are you guys ready to check out the Miami Project? Oh, hold on. I need to grab something.” He rolled up the steps, warping my sense of gravity and physics. Then he was back. “I’ll drive my car. You follow me.” He jumped into his Jeep Wrangler and threw his chair in the back, seemingly in one motion.

When we parked, he came to our car to coach me as my mother brought my chair from the trunk of the rental car. I pushed myself hard to the edge of the seat like I was lifting my butt out of a hole surrounded by loose dirt and stuck my feet out to the footrests.

“Watch out that you don’t sprain your ankle,” he said as I gave my best effort to heave myself into my chair trying desperately to make it look effortless, “If you put them on the footrest then they can twist. You don’t want to sprain your ankle.”

Disappointed, I followed him like a puppy to the entrance. Glass and light, soaring ceilings, high-tech science and the feeling of sport, the Miami Project couldn’t have been more different than University Hospital. This is where I could walk again.

“Hello,” “Hello,” “How are you?” “Great to see you,” Chris knew everyone.

A guy in a tech jacket gave us a tour. “This is an FES bike,” he said, “Do you know what an FES bike is?” he asked me.

“I’ve read a bit about it,” I said. “It’s where they attach electrodes to make your leg muscles fire so that you can ride a bike and build muscle.”

“Well, you can’t really build muscle,” he said, “but you can maintain what you have. It’s also really good for promoting blood flow, bone density and overall health of your legs. When are we going to get you back in here?” he said to Chris.

“I’m working on my own stuff right now,” Chris said. I looked at him, expecting a bit more of an explanation, but got none.

“You know that we’d love to have you back,” he said.

“I know, but I’m onto some good stuff.”

“This is the bio-feedback lab,” the tour guide said. “Here we can measure the muscle responses,” showing us a computer screen with color patterns looking like thunderstorm cells on the weatherman’s chart. I wanted to get right on and wake up my muscles. Let’s measure them. Let’s push them. Let’s make it happen. This I could understand.

“How long have you been in a chair?” he asked me.

“It’s been three months,” I said, “It’s been three long months.”

“Oh, that’s too bad,” he said, “We can’t take patients until at least a year after the trauma. Your body changes so much during the first year. It’s still in shock and will take a long time to return to its new normal. We can’t really do anything until at least a year from the injury. I’m sorry.”

“Really? I’m back at school, but I’m not doing any PT. It’s been great to be back with my friends, but I feel like I’m wasting my time.”

“I know it’s frustrating and I’d recommend doing some PT, maintain your range or motion and flexibility so your legs are ready. It’s important that your body has settled when we start. That takes a year.”

Chris took us to Sea World, where again he knew everyone. We watched the show from the deck with one of his friends.

“Are you still swimming with the dolphins?” she asked.

“Every chance I get,” he said, turning to me, “They are the most therapeutic animals in the world. They care for their sick. I’m completely embraced into their pod. Communication happens on a totally different level. There’s so much that we haven’t explored. I have this friend that when I want to connect with her, I just send her a mental message. She called me last night.”

“Like ESP?” I asked.

“Sort of, though something deeper and more personal. It’s communicating with someone on a foundational level. I started exploring it a lot more after my accident. Everything is so straightforward with medicine. They’ve made their decisions. This is more intuitive and really primal—like what we had to do before we thought we could explain everything.”

Back on campus, hanging by the fraternity house pool table, Matt Martin said, “Well someone needs to address the pink elephant in the room,” his smirk stating that he got things others didn’t and he did. I was human and flawed, not just an “inspiration.” With that we became great friends as I bided my time before I could head to Shake-A-Leg, where they would accept me even if it hadn’t been a year since the accident and where I would walk again even if no one else thought I could.

When I finished the semester, I read all the books that Chris had recommended to stretch my mind and prepare the connection to my body. One day, at home alone, I looked outside to see my car sitting idly in the driveway. I’m going to figure this out, I thought. Surrounded by the trees that blocked any watching eyes on North Street in Granby, I transferred in and scooted the seat forward. It wasn’t even that hard, so I went for a drive along the Connecticut River, on a route where I used to ride my bike.

I drove my car to Matt’s graduation from Burke Mountain Academy. The day before, he and I hung out in the living of the rented condo. I did wheelies while we talked, until I leaned a little too far back, spilling on the ground, my legs tangling with the chair. Matt didn’t budge from the couch. “Can you get up?” he asked with studied casualness.

