Three weeks later, the resort opened for the winter season. Skiers crowded the base lodge as I walked toward the patrol station, and there were eleven young patrollers standing outside it in their red jackets, and not one of them was cleared to work.
Nobody had told them yet. They found out that morning.
A patroller carries a certification called Outdoor Emergency Care. It has to be refreshed every single season, and the refresher has to be run and signed by an instructor, and the instructor has to be signed by an instructor-trainer.
There is one instructor-trainer on that mountain. I did the course in 1998 because somebody had to drive to Colorado for two weeks and I was the only one who could get the time off.
I have run the refresher every October for twenty-seven years, in the base lodge, on a Saturday, for free, with donuts I buy myself.
The new director had scheduled it for the second weekend in November. Then he handed me a cardboard box in September.
He did not know what my signature was for. He thought I was an old woman with a locker.
The insurance carrier is what closed it, in the end, and not any of us. A patrol without current cards is a patrol the carrier will not cover, and a mountain does not open lifts without that coverage, and by eight o’clock that morning there were phone calls going that had nothing to do with me at all.
He came out to the station and asked me if I would run the refresher.
I said yes. I want that in here, because a person could have made him wait a week and I have thought about whether that would have felt good and I believe it would have.
But there are four hundred people a day on that mountain and there was ice under the fresh snow on the Nose Dive, and the whole reason a person does this job for thirty-two winters is that you cannot stand the thought of somebody lying up there waiting.
We ran it the following Saturday. Eleven of them, eight hours, and I bought the donuts.
In my locker, taped inside the door since 1993, is a card from Fritz Lindeman, who taught me the sled and who died on that mountain of a heart attack at sixty-eight with his skis on.
Nobody up here is the hero, kid. The hero is whoever is already standing at the top of the hard trail when the call comes. Get old doing this. It is the only way to get good at it.
The director apologized in front of the whole patrol at the season meeting. He is thirty-one and he did it without being asked, and he said the word wrong about himself twice.
My jacket is back on the hook. Same hook, and they never did change the locker, they just put my name plate back on it and never said a word.
I am training two of those kids toward instructor now. One of them is going to Colorado in the fall.