The Last Chairlift

3. A FIRST-NAME BASIS

My mother was the kind of moviegoer who could not resist likening the physical appearance of people she knew to movie stars. When the Austrian skier Toni Sailer won three gold medals at the 1956 Olympics, my mom said, “Toni looks a little like Farley Granger in Strangers on a Train”—a Hitchcock movie we’d watched together. My mom was a Hitchcock fan, but was she on a first-name basis with Toni Sailer?

“Toni almost fell into an open mine shaft in Aspen!” she said in her wide-eyed, exclamatory way. My mother then went on and on about all the ski lifts they were constructing and new trails they were cutting on Aspen Mountain. She said the old mine dumps and the abandoned buildings were being bulldozed, but there were still open pits here and there.

It’s also not clear if my mother knew Stein Eriksen, the Norwegian skier; to this day, I don’t know if they so much as met. The FIS Alpine World Ski Championships were in Aspen in 1950. “Stein was in first place after the first run,” was not quite all my mom had to say about Stein. I’m referring to more than her oft-repeated knowledge of his famous reverse-shoulder technique.

I mean when my mom and I first saw Shane together—in 1953, I would have been eleven or twelve—and my mother remarked that Stein Eriksen looked like Van Heflin. “But Stein is handsomer,” she confided to me, taking my hand. “And you’re going to look like Alan Ladd,” she assured me in a whisper, because we were in the movie theater—the Ioka, in downtown Exeter—with the pending violence of Shane unfolding before us.

I later pointed out to her that Alan Ladd was blond; whichever movie star I might resemble when I grew up, surely I would remain brown-haired. “I meant you’re going to be handsome, in the same way Alan Ladd is handsome—good-looking and small,” my mom replied, squeezing my hand when she emphasized the word small.

My aunts and my grandmother complained that my mother didn’t weigh enough to be competitive in a ski race, but I believed she cherished her smallness. My being small was an attractive trait to her. Thus, before my teens, I evaluated Alan Ladd—the solitary but romantic gunfighter in Shane—and I imagined I might become a hero, or at least look like one.

Did my mom have an encounter (of any kind) with Stein Eriksen in Aspen? Did she even shake his hand? I know she made the trip; she saved the bus tickets, if only the New-York-to-Denver part. I don’t doubt that she was there—in Aspen, in 1950—but she finished nowhere near the podium. Two Austrian skiers, Dagmar Rom and Trude Jochum-Beiser, won the women’s events. Stein Eriksen, not yet a household name in international skiing, placed third in the men’s slalom. The American racers won no medals. It’s verifiable that the FIS Alpine World Ski Championships in 1950 were held in Aspen, but that wasn’t the first time my mother was in town.