“Oh yeah,” I said, only having risen from the floor that one time. I extricated my legs and again used one hand on the chair and one on the couch to return back to sitting. “See.”

I couldn’t control the fall, but I could get up. Returning to Middlebury proved that, and that I had more love and support than I’d ever imagined.

“Mr. Waddell, you need to wake up,” the nurse said shaking my arm. Just finally submerged in sleep I had no desire to fight to the surface.

“I’m going to give you a cup of water,” the doctor said. My tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth, the smell of curdled milk hung in my nose and I felt cooked from the inside out.

“You’re going to give me a cup of water?”

“Yes, but we need to reinsert the GI tube as well because your stomach has shut down from the shock.”

“That sounds like a fair deal.” They raised the head of my bed and gave me, not a Dixie cup, but a full glass of water. I took three big gulps before the doctor shoved the GI tube into my nose, hard plastic violating delicate, hidden tissue, water splashing capillaries, bubbling snot, tasting blood.

“Keep swallowing,” he said as I gasped. Tears tracked from the corners of my eyes into my hair. “Keep swallowing,” it clawed at my throat. Overriding the instinct to gag, “One more. Okay there you go.” They left. The machine sucked the water first then the brown bile.

A black cylinder the size of a magic marker hung by a cord wrapped around the bedrail. Depressing its button fed a dose of morphine into my arm, easing the hollow pain, which felt like a cold, metal pad pressing into the soft spot above my forehead and over my right eye, radiating electricity between it and the two pulverized vertebrae. I counted down to my next one then drifted to sleep only to be haunted by my recently finished final exams, the last thing on my personal hard drive.

The nurse came in and said, “I need to drain your bladder.”

“I can pee,” I said.

“Okay,” she said handing me a plastic urinal like a liter Coke bottle with a handle and a mouth as big at its base. I put it between my legs and prepared to pee like I always had only nothing happened.

“It doesn’t seem to work,” I said, returning the urinal. She then spread out a picnic lunch looking plastic box, smoothing the absorbent cloth on the tray, and placing two rubber gloves, a foil pack of KY jelly, another foil with Q-tips dipped in iodine and what looked like a flexible rubber straw, the length of, though far thinner than a curved Slim Jim, which she inserted into my urethra wearing the gloves stained brown with iodine, filling the urinal and commenting on the level of pee.

I didn’t feel a thing, except distress that I didn’t feel anything. No one had told me that I was paralyzed because my parents refused to brand me that way, worrying that it would be more debilitating than the injury, but when I’d broken my ankle at nine, I’d seen the x-rays. Not getting the diagnosis confirmed the dire situation. In fourth grade when my class read a book about a kid who became blind in a fireworks accident, I had said that I’d rather die. In the hospital bed, I told myself that this worst situation provided my greatest opportunity.

During the fall training, I had pushed myself to the brink, to prepare for critical times, which couldn’t get more critical. Quitting meant the death I saw in the hospital. The accident took skiing, the thing I did better than anything else and threatened to leave me alone, unworthy of love and an object of pity, but as a kid in the backyard I’d been the guy at the plate with the bases loaded, down by three runs with two outs and two strikes in the seventh game of the World Series. The story I told myself: I can be the hero. I can achieve the impossible. I have the opportunity to be exemplary in the way I’ve always imagined.

For the only time in my life I treated myself with generosity and nurturing to build the strength, health and confidence and avoid despair. Each obstacle offered a necessary lesson and the potential key to a miraculous recovery. I had to master and channel my thoughts and emotions, an area where I’d failed, not reaching the finish of a ski race for a year and a half and by succumbing to asthma when my father said it was all in my head.

I didn’t need anyone’s permission. Death stared me in the face. While my parents would walk through fire for me, my happiness, my health and creating the environment to heal became my responsibility alone. No one, not them, not the doctors or nurses could do it.

Dick Rossi, who had alerted my father after the accident said, “Don’t let them leave that stomach tube in too long. You’ll end up with a nose like mine.” He turned profile to accentuate his ski jump nose and then laughed and leaned into my father, giving him a friendly punch in the ribs. After I drifted off, Jack Jones, my Eaglebrook soccer coach who had convinced my parents to send me to private boarding school, resumed his Laurel and Hardy routine with my father.

“If it hadn’t been for me, you wouldn’t have three mortgages on your house.”

“I think about it every day.”

“Do you know how much you brought down the average income at each Eaglebrook Parents’ Weekend?”

“But I did sit next to Jay Rockefeller.”

“Yeah, you cozied right up to him,” finishing with, “Look at all the places they’ve gone and will go.”

The televisions announced that terrorists had brought down Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland killing eleven on the ground and all 259 onboard, many college students headed home for the holidays. My ski racing buddies smuggled me a half-sized Budweiser, which I still have. For the first week my mother slept in the chair next to my bed. Then she drove back and forth looping Bob Dylan’s Forever Youngand crying the tears she couldn’t shed in front of me: “May God bless and keep you always / May your wishes all come true /May you always do for others /And let others do for you. / May you build a ladder to the stars / And climb on every rung / May you stay / Forever young.”

She took my dictated application to summer French immersion at Middlebury so that I could study in Paris the next fall. My father, disregarding his principal’s protest, gave all his students A’s because they’d supported him during a difficult time. When my body stabilized enough to operate, I said, “If this means a long recovery, we should probably do my knee at the same time,” My torn Anterior Cruciate Ligament had never been repaired.

She said, “Let’s just do this one now and then we’ll see.” Surgery held hope even though the doctors told my parents that it would stabilize my back, not reverse the paralysis.

My college friend Jed stood frozen against the hospital room door.

I said, “Are you just going to stand there or are you actually going to come in?” He shuffled in, looking at the floor.

I said, “Have you been out skiing?” He looked to my mother for help. “It’s okay. You can ski. You can talk about skiing. I think about it as I’m lying here. I figure I can’t train, but I can do mental imagery. I imagine myself skiing well over and over. The season is lost, but I hope to forerun the Middlebury Carnival.”

“Really?”

Stephanie wore a yellow turtleneck, not her color, when she returned early from Wisconsin to see me. Her teeth didn’t come together in that burst of excitement about to happen. She hung bedside waiting for me to invite her support. I refused. When she left, I wondered briefly if I’d been punished for hurting her that night—the events fit too closely, but thoughts about things I couldn’t change wouldn’t help me heal, so I let it go.

Each year we skied a half-day at Berkshire East then drove to Rita and AB’s post-World-War-II suburban ranch house in Beverly, north of Boston for Mass at St John’s. Christmas Eve and Easter were the two times we attended church despite my parents’ Catholic upbringing.

AB came from Scotland at ten, but you couldn’t cut through the Boston accent to find any remnants of a brogue. I had an Aunt Anner (Anna) and an Uncle Jawge (George), who both lived within walking distance of Rita and AB, who if he disagreed with you said, “That’s hoss shit.” Their house served as the hub for family, extended family, local politicians and friends, conversation, food, drink and debates in and between the dining room and the small kitchen. AB held court at the head of the dinning room table with mafia-don white hair swept back and both hands cradling the highball martini. They never drank before five. Rita, small, round spectacled, with her once-a-week-parlor tight curled, grey and white hair, ran the place as she had during all those years when AB had worked throughout the world.

That year they moved Christmas: five children and thirteen grandchildren, to an almost vacant Holiday Inn down the street from the hospital. I don’t remember much other than that they were there.

A few days after the surgery two orderlies, who barely spoke English and were two hours late, lifted me out of bed like sheet of plywood, dropped me into a stainless-steel wheelchair and left. Blood drained from my brain since I hadn’t been upright in more than a week. My face turned grey. My head swam. I felt nauseated and slumped lower into the chair, but those guys didn’t return for hours.

The next day when the nurse dressed me, my skin stretched against the staples that closed the fourteen-inch long incision down my back. Fabric from my pants gathered in my crotch and gripped hard on my thigh, guaranteeing to cut off the circulation. My t-shirt twisted and rode up exposing the flesh. Nothing hung. I either had exposed skin or a tourniquet.

My blond, six-foot tall therapist wore a thin black leather jacket and said, “First you need to position your chair parallel to the mat,” a three-foot high wooden structure like a bed frame with a blue nylon gym mat on top.

I banged my footrest against it, then the back of the wheel, then the footrest, then the back. I just couldn’t match the flat surfaces.

“This thing doesn’t seem to handle very well. It might be defective,” I said.

“I’m sure it is,” she said, “You’ll figure it out. We’re going to use a sliding board,” a polished board about 18 inches long, six inches wide, a quarter of an inch thick and tapered on each end, “to get from your chair to the mat.” She demonstrated how the sliding board worked. “You’ll shift your weight to your right like this so that we can slide the board under your thigh,” as she slid it effortlessly under hers. “The other side will rest on the mat creating a bridge. You won’t have to transfer the entire space at once.”

“Lean to your right.” I leaned and stared. My hips didn’t move at all. I leaned further and still nothing. The tapered shape of the polished board allowed her to slide it under my thigh. She helped lift and place my feet flat, but useless on the floor. “My God, this is a ton of pomp and circumstance just to get from my chair to the mat.” The sliding board bridge rose slightly from my chair.

“You’re going to put your right hand on the armrest and your left on the board. Then you will lean slightly forward, lift with your arms and move yourself onto the board.”

I pushed hard and felt totally glued to my chair. I’d been as strong as I’d ever been just a little over a week prior. I pushed harder without a ripple of movement.

“You should be able to do this,” she said.

“I do have a broken collar bone,” I said.

“Is that a problem?” she asked.

“No. I just find it a bit disconcerting.”

“Disconcerting. That’s a good word. I don’t get that a lot here,” she said, “That was good.”

“That was something. I’m not sure if it was good.”

“Try one more time,” she said. When I lifted, she did too from the Velcro belt secured around my waist, moving me halfway on the board and then keeping me in place as I teetered forwards, backwards and to each side like sitting on a tightrope in the wind.

“One more,” she said, lifting more than I did to the mat. “Now you lift your legs like this,” placing her hand in the bend behind her knee.

Even flat on the mat, the tightrope swung with every slight weight change. Resting almost all of my weight on my right arm, I fished with my left, unable to look because my counterweight head pointed in the opposite direction. She let me struggle then helped. Finally, as I lay flat on the mat she said, “We’re going to practice rolling over. I’ll make it easier for you.” She crossed my right leg over my left. “Now, swing your arms hard to the left,” smoothly demonstrating a roll to her side.

I windmilled my arms, but my body felt like it was buried in sand from the sternum down. She pushed from behind on my next try and supported me as I teetered on my left side.

“One more thing.” She eased me flat on my back, then lay next to me again. I had to look out the corner of my eye. “This is how you’re going to sit up.” She slid her hands into the back pockets of her pants palms down. “Slowly, you walk your elbows underneath you,” she rocked from side to side until in a seated position. I copied her movements, but couldn’t budge from the mat.

That night after everyone had left, I lay in something like peaceful twilight. The hospital never became completely dark or quiet. Something shone or pulsed or beeped or hummed. My thoughts drifted. I’d recovered from a broken back, the closest to death I’d get without dying, but was still me. I promised, if this is the worst, I won’t be intimidated again.

“In or out,” my mother said when I brought snow, winter and our German Shepherd Thor into the trailer on the Hampshire Country School campus. At 5’3½,” the tallest woman on either side of the family, with waist-length, straight, chestnut brown hair and skin that collected freckles in the sun, she barely slowed to accommodate the bump that would become my brother Matt in a month. At two, in a navy blue, Communist-Russia-looking, one-piece snowsuit with a pointy hood, I said, “You need to put my skis back on.”

“Either learn to put them on yourself or don’t take them off,” she returned. The daughter of a dark suit, white shirt, fedora-wearing regional Coca-Cola salesman, she had babysat the six neighbor kids, infant to almost her age, from twelve. She sang Bob Dylan to us as we drove in the white Chevy station wagon with no radio.

My father looked like Abbey Road John Lennon—all hair, beard, nose and glasses. He taught emotionally disturbed kids with high IQs and he skied, having learned at seventeen studying in Switzerland to be close to my General Electric turbine-building grandfather. I walked on wooden skis with cable bindings and lace-up boots in the flat yard refusing to come inside until my fat cheeks turned bright red and my mother worried someone might think she had abused me. Mt Sunapee was my first mountain, but I didn’t start to race until we moved to Western Massachusetts.

If the night skiing lights hadn’t blazed until 9pm, most would have missed Mt Tom, barely more than half the height of the Empire State Building, but it became home to me—our little Austrian village facsimile of five cinderblock buildings with dark brown siding and red trim—smelling wax ironed into skis to make them slide faster in the basement of the Ski School, where we stored our equipment—the bouncy boardwalk around the lodge after I’d changed my boots for sneakers—the potpourri of years of hot chocolate spilled on a cement floor—covering my goggles with my gloves so that the snow guns wouldn’t coat them with a frozen film on the ride up, and the Boulevard where I joined the race team at six.

Each afternoon my parents brought Matt and me from school to the mountain, where were instructors. They had met in French Class at Merrimack College. During exams, my father broke my mother out of mandatory library study for her ski first lesson. Despite a burnt tongue from hot chocolate and torn ankle ligament that she discovered when she couldn’t stand after falling asleep back in the library, she stuck with him and the sport.

Rob Broadfoot, our coach whose dark eyes, bounced with excitement stood at the bottom of each course and said, “That was great. Really good skiing. Now try this.” “Keep all your weight on the outside ski.” “The upper body is just along for the ride.” Racing became my first ski lesson and introduction to the science of little movements having a big effect. My best friend Bissell Hazen and I imitated his brother and the other thirteen year olds. From them we learned things like humongous, sucks, lung butter and pig out, how to swear poetically and that if you ran number sixteen, just out of the first seed, you said you were Abe Lincoln.

Bissell didn’t attend the camp at Titcomb Mountain, where Rob had raced for University of Maine at Farmington. I met the yellow school bus at the Howard Johnson’s in Holyoke for the five-hour drive the day after Christmas, then followed Rob’s college roommate, “a really fast pro racer,” all week. Back at Mt Tom, I told my father “Bissell can’t keep up.” At Bousquet Ski Area, I won my first trophy, second place, eleven and under, then I qualified for the thirteen and under Championships at Sugarloaf Mountain in Maine.

Rod Stewart sang, “If you want my body and you think I’m sexy,” as I rode Titcomb’s T-bar under the March sun training for the Championships instead of sitting in fourth grade. An hour north, at the start of the Giant Slalom on Sugarloaf’s Narrow Gauge a kid from another state asked Rick D’Elia, the fastest guy in our age class, and me, “How old are you?” I said, “Ten.” He replied, “You’re not ten. They don’t let ten year olds in this race.” They did and I beat the majority of them that day. When they announced my time over the loudspeaker Rick said, “You beat me.” I’d never done that, and I narrowly missed advancing to the Championships for the whole North East.

Three years later I didn’t know if the little kids looked up to me the way I had to the thirteen year olds. I needed one more win to have a perfect six for the season. My speed built from the start and across the flats of the Slalom at Springfield Ski Club, but the tight turns and icy bottom pitch pulled me further from each gate and out of the course. Only one top fifteen guy finished so I got on the chairlift.

“You can practically snowplow,” I said to my brother Matt, “Just make it to the finish.” Two fifth place results catapulted him onto the team. The next fall the US Ski Team invited him to a regional development camp with the best skiers his age.

At my Junior Olympics rain splashed and a dark ringed cloud blanketed Mt Snow. I’d been feeling the pressure to perform, to gain equipment sponsors and in my mind permission to continue with greater expenses and competition at the next age level. We pulled black trash bag ponchos over our jackets with holes for head and arms. My mind wouldn’t turn off. How do you think you’re going to do?…Those guys look good…That guy has skis just for races…That girl looks better than any of the guys…Do you think you can do it?…If you fail you’re done. Water squished between my fingers as I pushed out of the start and my skis took off without me. I didn’t catch up until they stopped abruptly throwing me over the handlebars and into the slushy snow. Same thing second run.

The sun rose strong and bright the next morning. Perfect corduroy snow replaced the slush. Flat Mt Tom bred Slalom skiers because we couldn’t go fast enough to make a GS turn. I loved short turns and hitting gates. Arriving at the finish I heard the top guy complain of being beaten, but not by me. I slunk away, unnoticed. On the way home, at a deli just out of reach of the mountain I said from the backseat, “I could have done something there.” No one responded.

The summer before I’d gone to a Soccer Camp at Eaglebrook School, a spectacular place with tons of fields cut into the mountain, which had a private ski hill. Their coach Jack Jones had been featured in Sports Illustrated’s “Faces in the Crowd.” Over fifteen years he’d gone 177-15-11 and 66 games without losing. Kevin Coogan had scored 61 goals in a 17-game undefeated season and 115 goals over his two-year career for them.

With the smell of fresh cut grass on their Varsity field my buddy Steve Williams said, “Let’s separate by four so we’re on the same team,” and moved down the line of twelve year olds as the coach counted out 1, 2, 3, 4. Steve played in the middle with Billy Kuzmeski, whose brother Bobby had starred for Eaglebrook. Jack Jones coached us. I took the ball on the right wing, faked inside, pushed it outside and hit a shot that went over the goalie to the far top corner. I did it again and again, probably scoring forty goals that week. Our goalie Leroy, reduced to cheerleader by inaction, called me “Big Foot” each time I got the ball.

When I came off the field Mr. Jones said, “You need to come play for me. Could you imagine yourself here at this school?”

“Definitely,” I said, “I’d love to play for you.” At dinner that night I told my father.

“Does he know how much money a public school teacher makes?” A couple of months later as he coached Granby’s team at Eaglebrook’s Fall Tournament, Jones sidled up to him. “Can’t you just imagine Big Foot scoring goals from the right wing for us and skiing on this hill? It’s a long way from Granby public schools.”

“Do you know how much money a public school teacher makes?” my father repeated.

“Oh, don’t worry about that. We have money for kids like this.”

My first lunch at Eaglebrook, I listened to classmates talk about their yachts in the Mediterranean, but then we went to the soccer fields. Sharing the pitch with guys from Africa, Mexico, South America, Mr. Jones grabbed me, “Ah Big Foot. You’re going to play over there,” pointing to the Varsity field, “And you’re going to score goals from the right wing.” Suddenly, it didn’t matter that I was the son of a public school teacher from Western Mass because I became one of two eight graders, or Fifth Formers as they called us, to play on the Varsity Soccer Team.

In Fifth Grade when I’d slapped the standardized math test closed halfway through the allotted time my teacher had said, “You’re going to make mistakes if you rush.” I scored the highest in the school, but at Eaglebrook I heard Alex Wiegers, a tall skinny kid from New York City say, “I want to do a year of Calculus before I go to college.” I’d never heard of Calculus, let alone considered that I should do it before college, but I listened to him map out a plan and then hired my neighbor Art Morin, who taught a gifted class at Granby High School. Each morning my eighth grade summer I carried my black and red book up the hill to his house until we’d finished Algebra I. In the Fall I started Geometry and would complete a year of Calculus by the time I graduated.

If Mt Tom had been the golf course fairway, Berkshire East was the rough. No two turns were the same. The trails fell toward the woods instead of straight down the hill. Snow balls, golf balls, chunks of ice, divots and bumps instead of the manicured surface I’d always known. Closer to Eaglebrook, bigger, steeper, Berkshire East became my new home mountain. It also hosted the first race of the season over the Christmas Holidays. After eight years of thirteen and under, fourteen and over meant I raced against men—guys with beards and girlfriends, strength and power.

I started at the back with the rest of the fourteen year olds, except Jim Schaefer, who’d made the All-Star Team at the Junior Olympics. After years at the front, I had to earn my way back. The snow shined like a mirror with little crescents of ice shavings at each turn as I kicked from the start, surviving more than racing to the finish, still I had the fastest time for my age group, fourteen and fifteen, and won again the second run.

Later that week, the yellow phone with the cord that hung to the linoleum floor in the kitchen of our side of the grey duplex on North Street in Granby, Mass rang. Albert Arnaud from Dynastar Skis asked for one of my parents in his French accent.

I asked, “Did he want to sponsor me?”

“No, he wanted Matt,” my father said, and with that, the door of opportunity closed for me and opened for Matt.

The Eaglebrook ski hill’s extreme flats and steeps, boot packed, narrow and hand-cut trails combined with longer, stiffer skis made me wonder if I could still make a turn. Determined to tame the terrain to my wishes atop Nose Dive, I pushed into three big, fast GS turns to build speed above the precipice that gave the trail its name, then nose dived, landing head to ski tip, which sliced a perfect six-inch arc from forehead into my hair.

I’d gone over a year without finishing since winning that first race. Returning to Bousquet, site of my first trophy, I dreaded my turn to start. Pins and needles made my legs numb and weak. Ringing ears wobbled my world, and the stomach acid climbed my throat.

“Racer Ready,” the starter said. I leaned forward and kicked my skis back so that most of my body would be over the line before my feet tripped the wand starting the clock, and I felt like a runaway cement truck careening straight down the hill unable to even make the second gate.

“What happened?” my father asked when I stopped next to him and my mother.

“I don’t know. I can’t do this.”

“What do you mean you can’t do this? Come on, let’s ski.” I followed him for a few runs. “See you can do it.”

“Yeah, kind of, but not really.”

I sat in the back seat on the return to Eaglebrook. He said, “Maybe you should just ski for the school,” the moment I’d expected since failing at Mt Snow. I couldn’t speak without breaking into tears so I said nothing. They dropped me off resigned to my fate, but my mother offered a stay at the study break.

“You don’t have to quit if you don’t want to,” she said, “We talked about it on the way home. We know you’re trying.” Quitting would have stopped the pain. I continued to race and fall.

Between classes one day Stuart Chase, Headmaster, father figure and former Olympic skiing hopeful asked me, “Chris, where do you think that you will go to prep school?”

I said, “I’m not sure. Maybe Berkshire. A bunch of the guys that race USSA with me go there. I might consider a ski academy too.”

He said, “Just remember that you will only ski so long. Your success will be determined by your education.”

On March 9^th I returned from a day at Berkshire East and my father asked, “What do think the odds are that you got accepted to Deerfield Academy?”

I said, “2 to 3?” My father’s college buddy Tom Lucas was there too. “Can you do that with odds?” I looked at him. “I’ve always heard 3-1 and that kind of stuff, but I’m sure that I got in.” Deerfield had a great relationship with Eaglebrook and I felt like I’d been accepted at the interview.

Deerfield Academy accepted me for my sophomore year. The next day St Paul’s, Phillips Andover, Hotchkiss and Williston Northampton did too.

My father said, “Do you realize that this is like getting accepted at Harvard, Yale and Princeton?”

Short of skiing, which I’m sure was in large part my fault, I couldn’t have been happier at Eaglebrook. I made great friends from around the world. The school opened new possibilities both in learning and for my future. Continuing at Deerfield, choosing education and proximity to my parents, allowing me to ski race every weekend, albeit on a lower level, made sense, but it also let me hide. If I didn’t go to ski academy, I couldn’t fail as a full-time racer and my asthma couldn’t reduce me to the most pathetic person in the group, but I couldn’t try for a kind of greatness that I’d always believed was mine and lay just out of reach.

At Deerfield, however, that belief, which had grown mastering each little movement on the Boulevard, took a turn for the mediocre. If you wanted to be cool you weren’t supposed to look like you had to try, and I had to. Each pop-quiz seemed to challenge my hope of “Being Worthy of Your Heritage,” the school motto. While I captained three teams, was a senior dorm proctor and school leader, the college admissions process shook any confidence I had for my future. Middlebury took a chance on me for the Spring Semester. Exhausted from trying and not quite reaching expectations I welcomed the break, but second semester meant I would arrive late for my first college season. I was in, but I was also out.

I spent the unexpected fall reprieve from school working in New York City for the law firm Milbank, Tweed, Hadley and McCloy in the Chase Manhattan Building, one block from the Stock Exchange. Jim Wallis, who had employed me that summer to paint buildings, clear brush and ferry guests to and from his Round Island, off Maine’s Northeast Harbor, where the bluest of blue bloods vacationed with the Down East lobstermen who said, “Ayuh,” let me live in his spare bedroom on Lexington and 80^th. I vomited behind the Met the first two mornings that I ran around Central Park in preparation for the ski season because there was always someone to chase.

Visiting home one weekend, Matt, who had left Deerfield for Burke Mountain Ski Academy, picked me up at the bus station in Springfield.

“How is school?”

“I’m running cross-country.”

“Why are you running cross-country?”

“I didn’t have a choice. I was top six in the 1.75 mile run for the physical testing. They said, ‘You’re on the cross-country team.’ I said, ‘I play soccer.’” They said, ‘You can do both.’”

“It’s a lot of work, isn’t it?”

“Every morning’s three mile run is a race to breakfast. We lifted heavy squats before a soccer game because that was the training progression. One day we ran up the mountain and Chris Puckett was ahead of me. I could see him, but I couldn’t catch him. Each day you know that you need to catch the people ahead you on World Rankings. It’s right there for you.”

“College skiing is going to be my Olympics. I’m going to be an All-American,” I said.

“No one does that. If you don’t make it before college, you’re not going to make it. It just doesn’t happen.”

“Well, I’d hate to quit without feeling like I’d really tried.”